ANT Forum

Hi everyone, I run a small digital marketing agency in the United States, and we’re planning to test campaigns in Southeast Asia for one of our clients. I understand the basics of market research, but I’m unsure how to adapt content properly for a completely different region. How do you approach research and strategy when entering a new international market?      

That’s a very smart question, and it’s good you’re thinking about strategy before launching anything. When you’re based in the United States, your search results, ads, and even trending content won’t look the same as they do for users in Southeast Asia. That difference can lead to wrong assumptions about demand, pricing, and competition. When my team expanded into that region, we realized we needed better visibility into local search results and user behavior. We started combining AI tools for analyzing trends with region-based access tools to see how content actually performs in those markets. I came across a useful breakdown of this approach at https://eztalks.com/blog/tech/leveraging-ai-and-proxies-for-southeast-asian-market-research-and-content-strategy, and it helped us structure our research properly. The biggest lesson was that you can’t just translate content — you need to understand intent, culture, and platform differences. Once we adjusted for that, our campaigns performed much better.