Building a persuasive global marketing strategy gives your employees the tools they need to target their audience in the right way – driving traffic to your website, increasing leads and maximising sales.
If you’re new to global trading, or have hit a slump in your overseas operations, the following information will help you create the right marketing strategy to kick-start, or revitalise, your business.
1. Know your Audience
While you might have an extensive knowledge of your audience in your home territory, it doesn’t always follow that a global audience will behave in the same way, or even have similar demographic characteristics.
To truly connect with your new audience, you’ll need to understand what makes them tick.
Ask yourself the following questions:
• Who is my new audience?
• Where do they live?
• What is their age?
• What is their gender?
• What is their ethnicity?
• What is their social position?
• What language do they speak?
• What are the dominant cultural norms?
If you can’t answer all of these questions, you’ll need to do some serious market research before going any further with your marketing strategy.
Similarly, just because your organization may already trade in a certain location, it doesn’t always follow that an audience that speaks the same language will behave in the same way, or that an audience in the same country will speak the same language!
For example, a Middle Eastern audience, might reside in any one of the 26 Arabic-speaking countries, many of which have different dialects, cultural variances, and socio-economic structures.
Your audience will instantly spot erroneous language, superficial promotions, and inappropriate advertising, and they will choose to purchase elsewhere.
Knowledge is power, and the more you know about your global audience, the better you’ll be able to provide for them.
2. Global Brand = Local Focus
In order for a global brand to be successful, it needs a local focus.
Consumers are a perceptive bunch (no matter where they live) and they expect a global brand’s website to work the same way as a local one.
This means they expect to be able to browse your website and social media sites in their native language, engage with customer services with ease, and buy products online using their typical currency.
Your website must look like it was created ‘locally’ and designed with that particular audience in mind.
And the best way to achieve this is with localization.
Localization is a unique language service, similar to translation, but more comprehensive as it considers not only language, but also:
• Images
• Colour
• Currency
• Weights and measures
• Time/date formats
• Address/phone/email formatting
• Cultural context
• Regional dialect/language
• Humour/idioms/lexical choice
• Packaging
• Product design
• Marketing preferences
• Religious tendencies/sensitivities
• Spelling and grammatical variances
Using localization services, your global marketing strategy is repeated across multiple markets (your brand will still be recognized and maintain consistency) yet it is adapted to suit each specific audience allowing for cultural nuances and audience expectation.
3. Multilingual Marketing
You know your brand ethos – you can explain why your business exists, what it does, how, and why. But does this translate well into another language or fit with a new audience’s expectation?
Attempting to consolidate your brand into a single, universal concept so it is marketable to multilingual audiences is no mean feat, but getting it right is important.
Consider how your tagline, logo, product packing, and more, will be viewed by global audiences and ensure everything fits with your brand ethos, no matter where it is to be marketed.
For a global brand, consistency is vital, and this applies whether it is for a marketing email in the UK or a TV ad in Dubai; your brand must be recognizable, reliable, and relatable.
Don’t overcomplicate your brand message – keep it simple and succinct so it can be localized without a complete overhaul.
4. Plan Ahead for Translation
You know your business is going places, so project forward and plan ahead for translation.
When working with web designers, marketers and so on, plan with translation and localization in mind by considering how colours, images, locations, people, symbols and even emojis, might be perceived by different audiences.
Where possible, avoid things which don’t ‘translate’ well, then less adaption will be required when the time comes to move into a new market.
Similarly, factors such as, text expansion or contraction, can play havoc with design layouts, and shifting text from right-to-left (or vice-versa) can throw off symmetry, but with early input and advice from designers and your Language Services Provider you should be ahead of the game, saving time and money in the future.
If you are considering an overseas marketing operation, contact a member of the Creative Word team here for advice on localization, translation, or global marketing.
