The Most Frequently Asked Questions in Global Buyer Discovery Training
Hello, I’m marketing instructor Kim Bo-kyung.
When I run global marketing training, all questions eventually end up converging on one thing.
“How can we find overseas buyers?”
In this session too, I had a lot of conversations with startup CEOs.
The Q&A was even more heated than the lecture itself.
Today, within the big topic of buyer discovery, I’m going to pick and organize the five questions that came up most often on site.
Q1. On LinkedIn, should we start with a personal account or a company account?
This was a question from a director at a logistics software company.
They said they want to activate their company’s LinkedIn channel, but they’re unsure whether to grow the company page first or start with personal branding. Since LinkedIn is a channel that connects directly with overseas buyers, it matters where you put your effort.
Based on my own hands-on experience in the field, I answered clearly.
Start with the individual.
The Marumbo Lab LinkedIn account I run has a decent number of followers, but the company page for Gyeongseong Solution (CRM software), which I run together, honestly doesn’t do well. That’s not an operations issue on my end—it’s because of the way the LinkedIn algorithm works. Company pages simply get low impressions (exposure).
It was exactly the same when I did B2B marketing consulting for large enterprises.
Even among major Korean conglomerates, successful LinkedIn company channels are extremely rare. In that case, it’s much faster if key people or the CEO post content directly. From a buyer’s perspective too, it’s easier to approach a “person” than a company logo.
“Once you get past 3,000–4,000 followers, you get pushed around less in sales meetings. People stop calling you in and then no-showing, or pushing you excessively—it definitely drops.”
Of course, using the company channel for PR during an investment round, or investing heavily in LinkedIn when repositioning your brand image, is a different kind of strategy.
Q2. For Google Search Ads, how should we set match types?
This came up during the ad practice session.
They said Google Ads has several keyword match types, but they weren’t sure which to choose.
If you want to capture the moment a buyer searches, every single ad setting affects budget efficiency.
I’ll give you the conclusion first.
Start with Exact Match.
Ad platforms are basically designed to make advertisers spend more. If you choose broad match, your ads will show for irrelevant keywords too, and your budget will be burned up in no time. Your ad spend ends up leaking out through clicks from people who aren’t buyers.
| Match type | Reach | Cost efficiency |
|---|---|---|
| Broad match | Wide | Low |
| Phrase match | Medium | Medium |
| Exact match | Narrow | High |
At first, build up data steadily with exact match, and once you start seeing patterns, it’s safer to expand to phrase match. If you go broad from the start, you’ll likely just waste your ad budget.
Q3. Should B2B software companies do SNS marketing too?
This was a question from the CMO of a legal SaaS company.
They said they’d tried Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but weren’t sure whether any of it was actually working.
I told them honestly as well. If your goal is buyer discovery, spending time on SNS as a B2B software company is a low priority.
The first thing you should do is search-based inbound. In other words, when buyers search specific keywords, your company needs to show up in the results. On Naver, if you have links in Cafes, blogs, and Knowledge iN, you can rank at the top right away.
Check your traffic trend in Naver Search Advisor. When I had my team build Knowledge iN backlinks, traffic jumped sharply—and when we stopped, it dropped right back down. It’s an area where you can see the impact clearly.
SNS is less about generating traffic directly and more about helping you stay top of mind. If you urgently need buyer inquiries right now, SEO comes first, and SNS should be viewed as a supporting channel for brand awareness.
Q4. We sell multiple solutions—should we merge everything into one website?
They said they run three offerings—domestic delivery, overseas forwarding, and export regulation solutions—and each has different inbound keywords.
Since each buyer searches different keywords, your website structure effectively becomes the doorway for buyer acquisition.
I explained this using my own company as an example. I run Marumbo Lab (education) and Gyeongseong Solution (CRM distribution). They used to be on the same site, but they’re separated now.
The key is how you define your company.
Gyeongseong Solution’s identity is “a company that distributes overseas SaaS in Korea.” Under that, services like HubSpot, Zoho, and monday.com sit in a parallel structure. If you can lay them out side by side like this, running a single website is advantageous for management efficiency.
On the other hand, if the targets are completely different, you should separate them. It’s hard to cross-sell an overseas forwarding solution to customers looking for same-day domestic delivery, right?
In my experience, splitting is easy, but merging is hard. So don’t over-segment from the start—if you have a shared target, I recommend starting with one site first.
Q5. When expanding into Japan, do we need to buy a new domain?
They said they’d created a separate Japanese website and also purchased a .co.jp domain separately.
If you’re targeting Japanese buyers, your domain strategy directly affects search visibility.
From an SEO perspective, separating domains is an outdated approach.
What I recommend is a directory structure. It’s a way to create language-specific pages in the form of example.co.kr/jp/. This way, your domain authority doesn’t get diluted and instead accumulates in one place. The more authority you build, the more likely you are to stand out to buyers in local Japanese search.
Many people doing SEO in Japan use this approach today.
They keep the main site in Japan, and run the Korean pages under the /ko/ path.
One more practical piece of advice: if you’re already testing with a .co.jp domain, first check whether it’s producing results. Once you confirm traction, it’s never too late to consider consolidation. Rebuilding a multilingual website is a project that can get quite expensive.
Buyer discovery—what should you focus on in the end?
As we wrapped up the Gravity Ventures training, this is what I shared with attendees as my final message.
There’s nothing particularly special about global buyer discovery. Get found in search, talk to buyers, and build trust. It’s exactly the same principle as domestic sales. The only difference is that the stage has expanded overseas.
For startups, you need to get the maximum impact with limited resources. That’s why the order matters.
– Search inbound before SNS
– Personal branding before company channels
– Consolidation before splitting websites
– Exact match before expansion
Just following this order can significantly reduce the trial and error you go through in the process of finding buyers.
If you have any questions about global buyer discovery training or expanding into overseas markets, you’re always welcome to reach out. Feel free to contact me 🙂
