It’s the American dream to “be fruitful and multiply” (King James Bible).
Growth and expansion are key goals for a majority of business owners and entrepreneurs.
Hungary, for a long time, has been an attractive business hub, and this is for some pretty good reasons.
For starters, it’s a member state of the European Union since 2014, meaning that companies expanding in Hungary can take advantage of the EU VAT number.
Additionally, Hungary has a stable economy and good infrastructure. Most importantly, however, Hungary has an ideal economic climate; for instance, it’s among the European countries with the lowest taxes and wages, and low company registration and upkeep.
Despite the exciting growth opportunities for your business growth, business expansion in Hungary can be quite scary.
How do you diversify and find new clients?
Do you need to form business alliances?
Well, you have to be ready to take on this challenging and complex market, and in the section below, we shall highlight five crucial steps you need to follow to expand your business in Hungary.
- Create a Business Plan
Traditionally, a business plan is considered as the cornerstone to the key to the success of any business model, and a good business plan for the Hungarian market should never be underestimated.
Encompassing on your objectives, forecasts, plans, and routes, a good business plan should provide clarity and paint a picture on how you intend to take your business from paper to profit and expand your business in Hungary.
Remember a well-structured business plan might make the difference between success and failure.
Ultimately, whatever business plan you come up with, it should answer three crucial questions; the what, how and when questions.
- What I’m I trying to achieve?
- How I’m I going to achieve it?
- When I’m I going to achieve it?
- Competitor Analysis
Once you have designed a business plan, it’s time to check on the competitors.
You’ll want to know what you are up against. Are the odds stacked against you?
Understand what your rivals in Hungary are up to.
For instance, if they’re offering products or services at a lower price than you are looking to, it’s essential that you find out why.
When doing competitor analysis, there are four fundamental questions that you should ask yourself:
- Who are my competitors
- What services and products do they offer
- What is the price of their products and services
- What edge do they have over you? And what edge do you have over them? And can these be overcome or maintained?
For more refined results, you might even consider performing a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats) analysis, too. A SWOT analysis will not only juxtapose your new business against your rivals but also allow you to contextualize your business against the market.
- Market Research
Market research is primarily concerned with investigating the consumer market.
Market research taps into and analyses the buying and spending habits of the target consumers, and this gives you an insight into the potential clients.
When analyzing your potential market base, ask yourself:
- Who will be my clients?
- What social/economic class do they fall under?
- What is the potential market base?
- What’s they spend habits?
- What criteria do they use to shop?
- Market Entry-Build a Brand
Your first action from the boardroom is to make your brand story relatable to your audience.
You’ll want to convey a brand story, and most importantly, one that relates that brand to the locals.
For starters, you’ll need engaging content and a practical means of transmitting that content to your audience.
Having a multilingual website is a good place to start, a website will increase your online presence, as Hungarians will now browse your business in the local language and this will make you look more reliable and relevant.
Communicating in the local dialect will allow you to make your target customers feel considered and appreciated. More importantly, the message conveyed is understandable and more memorable.
Many companies have learnt the hard way by translating their slogans literally. For instance, when the Brand Ford, launched Ford Pinto model in Brazil, they did not change the name of the model, and little did they know that “pinto” meant “tiny male genitals” in Brazil slang.
This shows how vital it is to proceed carefully with branding yourself in a new space. In any case, if you are branding in Hungary, we advise that brand translations and marketing should be done by professional translation agencies and reaching out to translators from Budapest is the best alternative.
Translators understand the local dialect, and will personalize the messages to remain accurate, yet still have the intended impact, and that’s how you build a long-term relationship of trust with the new market you’re targeting.
- Integrate Sales and Marketing for Greater Growth
Once you’re done with creating a recognizable presence, it’s time to integrate your sales and marketing for the greater growth.
The idea behind aligning the two processes is that it allows everyone on your team to move towards the same goal, and increase accountability.
We recommend embracing the pipeline marketing; a new iteration of lead generation that will connect marketing and sale data to facilitate better decision making.
Conclusion
Scaling your business to a new height should not be challenging as it sounds.
If you follow our above tips, you should easily expand and grow your business.
