Campaign planning is a challenge for global marketers. How will your product have the impact you want in 30+ markets and in 20 different languages?
Just how do you create and coordinate a global marketing campaign so that it truly resonates all over the world?
International campaigns usually originate in the home market where the client’s central team and lead agency are based. The first stage of the process is a melting pot of creative thinking. There’s a focus on the big idea and on campaign strategy from a group of talented creatives. They have knowledge of the product, and personal experience of the home culture.
Marketers love to deliver brilliant creative campaigns, and set the strategy in motion, but what happens when the time comes to deliver the strategy globally?
Often, it’s not pretty. The role of implementing the strategy is given to local markets, who may be equally talented, but who are working on the project at arm’s length. Or you can have a global campaign run by a central team, completely disconnected from local reality.
Where global campaigns fail
Lack of understanding and knowledge
Aside from the normal communication challenges – different time zones, different languages, cultural differences – the local teams don’t share the deep understanding of the home market’s thinking. It’s not unusual for great ideas to become incomprehensible once they cross cultural or language divides. This lack of understanding doesn’t give local teams a huge impetus to embrace the project.
Technological challenges
Technology throws up a heap of challenges – different devices, browsers or even internet speeds can put a halt to the best intentioned global marketing campaign. Besides, each market has a different relation to technology, with some markets being more technology-savvy.
Roles and responsibilities aren’t defined
Project management is a huge issue during global marketing campaigns. Uncertainty over processes can hamper the situation still further. Whose project is this? Who owns the budget? Who reports to whom? Who’s in charge here?There is so much to coordinate – agencies, people, status reports, assets– and very often a lack of people to make it happen, or take responsibility in case any issues arise. At the heart of this conundrum, marketers are unclear on where to go for help.
Lack of communication
If you’re not all on the same page, it’s impossible to tell the same story. Basic stuff, like communication of schedules often gets lost in the transfer between head office and the local markets. If you don’t know the launch schedule, it’s extremely difficult to plan your media schedules.
If you’re not crystal clear on what marketing content is needed by your different markets you’re liable to waste resources on generating content that is not always appropriate for the markets. And if you don’t understand your local markets well, you lose out on the synergies between markets. You’ll end up with multiple markets generating similar materials, at unnecessary cost.
Generating a global toolkit is a great idea, but these are often delivered late in a schedule. If it’s not ready for the project kick-off regional markets won’t be able to fully utilise its assets. With deadlines looming they’re forced to develop their own marketing materials, thus duplicating effort and wasting your budget.
Budget black holes
Where does the budget sit? The answer to that simple question holds the key to understanding where many global projects run into difficulties.
If the budget is wholly owned by the global team there’s a danger that local markets get sidelined in the creative process because the global team doesn’t consult on local needs or creative input.
If the budget is split between global (for strategy and creative) and local for (adaptation and media) then the onus is on the global team to provide materials that will work and meet needs of local markets. However, this split frequently backfires, and local markets often discard global tools and recreate their own, pushing up project costs and risking brand inconsistencies.
If the budget is all held locally, the global role becomes very hard. You will need to get buy in and budget from local markets to develop global assets – and this can be a major uphill task without strong senior management direction.
Another danger zone for budgets occurs when marketing budgets are not confirmed until very late and when they are, they vary significantly from initial estimates. Consequently, regions make assumptions about what the budget will be and what markets will want, and then they go ahead and produce assets accordingly. This leads to materials being created at a local market level, resulting in either wastage, an under supply of assets and / or inefficiencies.
The creative ideas won’t translate
Global creative is often not easy to localise. From sign-offs and tag lines to pictures and concepts that offend rather than resonate, the whole process can be a minefield to the under experienced.
It’s easy to see that not thinking about the global implications of any visuals you’re creating will lead you into trouble, but creative can crash in many other ways too. For example, sound matters. Projects flounder when markets react badly to the voice-over you’ve selected – if the voice selection is insensitive to cultural needs it just won’t work. Other creative minefields include humour, metaphors, idioms, regulatory issues and cultural norms.
A Better Way to plan your global marketing campaign
A focus on marketing implementation from the outset is the key to global success. We believe that there are five elements of a global marketing campaign that require consideration at the initial stage.
Smarter process, roles & accountabilities
Make sure you’ve got the right people and that everyone knows what they’re doing.
- Establish clear roles for global, region and local. Define roles; educate players; and follow it.
- Define a worldwide localisation process. Implement one consistent but flexible process worldwide and educate global teams on transcreation and adaptation.
- Determine what resources are available and fill any gaps within internal service departments, global and local marketing teams, agencies, or other suppliers
Sort this early. Where’s the money coming from? Make sure everyone is clear. Defined budgets
- Decide on budget ownership and allocation.
- Secure early budget allocation to allow marketing teams to deliver with confidence and consistency.
Think global from the get-go. Involve the markets early. Truly global creative
- Decide your creative development approach in association with the markets. Co-create and get them involved.
- Mandate and pay centrally, create and hope markets will use campaigns (using their local budgets).
- Define a global creative brief. Prepare a worldwide plan and creative concept which all marketing teams can work from; eliminate massive re-working in market.
- Understand the creative toolkit needs for each market; be open to developing toolkits that work for larger, medium and smaller markets.
- Plan for creative localisation implications e.g. images, product shots, talent, cultural norms.
- Define collaboration between central and local teams for the creative
- Understand the budget impact of creative options chosen and the localisation required.
The Implementation Captain acts as central point of contact and oversees the A-Z of the campaign plan. Here’s why you need one, and what makes a good one. Clear project management and communication
- Having a single point of contacts maintains consistency and keeps knowledge flowing between translators, validators, developers, client stakeholders and creative agency.
- A good Implementation Captain is an expert in digital localisation:
- They know the right questions to ask, questions that creative agencies often bypass. e.g. character limits, special characters, best format in which to validate, structured QA process, etc.
- They are deadline focused ensuring adherence to timelines and budgets and continuously seek methods to improve process and technology.
- They will set up project tracking against every deliverable for every market.
- Their role is to establish a structured briefing process to ensure that the goals are understood by all parties, and include a formalised sign-off process and clear escalation steps.
The right tools will make your life much easier. Here’s what you need in your toolkit. The right tools
- Invest in one Digital Asset Management system – a single, secure, and easy-to-use system, accessible to partners and agencies, will ensure the Invest in one campaign management and collaboration system for launches to enable the viewing and management of the complete campaign process and status.
- Consider other key tools such as Translation memory and workflow, video subtitling, web CMS translation software.
Planning for a successful global campaign is a big task, but the key message is to ‘think implementation first.’
Think implementation first
Spend as much time nailing down how you’re going to deliver the campaign as you do to the initial creative. What’s the benefit of doing it this way? It’s less costly and less stressful, and you’ll get there on time. The global brand will be enhanced, and you’ll get a far better ROI, and results you can measure.
Best of luck!
