A successful localisation strategy must look beyond translation if a brand or business is to maintain cultural relevance and local engagement wherever it appears in the world. Here’s how to ensure your global-to-local model is efficient and effective.
1. Adapt your global creative brief with the help of local teams
Cultural context and consumer attitudes can drastically impact how your campaign is received in different markets. That’s why a deep understanding of local values should inform every word you use and image you select. Engaging the help of in-market experts can be invaluable when it comes to gaining local insights and an understanding of specific personas and audience segments that exist in your target markets.
However, you can start by more closely involving local teams to carry out market-specific research, which should give you the confidence to make decisions about whether your creative ideas can be successfully adapted. In addition, you can be sure that you are able to provide local teams with the assets they require – in line with the format and specifications of their market’s preferred marketing channels.
By involving local teams from the outset and throughout campaign development, you can ensure greater buy-in and give them more time to plan their campaign and media placements. In addition, building regular status updates into production timelines can avoid unexpected feedback when it’s too late in the campaign or too expensive to reshoot or redesign assets.
At the end of each campaign, encourage all involved to review, validate and share feedback. Remember: the overall aim is to develop a campaign concept that meets the global business objectives and can be adapted to local market needs.
2. Establish efficiencies by putting together a playbook
Successful global marketers recognise that making an idea work is as important as the idea itself, which is why your creative concept must be supported with a great implementation plan. But, all too often, brands fail to pay attention to implementation – not realising it’s an essential part of the marketing mix.
A playbook can provide an essential guide to an organisation’s localisation process and should contain strategic instructions for local market activation in relation to the global strategy and guidelines. It can also help ensure that marketers don’t waste money on ineffective global creative. The goal is to align markets not just in execution but to embed global and local best practices, guardrails and watch-outs. This document is key when it comes to ensuring brand consistency and streamlining the localisation process. Start putting yours together by collating in-market requirements from local teams, consolidating cultural insights and gathering information regarding preferred channels and TOV.
3. Champion communication and collaboration across teams
Global marketers should make the most of their local teams’ expertise and consult them throughout the creative process by sharing initial ideas, wireframes, storyboards, scripts and designs. In fact, local teams can add value every step of the way – from providing cultural context and valuable insights to specifying what assets they need and being involved with media buying and procurement teams.
Having the right people on board from the beginning can make or break a global-to-local model, and this includes technical partners such as a localisation agency. Reach out to resources around the world as you move from ideation to execution in order to:
- Define production processes, timelines and budgets
- Assign clear roles and responsibilities across teams, and establish a single point of contact to maintain consistency and keep the brand’s identity flowing between internal and external stakeholders
- Determine what resources are available and fill any gaps by looking to internal service departments, global and local marketing teams, agencies or other suppliers
- Set up deadlines and project tracking against every deliverable and/or asset for every market
- Look to previous campaigns – and your localisation playbook, if you have one – to gain best practices that need to be considered from the outset.
Think about implementation from start to finish and take the brand further, wider and faster than ever before. Find out how Freedman has the local market and strategic expertise to assist in building an agile localisation model.