Last week I attended Content Israel 2022, where many of Israel’s high-tech marketers met to learn about new trends and strategies in the field of content marketing.
Apart from the great talk sessions, I noticed something very unique that I hadn’t experienced before: most of the speakers and attendees were native English speakers.
For a moment I felt that I was in a seminar in the US, hearing and speaking English. But no, I was in the heart of Tel Aviv, Israel, and all the people in this event either worked for or worked with an Israeli tech company.
Israel is known as the “Start-up Nation”, where you can find innovative ideas for many of our day-to-day problems in all disciplines.
Millennials and Gen Z seek to be in workplaces and industries that have the word “tech” in them: Hightech, Biotech, MedTech, Fintech, Foodtech, Agritech, Cleantech, Edtech — and there are many more. It seems that no one wants to miss the opportunity of jumping on the train of the new revolution.
Each major university and college in Israel has its own entrepreneurship program. There are many accelerators, start-up hubs, angel investors, venture capitalists, and government sponsorships in almost every area you can think of.
And this is the reason why Israel, with its high-tech ecosystem, is a great place to be if you are a founder that has a great idea, and would like to develop and commercialize it in a “nurturing” environment.
Now, there are thousands of early-stage start-ups, hundreds of tech companies in the Growth phase, and only dozens in the Maturity phase. And I’m not referring to the multinational corporates that have established innovation centers in Israel.
Why is that?
There is a myth that Israeli tech companies are very good in innovation, but bad in marketing.
VC investors normally expect to make around x3 on their investment in a period of 10–11 years.
As opposed to US-based start-ups that create growth in their local market, the goal of Israeli tech companies is to reach the biggest global market from the get-go, and in most cases, that is the US market.
This is even more so when dealing with MedTech companies that aspire to get clearance from the FDA, and market their innovative products in the largest medical arena: the US market.
When this is the case, and a tech company wants to sell globally, once they reach their commercial stage, they have two main options:
1. go direct and open their own local subsidiary
2. or use local partners to help them market their products.
Either way, marketing is done, in most cases, at the headquarters, and for this reason, one of the prerequisites in a marketer’s job description is to have English as a native language.
Peter Drucker once famously said: “Marketing is not a function. It is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view”.
Your customers don’t buy just the product. They purchase a brand, an experience that includes customer support, customer service, training, logistics, billing support, etc.
Simply opening a full-blown subsidiary to supply the above needs isn’t cost-effective, especially for an early-stage, single-product company. Partnering with a local vendor, distributor, or reseller is essential to successfully launch your innovative product for the first time.
Your product or service will need to be adapted to the local market needs, as well as your marketing strategies. Thus, there is a need for marketers that are either native or have lived and worked in your targeted market, so they know how the system works.
Creating an effective marketing team that works on demand generation and lead generation will enable your local partner to more easily convert your prospective clients. Your channel or partner manager has the tidiest job of liaising between the HQ and your partners and end-users.
Due to the myth, what usually happens is that after a successful launch and substantial growth that normally takes several years, and a few rounds of investment and/or IPO, Israeli firms get acquired.
Investors get their return on investment, and the founders get ready for their next endeavors.
Only a small percentage of the start-ups get to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And even fewer will keep growing organically and reach the maturity stage and many years of successful operations.
Will this pattern (or myth) ever be changed, and will we see a growing number of Israeli multinational big companies? Time will tell.
