Manolis Manassakis is the CEO of Qogita, a B2B marketplace for health and beauty industry SMEs, originating from the Netherlands. He has led Qogita’s massive expansion across Europe, including the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region.
We launched Qogita in 2021, as a game-changer for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the health and beauty industry. Our B2B marketplace streamlines procurement by connecting SMEs with the ideal sellers and automatically securing the best available prices. It features an online product catalogue that acts as a one-stop shop, aggregating demand from wholesalers to create a powerful buying force for smaller companies.
Our objective has always been to become the automated procurement partner for every SME, globally. We started by streamlining the health and beauty industry in the Netherlands and the U.K., and the response has been positive. Now, we're scaling up across all European markets, including CEE countries like Poland, Czechia, and Hungary. We partnered with Relevance Digital Agency, experts in helping global brands establish local presence, and the strategy we developed together allowed us to achieve critical milestones.
The majority of beauty brands don’t have an established presence in CEE markets due to their small size and lower sales capacity. We identified an opportunity for our marketplace to gain a foothold by providing superior pricing and customer experience compared to local wholesalers.
However, with international growth comes the challenge of managing this massive expansion.
As a new entry in a market, it’s important for us to build trust and convince retailers of the value of our platform. The B2B space, compared to B2C, is more reliant on localisation. Additionally, B2B transactions often involve established relationships between buyers and sellers. This means success hinges on building a local presence, speaking the local language, and having a localised website. The challenge lies in achieving this level of localisation while maintaining scalability for a business like ours experiencing 20% monthly growth.
International expansion checklist
To facilitate expansion, we relied on Google’s International Growth Framework, designed to support global business growth. We started by prioritising the markets we wanted to focus on. We leveraged Market Finder to identify the most promising countries as it has insights on local market size, fragmentation, the competitive landscape, and regulations. Then, when launching in a new country, we focus on four key areas:
- Secure a sufficient number of reliable local suppliers
- Localise the product and services, for example, by creating a local customer relationship management system
- Attract local buyers, building a customer base
- Assemble a local team, including sales growth managers and support staff.
This year, we also allocated a higher advertising budget for markets in Central and Eastern Europe, like Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic, as we saw the potential for increasing our customer base there. The Market Finder analysis indicated a substantial search volume in our categories, suggesting the potential for a profitable market entry with dedicated launch and support. Moreover, competitive analysis further indicated these markets’ attractiveness.
Building local presence
We previously relied only on manual bidding and text ads, but as we grew, we needed a more holistic, yet simple marketing strategy. We start each market expansion by launching a video ad to explain Qogita's value proposition, raise consideration among potential customers, and ultimately drive purchases:
We used variations of the video for Performance Max (PMax), Demand Gen, and Video Reach to maximise reach among potential customers. Our operations are complex with all the different markets and languages, so creating the assets and managing campaigns manually would have been close to impossible. Moreover, we have noticed that PMax has been optimising the assets, depending on the user response.
We also use another AI-powered tool to help us localise our ad campaigns: broad match. Our massive product catalogue makes traditional keyword selection a daunting task and we found that simply translating regular keywords didn't always match user search queries. Broad match helps us capture a wider variety of relevant searches for our audience.
For instance, in Poland, we used "hurtowe zakupy", a local term for “wholesale shopping”. Interestingly, broad match also captured queries seemingly unrelated to wholesale, such as “perfume”. The AI algorithm was surprisingly effective in identifying users with wholesale intent even when using such general terms. Thanks to this, we can now cover thousands of products in our catalogue rather than using only wholesale-related keywords.
We have learnt that simplicity is key when expanding. The less effort required, the more efficient the scaling process becomes — and this is where AI comes in.
We were sceptical of AI initially, but we were positively surprised with the results. Our new AI-powered marketing strategy helped us increase both revenue and new customer acquisition by more than 5X in just a year’s time. Moreover, AI-driven campaigns, particularly PMax and broad match, contributed to a 36% incremental revenue increase in the first half of this year compared to the previous year. We now feel confident enough to use it to expand to other countries.
Simplifying processes
As a next step, we analysed account performance in the new markets. We discovered that in some countries, like Hungary, not many people who signed up ended up making a purchase. In these markets, we built local sales and customer support teams to create trust and educate customers about our services. This resulted in a 3X increase in our signup to conversion ratio. To measure the performance, we used an automated scoring system based on factors such as company size and role.
We have learnt that simplicity is key when expanding. The less effort required, the more efficient the scaling process becomes — and this is where AI comes in. Our advice is not to be resistant to change or new technology; if you grow, you have to experiment as much as you can with the budget you can take risk with. And use whatever tools at your disposal to understand customers in the local market. If the advertising is not personalised, you will be wasting money.
We are now planning to expand beyond Europe and consider launching new categories like pet products and electronics. To fuel our expansion, we're strategically deploying AI tools. One key area is streamlining creative asset development and customisation, a time-consuming process to do manually.
