1 in 3 global marketers state their organisation struggles to execute its global strategy in local markets, but there are several things you can do to efficiently and effectively roll out campaign messages in regions around the world.
By considering local market needs and requirements from the outset, it’s possible to create global assets that can easily be localised – streamlining the production process, avoiding asset wastage and ensuring local teams receive everything they need to achieve in-market impact. Here’s how to deliver marketing content at scale.
The right target markets
Whether you are targeting a local market where your brand or business has already established a presence or are entering a new territory, carrying out research will help you better understand the business market, cultural attitudes, consumer behaviours and regulatory landscape. And by thoroughly understanding the local market and buyer preferences, you can identify the personas and audience segments you want to target and adapt global campaign messages accordingly.
The right content and channels
Based on local market research, you will know how local audiences consume content and want to interact with brands. For example, Facebook is a hugely powerful sales tool in markets including the US, India and Indonesia, while in China, it’s WeChat and Weibo. Similarly, your SEO research needs to take into account each new country and the requirements of the predominant search engine. While that’s Google in much of the world, it’s Baidu in China or Yandex in Russia. All these insights should form the basis of your localisation strategy as you identify how you will talk to local market consumers, start mapping out content journeys and define the actions you want them to take. It will also help shape your local market media plan and inform how you allocate your marketing budget.
The right resources
It’s not as simple as translating your global campaign into a local market language. Delivering marketing content at scale requires central and local teams to work together on translation, transcreation and adaptation – and it can take considerable time to move through the review, feedback and approval stages. As we’ve already acknowledged, translating your marketing content is not the same as localising your marketing content – while translation makes a message readable and understandable in the target language, localisation makes your message feel as if it were specifically written for native speakers of the language. A localisation partner like Freedman can help you achieve this, as well as provide expert guidance on imagery, colours and a host of cultural nuances that can make all the difference to how marketing messages are received and brands are perceived.
The right processes
Different rules and requirements for localisation in each country can mean it’s easy to dilute your core marketing message. Similarly, trying to adapt your messaging to suit consumers around the world can damage the brand equity you’ve built up.
Drawing up localisation guidelines can help you stay true to your brand and should include global standards and advice on how these can be implemented to meet local market considerations. Your guidelines should clarify voice and tone, imagery, animation style, iconography, audio and more. Essentially, everything someone would need to know in order to create content that looks, feels and sounds in line with your marketing goals.
An efficient workflow will also keep everyone on track and streamline the production process.
Contact us today to discover how we can support you to localise existing global marketing assets or introduce local expertise to your central marketing team as you embark on a new campaign.