You’re about to launch into a new market. As an influencer marketer, what should you be aware of? How should you prepare? What tactics can help you get the most bang for your buck?

We asked these questions to 35 influencer marketers. Here are seven pro tips and strategies to maximize your return on investment (ROI) from influencer marketing in a new market.

Psst… want to understand how influencer marketing fits into a market expansion from start to finish? Read our ultimate guide on how to approach new market launches.

1: Get to know your new market and target audience

On your home turf, you know the lay of the land. You know your consumer’s expectations – what they like, what they don’t, what marketing they will respond to. You know the buying power. You understand the culture because you’re immersed in it – the slang, the trends, the norms.

But in a new market, you might not know your way around, especially if you’re expanding in a customer segment or location that is very different from that of your current customer base. Abdullah Khan shares an example:

Abdullah Khan

Influencer Marketing Manager

While meme marketing resonates well with younger audiences in markets like the US and the UK, it didn't have the same impact in Oriental markets like Japan. There, humor can be more subtle and context-dependent, so campaigns that relied heavily on memes didn't perform as expected.

‍Kat LaFata also highlights the importance of understanding market preferences:

Kat LaFata

Founder, NY&Bagels

Your typical customer won’t necessarily be the same in a new market. You have to start from scratch, see what sticks each time you expand, and recognize the differences in market preferences.

Small details matter – the local humor, the cultural nuances, the seemingly inconsequential consumer habits. But you also have to learn the logistical elements – shipping costs, existing competition, and legal requirements. If you do the work of understanding all of this before launching an influencer campaign, you will be able to:

• Choose the right influencers who have built trust in the local market
• Design collaborations that resonate with your new buyers
• Adapt your strategy and goals based on research
  

Hear it from Abdullah himself:

Abdullah Khan

Influencer Marketing Manager

Each market has its own culture, preferences, and behaviors. Without understanding these differences, campaigns can feel out of touch or even offensive. It's crucial to adapt your strategy, not just replicate it.

Before you ever set foot in a new market, take a step back and absorb as much information as you can about the place and customer cohort. But how long should you spend on research?

Forty percent of the marketers in our survey started planning for a market expansion one to three months in advance, and over 48% of those we polled took more time than that to prepare. Don’t skimp on this time – add it to your calendar so you don’t find yourself having to rush.

While you’re at it, you should consider getting support in learning about your new market:

• If you have someone in your team who knows the area you’re expanding to, involve that person every step of the way.
  
  
• If you don’t have that option, hire a firm or freelancer to assist you.

Want to take the culture absorption up a notch? Hire someone from the local market to be your eyes and ears. More on that in the next point.

2: Rely on local help (especially in a market whose culture is vastly different)

If you’re navigating an entirely new market, you can’t catch up on decades of consumer culture, societal expectations, and influencer marketing practices. What works in Taiwan, for instance, is a far cry from what works in the United States.

Your best bet is to hire a local agency or freelancer to represent you, especially when entering a market whose language you don’t speak because the local marketer partner can communicate on your behalf. Additionally:

• You get firsthand info about influencers and their reputation from someone who’s been in the market for years.

• You can bounce ideas off someone who knows what works with your new target customers. They can even come up with campaign ideas for you!
  
  
• You can borrow the agency or freelancer’s trust when communicating with influencers to build your brand reputation in a new market.
  

Lucy Sergeeva recommends this approach too:

Lucy Sergeeva

Head of Influencer Marketing, InkPoster

Hire consultants who are true professionals in your industry within the new market. Share every tactic you plan to implement, validate them together, and make adjustments where needed. The more you engage with experienced experts, the more valuable insights you'll receive – often the kind that can truly change the game.

Expanding into a new market can be overwhelming. Are you identifying the top opportunities for your brand? Are you working with the right creators? Partnering with someone local can assuage these worries and give you more confidence in your campaigns.

Julianne Kiider explains how having someone local in your extended team can help you refine influencer selection:

Julianne Kiider

Influencer, Affiliate & Partnerships Consultant

I lean on the local talent agencies to tell us who from their roster would be the best fit for that particular product or brand. If we rely only on our own discovery, it would take us so much longer to understand all the backstories and niche inside jokes they have with their community.

