Grow globally by going niche: How brands tap into the Indian diaspora for expansion
Go big, or go home. That might be a common mantra for businesses expanding overseas, but a wide-ranging audience strategy may not always be the best approach.
In fact, it could pay for businesses to focus on specific customer segments. The Indian diaspora, for example, tends to be an overlooked opportunity.
While they are in the minority overseas, non-resident Indians make up 30 million people worldwide.
That’s a sizable opportunity to unlock, and here are three overseas expansion strategies that brands in India have used to achieve global growth.
1. Use insights to find the right export market, audience: Zee5
To expand your business internationally, you’ll need to know where the demand is and the consumer preference of non-resident Indians in those markets.
For that, over-the-top platform Zee5, which streams content in Indian languages, adopted a data and insights-driven approach.
It used its first-party data and Google Trends to understand the online behaviour of non-resident Indians across different markets. That gave it insight into people’s video viewing habits and the topics they’re searching, along with their language preferences.
Additionally, it used the brand development index and category development index to analyse diaspora markets with the largest untapped potential for Indian video content.
2. Connect via highly relevant content: Matrimony
Besides identifying the Indian diaspora markets you should expand into, it’s important to connect with customers there in relevant ways.
That’s what matchmaking service provider Matrimony set its sights on. It has a family of apps that cater to Indian audiences of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and it wanted to better connect with non-resident Indian customers.
So it tapped into Search insights to understand which regions in India the different diaspora communities hailed from. That helped it identify the Indian languages that non-resident Indians in a market would most likely use.
With that insight, Matrimony was able to serve the most relevant vernacular app to non-resident Indians in a market, and use the most suitable messages in its ads. For example, the Kerala Matrimony app was promoted with custom ad creatives in markets like Saudi Arabia and Qatar because many non-resident Indians there hail from the south-western Indian state.