Ultimately, expanding overseas is about increasing revenue. Right after your global launch, however, progress might be harder to see. Our final tip, #12, is all about measuring and improving what you do well:

How can you measure the impact of your decision to go global, especially in the early phases?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are your best friends, especially when you’re trying out a new strategy. What you track doesn’t need to be be complicated—just start with the basics, whether you’re recording revenue, traffic, conversion rates, or something else in your target markets. Without data, it’s hard to improve. One of our earlier posts has some good information to help you get started.

Your KPIs will clearly show you your weak points and highlight opportunities for improvement. You’re not psychic; you can go into a new market with stacks of research and reports on local customer behavior, but it’s almost guaranteed you’ll hit a few snags along the way. Consistently tracking KPIs from the beginning will help you catch any issues early and identify better solutions.

In some situations, though, it’s much harder to see progress. If you’re testing out an unproven product or service or if you haven’t yet figured out how to monetize your service, be prepared for potentially challenging international growth. Felix Miller of last.fm poses a question for such companies in our Going Global report:

I think that being able to afford localization isn’t only about being able to pay your translators, it’s much more about, “Would the growth in that market be good for me? Or will it just hurt?” …If you all of a sudden grow a lot in Spain, can you afford that growth? Can you make money in Spain, or can’t you make money in Spain? If you can’t make money in Spain, it might come back to haunt you.

No matter what your situation, remember that launching in a new market is in some ways similar to starting an entirely new company. If you’re not doing well right out of the gate, don’t quit! Isolate your problem spots and adapt your strategy. Adopt kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continual improvement, as your mindset—how can you make good into great? Evaluate your greatest sources of success, whether channels or languages, and expand on them.

Need help improving the translation side of things? We can help—contact us.

Read all of the tips in Gengo’s Going Global Countdown:

• #1: Choose your timing and timeline
• #2: Research and choose target markets
• #3: Define your offering and level of service
• #4: Build an internationally-minded team
• #5: Craft a working translation/localization strategy
• #6: Select the best translation tools and services
• #7: Internationalize properly
• #8: Translate cleanly
• #9: Check, double check, launch
• #10: Create a great global growth machine
• #11: Round it out with multilingual support
• #12: Kaizen! Optimize

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