In a new market, having someone local to help you out is like a cheat code for fast growth. But agencies can be expensive, so if you’re only testing a new market, hire a local freelancer instead.

And remember to thoroughly research agencies and/or freelancers before you hire them. Victor Wiśniowski warns of the potential consequences of making the wrong choice:

Victor Wiśniowski

Founder and Influencer Marketing Specialist, LikeLab

It's easy to go to an agency that seems to know what they're doing. But, in reality, their creators might be sub-par. Or maybe the results of your market launch won’t be up to your standards or will fall short altogether.

Don’t rush through researching agencies and freelancers. Read their past reviews, ask for references, understand their working process, and get on a call before hiring. It also doesn’t hurt to ask for a referral in your network.

3: Partner with smaller influencers who have niche communities

“The bigger, the better” is only true for birthday cakes (and maybe the Wi-Fi range). In influencer marketing, a large follower count doesn’t necessarily equate to better results. In fact, when you’re expanding in a new market, the opposite might be better: the smaller creator with a tightly-knit, niche community can outperform the celebrity.

Greta Zacchetti posits a theory about why:

Greta Zacchetti

Influencer Marketing Manager, foodspring

Big, broad influencers usually sponsor every sort of brand. Sometimes collaborations are clearly about a marketing deal rather than a true connection with the influencers. The result? The audience is less receptive towards the collaboration.

She also expands on the risks of working with a big-name influencer from the get-go:

Greta Zacchetti

Influencer Marketing Manager, foodspring

The risk is that people will forever connect the brand with those faces, and if the influencers were not selected carefully, especially from a cultural point of view, this can damage the brand straight from the beginning.

Now that you know the risks, consider the various upsides to choosing the underdog. Smaller influencers are often:

• more in touch with their audience
• more receptive to your needs (within reasonable limits), and
• more cost-effective than big-name influencers.

‍Leslie Belen focuses on finding local influencers who are truly in sync with their audience and the overall market:

Leslie Belen

Influencer Search and Outreach Virtual Assistant

A game-changer for us has been leveraging localized content with influencers who truly understand the market’s cultural nuances. By working with influencers who are deeply connected to the community, we were able to create authentic, tailored campaigns that resonated better and drove higher engagement and trust in the new market.

‍Senith Berhane has also found better results by partnering with smaller creators over bigger ones:

Senith Berhane

Influencer & Content Marketing Manager, We Are Brands

A game-changing strategy for me has been partnering with local micro and mid-tier creators who already have trust and cultural resonance within the market. Their authentic voice drives relevance and helps our brand enter the space with credibility instead of just visibility.

By the way, this isn’t to demonize large influencers or say they’re a big no-no. You can definitely include creators with sizable followings to make a splash in the new market. But adding smaller, niche creators with a loyal audience into your influencer mix helps you balance out the scales and reduce the overall risk.

Even while considering large creators, do like Valerija Somi and focus on things like engagement, audience type, and past collaborations.

Valerija Somi

Influencer Manager, Qure Skincare

Choosing influencers based on real results, like engagement, audience type, and conversions – not just their follower count – has made a big difference. It helps us work with the right people for each market.

No matter which influencers you choose, vet them thoroughly using an influencer analysis tool like Modash. View their past sponsored content, verify their audience demographics, and monitor their fake followers.

I’d recommend doing this even if you’re working with a trusted local agency – it’s always better to double-check if the recommended creator fits your needs. You can always reach out and ask any follow-up questions if something looks fishy. Better safe than sorry.

4: Focus on brand awareness for the first three months

In our survey, 57% of marketers said they focus on brand awareness at the beginning of a new market launch.

And it makes sense: if your new customer cohort or market has never heard of your brand (or product category), then they are much less likely to buy because you haven’t yet built up trust with them. You need to grease the wheels a little first.

Greta explains how aiming for instant sales can hurt your brand in the long run:

Greta Zacchetti

Influencer Marketing Manager, foodspring

In order to create long-lasting value (not just initial sales that will eventually taper off), it is important to establish the brand values first and generate awareness, or else those customers won’t come back to repurchase.

