Global marketing is a delicate practice. Successful brand names expand into new markets by understanding each local audience and targeting their products, services, and messaging to resonate. Global marketing embraces and celebrates what makes individual markets unique.
How do these brands develop their global strategy, and how do marketers of all sizes replicate these tactics to expand their global footprint?
Today, we’ll share the best tips and strategies for understanding the nuance of global markets and using that knowledge to craft compelling localized campaigns and branding. Here are some key points to look out for:
How does strategy impact global marketing success?
Successful global marketing strategies will consider the target markets’ cultural nuances, language differences, currency conversions, local customs, and preferences.
Choosing the right global strategies is essential for achieving success in international markets. Strategies should be designed to meet the needs of different countries, cultures, and languages while also considering global market trends and customer preferences.
Brands that fail to emulate local business customs have a much tougher hill to climb in gaining market share and brand recognition. The best global marketing is indistinguishable from domestic brands in a consumer’s home country.
Businesses that capture this nuance, however, experience many market benefits:
- Easier entry into foreign markets
- Lower costs for customer acquisition and conversion
- Better brand recognition and adoption
- Scalability of these practices into new markets
10 tips for effective global marketing strategy
Engaging a global audience requires attention to detail and a customer-focused approach to messaging and presentation. To improve outcomes in your global marketing strategies, follow these tips and best practices that ensure your message always comes across as intended.
- Establish business goals: Well-defined goals allow organizations to create a comprehensive action plan, gain clarity on allocating resources, and accurately track progress. Knowing what you want from a global engagement strategy helps maximize returns by finding the right balance between short-term wins and long-term success.
- Prioritize audience research: Understanding target audience data is essential to success in a foreign market. Regional preferences, desires, cultural perceptions, and even taboos strongly influence consumer behavior. Fine-tuning messages to meet these expectations greatly increases engagement and conversion rates, so invest appropriately in market research to understand each audience deeply.
- Build streamlined branding: Consistency is key when launching a product or service in an international market. Customers and prospects should resonate with the company’s message, core values, mission, and positioning wherever they encounter the brand. Clean, streamlined branding makes it easier to present these concepts across different languages and regions. This strategy also ensures that any changes to messaging or visuals can be managed across markets without reinventing the wheel.
- Simplify your campaigns: Clean, simple messaging plays well in any language. Aim for simplicity and clarity when building a domestic marketing plan to be translated into different languages or localized for different markets. Phrasing that’s free from local slang or jargon makes it easier to translate the initial content. Later in the process, you can use localization to add nuance and flare that resonates with individual markets.
- Invest in multi-lingual SEO: Multi-lingual SEO optimizes website content for different languages and regions to ensure Google and other search tools see and prioritize the content. Localized SEO uses native language keywords and phrases to aid global search within individual markets. Using multi-lingual titles, descriptions, meta tags, alt text, and plugs on country-specific or foreign language sites helps crawlers accurately index the content.
- Use social media across markets: Social media is one of the most influential channels for ecommerce, especially if your target audience is on the younger end of the demographic. Be sure to invest in localized social media content for every market. While your domestic social media is a vital part of the marketing mix, so too is international engagement and consistency on the most popular social media channels in a region or country.
Recent reporting by CSA found that 65% of consumers surveyed across 29 countries prefer content in their language (even if it’s poor quality!). Considering the power of social media as a marketing tool, it pays to participate in the languages and platforms that matter most to your target audience.
- Repurpose wisely: Repurposing content becomes a little trickier when you develop your marketing assets to deploy across multiple languages or regions. But when done correctly, marketing teams can still get extra mileage out of their existing assets through thoughtful repurposing and geographic localization. Instead of just translating marketing materials to overcome the language barrier, focus on transcreation. This method reimagines the content for the new market while maintaining the original (or similar) tone and style.
- Customize channel selection: When creating content for different markets, tailoring customization to the best channels in every market can save time and money. While it’s tempting to create translated content for every channel across every language, assess the engagement and the return on investment from each channel. You may find a competitive advantage in taking a lighter approach with certain channels in select markets.
- Build local partnerships: No one knows your market like a local. Engaging local partnerships to help establish and promote your brand is a great way to ensure you pass the localization test with your native audience. This also applies to using local influencers for campaigns—personalizing content with celebrities and influencers familiar to your local audience increases the likelihood that they’ll engage with your content and convert.
- Don’t just translate—localize: Translation is a great start when establishing a global digital marketing strategy, but customer-centric translation and localization go beyond simply translating your message into another language. It also customizes currency, color preferences, imagery, textual rules, and more while addressing cultural nuances that might fall through the cracks with a standard translation.
Measuring the ROI of your global marketing efforts
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your global marketing efforts is a critical part of evaluating the success of a strategy. Otherwise, it’s difficult to assess the effectiveness of current tactics and maximize the most successful strategies.
By tracking relevant metrics, marketing teams gain valuable insights to inform future budget allocation, campaign selection, and personalization. Reliable data is also key in demonstrating results to stakeholders and potential investors.
For instance, if your goal is to monitor conversions in a foreign-language email marketing campaign, examining the open rates, split-testing, and click-through metrics of those emails can reveal if your translation and localization are strong enough to encourage users to “read and proceed” to a website or landing page. (GT)
