In an ideal world, your global campaigns will be crafted for each market. Using local insights to fuel the creative brief, resulting in campaigns that resonate with all audiences and no wasted budget.
It seems simple, but you would be surprised at how many brands miss out vital steps to getting global campaigns working effectively. The result? A disconnect between the people in market (a lack of insight or understanding of the local audiences) and creative that risks damaging brand reputation and costing money. Here, we look at how marketers can close this gap by getting to know target audiences and taking a new approach to effectively localising global campaigns for local markets.
Understand customer wants and needs
For your campaign to align with diverse cultural and social sensitivities, consider each market with fresh eyes. While the overarching brand strategy should be the same in terms of your brand mission, it needs to be re-examined locally in light of the market context.
Extensive in-market research is required to validate the creative idea and the tactics deployed to bring the brand message to market. Whether you use your own local teams or an external partner who can help with in-market research, collecting learnings and testing is a crucial step towards global campaign success.
Feed insight into effective campaign planning
Connect insight and creative through a global-to-local campaign timeline that includes the following stages:
- Global strategy: outline your global vision and overall strategy
- Market research: verify your global strategy on a local level by conducting thorough in-market research
- Insight analysis: analyse the data collated in your market research and consult local teams and experts
- Local strategy: use the findings from your data to define a local targeted strategy
- Kick-off meeting: brief all partners on your overall global strategy and local targeted strategy and define campaign timelines
- Media planning and buying: media teams negotiate media placements in-market
- Concept stage: creative teams come up with concepts that meet local market requirements
- In-market concept testing: check which creative routes perform better in which markets
- Creative development: once an approach is approved, creative teams develop key visuals
- Creative validation and cultural check: key visuals are checked and approved by in-market experts
- Collate master toolkit: this is a limited set of reference assets that will be adapted and localised across all of your markets and media placements
- Copy localisation: once the master toolkit is final and approved, copy is briefed for localisation
- Localised copy validation: in-market experts approve
- Adaptation: the master toolkit is adapted as per local specifications, using the approved localised copy
- Localised asset validation: local approver reviews the copy in situ – in other words – within the asset
- Clearance: clear ads with local advertising authorities or channels before being aired
- Trafficking and delivery: send localised assets to local publishers, either from production teams to local publishers directly or via a media partner
- Campaign wrap-up: the purpose of this meeting is for all stakeholders to identify areas for improvement and agree on the next steps.
We are set up to support brands through this entire process; from providing insights to fuel global-to-local strategies & creative briefs, plus liaising with local teams and other agencies on the individual markets, through to concept testing, creation of toolkits, creative adaptation of all assets and local market performance. We have you covered.
If you want to find out more please get in touch with Jade below, who can talk you through the process.