But I gotta be real with you: you can only focus on brand awareness for so long. Unless you’re a big brand with a seemingly endless budget and whose stakeholders have the patience of a saint, you’ll need to report tangible sales in the new market sooner rather than later. Greta confirms:

Greta Zacchetti

Influencer Marketing Manager, foodspring

Ideally, awareness would be the way to go first to establish the brand in the new market, but unfortunately, what usually happens is that short-term sales become the gauge for measuring results.

So, how do you strike the right balance? You can take one of two approaches:

1. Cap your time for focusing on brand awareness before shifting gears to conversions, or
   
   
2. Combine influencer marketing with other marketing strategies (like ads) to ensure you can make up for focusing solely on brand awareness.
   

In the first scenario, choose a timeline that you can meet and that your stakeholders will be happy with.

For Fernanda Marques, the sweet spot is three months:

Fernanda Marques

Influencer Marketing Coordinator

We focused solely on brand awareness campaigns for the first three months. During that time, the priority was building recognition, trust, and familiarity with the product and brand in the new market before shifting toward more sales-focused initiatives.

Additionally, you don’t have to halt your brand awareness initiatives entirely once your timeline is reached. Layer on (and perhaps prioritize) conversion-focused goals without losing the momentum you’ve built around brand awareness. For example, you could ask the same creators to participate in performance-based incentives so you can track the sales they bring in.

⚡Pro tip: Track your brand awareness campaign performance using metrics like engagement, webpage visits, clicks, etc. to negotiate with your stakeholders.

In the second scenario, you want to combine your influencer marketing efforts with adjacent marketing initiatives to nullify the “Where’s the ROI?” question entirely. The most common use case for this in our survey was repurposing influencer content for ads. You could also repurpose influencer content for your website and other marketing assets.

Influencer marketing should ideally never exist in a silo – this best practice holds even as you stretch your market borders. Brenda Levy Daniel reminds us that influencer marketing often needs a nudge from other marketing strategies to hit your goals:

Brenda Levy Daniel

Influencer & Ambassador Program Builder

Influencer marketing is still a top-of-funnel strategy, and it might need the help of other strategies for amplification and to complete the funnel.

5: Tweak your brand messaging, product catalog, and briefs depending on the market

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when entering a new market is assuming that what works in your existing market will work with a new customer cohort or location. In reality:

• Your new customers might care about other aspects of your product, which will shift your brand messaging.
  
  
• There might be legal, logistical, or competitor issues that prevent your product from succeeding in the new market, forcing you to change your product catalog accordingly.

• The content formats and social media platforms that work in the new market might be entirely different from your expectations.
  

As Fernanda says, no two markets are the same:

Fernanda Marques

Influencer Marketing Coordinator

There’s no universal strategy that works across all markets in influencer marketing. Each region, audience, and cultural context requires a tailored approach.

In our survey:

• 54% of marketers said they tweaked their product catalog
• 66% of marketers said they adapted their brand messaging
• 54% of marketers said they changed the content they prioritized

When you conduct market research, plan to adapt your brand messaging, product catalog, and content formats accordingly. It might take some time to get this right, but going through the process will lead to infinitely better results.

Abdullah shares an example of how he adapted a product catalog based on market feedback:

Abdullah Khan

Influencer Marketing Manager

Different markets have different needs and interests, so we had to adjust which products we focused on. In some places, certain items were way more popular than we expected, while others didn’t get much attention at all. We learned to pay close attention to local trends and feedback before deciding what to promote.

Adapting your strategy isn’t a one-and-done process – it’s an ongoing effort as you swim deeper into the market, learn from influencer collaborations, and find patterns in creator content performance. Rugile Paleviciute explains with an example:

Rugile Paleviciute

Head of Brand Partnerships & PR, BURGA

Our top-performing designs in Europe didn’t resonate the same way in Japan. Japanese consumers preferred more minimalist, refined aesthetics – often with clean lines and subtle cultural cues. That insight pushed us to rethink everything from product selection to influencer briefs.

This change in preference was also true for content formats. Rugile continues:

Rugile Paleviciute

Head of Brand Partnerships & PR, BURGA

In Europe and the US, our strategy has shifted heavily toward short-form video – Reels, TikToks, and motion-first content tend to drive the most engagement and conversions. But in Japan, we’ve observed a different behavior. Static Instagram posts – especially clean, well-composed product shots – still perform strongly.

