By Sam Martin-Ross, UK Managing Director, Eskimoz.
With marketing moving increasingly towards the digital, there has never been a better opportunity for brands of all sizes to connect with international audiences.
Global reach is more accessible than ever, and businesses have good reason to cross geographical boundaries as they tap into new markets, diversify revenue streams and establish an international brand presence.
While the potential benefits are huge, it’s also important to be prepared when it comes to international marketing, particularly if it requires a multilingual approach, and the many nuances between markets that can make or break your campaign.
Standardise or localise
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to marketing on a global scale. One is to standardise your efforts across all markets, designing campaigns with your global audience in mind, save for minor adjustments and adaptions needed at the local level in terms of, for example, language and grammar. This method prioritises brand consistency in presentation and messaging.
The second approach is to localise marketing by extensively modifying your campaigns to meet specific cultural needs or expectations. These campaigns can more effectively reach local audiences, while being sensitive to cultural nuances. This approach can often lead to variations in how a brand presents itself and communicates with its customers across different geographical regions.
In reality, most brands will opt for balancing each of these approaches by implementing extensive localisation to campaigns, while looking to develop a consistent brand image across its entire strategy. Fast-food chain and marketing powerhouse, McDonalds, is perhaps the posterchild for this, with its Golden Arches instantly recognisable around the world but a menu carefully adapted for each local market.
Localising campaigns
Localisation touches nearly every aspect of effective international marketing, from content strategy to paid advertising and social media, going far beyond translation of your original content and keywords.
From a content and SEO perspective, localisation substantially adapts your existing assets to those more in tune with the local cultural and linguistic customs, taking into account nuances in the language, search behaviours and other local preferences to create a more impactful experience and boost your ranking in the process.
Social media is another prime example of where localising content and communications is vital to connecting with various international audiences, with many brands opting for separate social media pages for each of their target countries or regions, to ensure posts properly resonate with their followers.
There are technical considerations to bear in mind, too, such as how well-tailored your website is to those in different countries. Illustrating the importance of this, payment portal Stripe, found that three quarters of the top 450 European ecommerce websites were losing out on both money and customers due to a lack of local adaption at the checkout page.
Choosing the right channels
Successful marketing requires a detailed understanding of each of your channels. This becomes more complex when targeting multiple regions, particularly for European and English-speaking brands where Google has enjoyed dominance over the search engine market.
Many countries around the world have strong preferences for their own native search engines. This is true of, for example, China with Baidu, Japan with Yahoo and Russia with Yandex, as these search engines can better support native alphabets and preferences. Excluding native search engines from your SEO and advertising campaigns in these instances can hugely limit your potential audience in that country.
In addition to advertising channels, it’s also important to consider the preferred communication channels and how these differ between your target countries. Take Spain, for example, where audiences regularly use WhatsApp as a channel to communicate with brands. This preference would be regarded as more unusual in places like the UK, so its crucial that you conduct robust research on the channels that will resonate with local audiences the most, reducing the risk of alienating potential customers through targeting the wrong channels and platforms.
Final thoughts
Establishing an international presence makes sense for both business and brand image, but this diversity also poses some serious challenges for marketers, who must balance consistent messaging and brand identity with the differing norms and expectations of various regions. As such, making the leap across borders requires not only a solid marketing strategy, but the proper research and planning to back it up.