Not to sound cliché, but change is the only constant. Consumer preferences, marketing trends, and social media algorithms in your home market shift quite frequently (and rapidly!). The same is true of new markets. Educate yourself upfront on the biggest differences, then keep your ear to the ground and adapt to shifts in consumer preferences – it’ll help you stay relevant, fresh, and relatable in the new market, just like on your home turf.

6: Adjust what “brand fit” means in a new market

Just as your strategy needs to shift with the market, so does your idea of what constitutes “brand fit” criteria for an influencer. In our survey, nearly 49% of marketers said they adapted their concept of brand fit for the target market.

Valerija explains how influencers work differently across markets:

Valerija Somi

Influencer Manager, Qure Skincare

Each market has its own rules and ways of working. Influencers also work differently in different markets. And in some markets, it may be more challenging to get the niche influencers you need, so you have to adapt and find what works best for you and the market you're entering.

“Brand fit” as a concept is already vague enough, but it all comes down to understanding the culture of your new market. In Japan, for example, influencers seldom show their face on camera. That might go against your brand requirements, but if it works better for a certain market, it’s worth trying.

Abdullah shares how offering creative freedom to influencer partners helped improve the overall performance during a market expansion:

Abdullah Khan

Influencer Marketing Manager

Instead of dictating exactly what we wanted, we allowed them to interpret our brand in a way that felt authentic to their audience. This approach led to more genuine engagement and helped us understand what truly resonates in each new market.

You must find the middle ground: don’t compromise on non-negotiables like your brand values, but remain open-minded about content style, formats, and platforms. Greta agrees:

Greta Zacchetti

Influencer Marketing Manager, foodspring

Different content works in different countries, so adopting a “one size fits all” approach is not always the best way to go. The key is to find the balance between staying truthful to the brand and its values while adapting it to the different markets.

Adjust your influencer briefs, expectations, KPIs, and vetting requirements based on the market and influencer workflows. Fernanda does the same:

Fernanda Marques

Influencer Marketing Coordinator

We crafted personalized briefings for each influencer, ensuring that the product and message were tailored to fit their audience’s interests and content style. It required more effort, but it helped us deliver authentic content that resonated.

‍Authentic partnerships go hand in hand with the culture of a place or cohort. If you merely copy and paste your current strategy to a new market, you won’t get the same results because “authentic” looks different. So, adapt your brand fit requirements based on the target market and culture.

7: Remain flexible and open to experimentation

New endeavors are scary, especially when there’s a lot at stake. But when you’re collaborating with influencers in a new market, you have to be willing to take risks.

Why? First, you're not 100% sure what will work in a new market – you don’t know what you don’t know. Second, you trigger faster feedback loops by being open to experimentation. You’ll quickly learn what works and what needs tweaking through trial and error.

Athira Aravind, for example, found YouTube worked better than Instagram in a new market:

Athira Aravind

Brand Partnerships and Influencer Manager, Mahina

YouTube as a platform worked way better for us than Instagram. This was because audiences in the regional areas we expanded to consumed more media on YouTube as opposed to Instagram.

Leslie had a similar eureka moment about a new content format:

Leslie Belen

Influencer Search and Outreach Virtual Assistant

A platform we hadn’t initially prioritized gained a lot more traction than expected, while other strategies, like certain content formats, didn’t perform as well with the new audience. This showed us the importance of remaining flexible and willing to adapt strategies based on what the new market responds to.

All of the above marketers stumbled across what worked because they were flexible, adaptable, and open to trying new things. Step out of your comfort zone and take the leap – you’ve already crossed the border into a new market anyway. 😉

To enter a new market, you need systems that scale with you

Expanding into a new market comes with enough unknowns. The last thing you need when figuring out the culture of a new market, adapting your strategy, and finding new influencers is losing track of it all in the 173rd spreadsheet tab.

You need a system that scales with you, something that can:

• help you quickly vet influencers in a new market
• monitor your outreach efforts without adding to your plate
• find creator profiles that match your exact requirements
• create different campaigns for different markets
• track different results for different markets
  

Modash can do all that, and then some! Not only will it become your source of truth, but it will also give you enough transparent data to make big decisions confidently. 

But hey, you don’t need to bet on my word alone: try it for free for 14 days. No strings attached, no credit card needed. Find influencers in Berlin, Seoul, or Bhutan today.