6 Key Steps to Global (Marketing) Domination

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SeveHiRes-300x300.pngn billion. According to most estimates, our global population currently stands at a little more than seven billion people. English is the third most widely spoken language, but it’s only the native language for about 5% of the world’s population. In fact, only about 30% of the world’s population speaks English with some degree of competency.

This reality may make the idea of extending into global markets seem daunting for marketers, but it’s worth the effort. Localizing your company’s marketing, product, and sales content can have a hugely positive impact on demand generation, company growth, brand recognition, and revenue creation. Indeed, according to a Forbes Insights survey, 33% of senior executives at companies with annual worldwide sales of +$500 million consider “expanding into global and new markets” as their top strategic priority.

How are these proclamations of global priorities transformed into actual results? Through the actions of marketers, like you, who serve on the front lines of global expansion!

By tapping into multilingual markets and engaging new groups of consumers, you’re on the cutting edge of demand generation. You’re spearheading a better, faster, approach to world domination (the nicest kind, of course), and will help grow global revenues. Regardless of where you are on the multilingual marketing learning curve, here are six steps to help you get started and capitalize on global marketing opportunities:

Step 1: Think Big and Plan Globally

You probably saw this one coming a mile away, but global marketing requires a global mindset! This may seem like an obvious a point, but you’d be surprised how often I see that deer-in-the-headlight expression when I ask global marketers for details about how they execute against their global strategy.

Implementing global delivery of marketing campaigns, programs, and messaging does come with its fair share of challenges, but it also offers the potential for huge gains that no global marketer can afford to ignore. And yet, developing a marketing strategy that is inherently global is less common than you might think.

Go-to-market activities must be justified by the revenue potential of each market, the degree to which competition exists in those countries, and the market demand data. To that end, it’s critical to conduct extensive market research to evaluate and prioritize which global markets to enter.

Having a global approach from day one will help your company capture more revenue using the least amount of resources by ensuring that:

  • People and budgets are utilized most effectively and efficiently
  • The right corporate and local stakeholders are involved from the start, and all in-country expertise is leveraged
  • Pre-sales content is delivered in the required languages and formats to best position your products in each target market
  • Your brand is communicated consistently across the globe
  • Your culturally and linguistically diverse audience enjoys a uniform customer experience.

Some companies treat localization as an afterthought, tacking it at the end of the marketing content delivery process. Others who do think globally up front often don’t execute fully on a global strategy because they’re convinced they don’t have enough time or resources to do so. Either way, the failure to execute a marketing plan from a global perspective jeopardizes valuable opportunities to gain market share in international markets and often has business leaders throwing good money after bad.

Step 2: Allocate Resources for the Best Localization and Biggest Global Impact

Now that you’ve identified your target markets and formulated a strategy to conquer them, it’s time to determine the localization plan to best support your strategy. The goal is to localize all marketing materials into the languages that matter to your business. Not surprisingly, data shows that translating materials to reach multilingual audiences contributes significantly to the attainment of business goals. According to industry research firm Common Sense Advisory (CSA), Fortune 500 companies that translated communications to engage customers in their own language were nearly three times more likely to experience revenue increases. Moreover, another CSA study found that consumers are six times more likely to buy when they see localized marketing.

Localization goes well beyond word-for-word translation: it takes into account the nuances of regional audiences and customs to get the tone, phrases, and even images correct so that materials read naturally in each target audience’s own language, and do not convey unintended messages. Research and knowledge of your target market may reveal cultural differences and beliefs that can have a big impact on how marketing messages are perceived. Use professional translators that not only speak the language in the market, but also understand the subtleties of the region and culture, so that your messages truly resonate as intended with your entire global audience. Getting it right is vital—giving the wrong impression will jeopardize your entire global investment.

Step 3: It Takes a (Marketing) Village

When you’re implementing marketing campaigns and programs that reach beyond your company’s headquarters, it doesn’t always work to simply translate the exact same content used by your corporate teams. Instead, work with your teams cross-functionally and globally to ensure that you not only understand and incorporate the language nuances into your global campaigns, but that you also provide the right content. To do this, leverage your global teams’ unique skills and perspectives and find the right balance of centralization for your organization.

Also, make sure that your global marketing plan allows for regional teams to make adjustments to campaign materials to increase their effectiveness in the local market. At the same time, the localization process should allow teams to test, implement, and retest marketing materials so that they meet regional teams’ and customer needs.

Step 4: Use Your Secret Weapon: Translation Memory

There’s an extremely valuable secret weapon in your localization arsenal that’s so secret even you might not know about it. What is it? Your translation memory. It’s a database of a company’s previously translated words and phrases.

Our survey of 500 global marketers found that 80% were completely unaware of this valuable tool. By using a translation memory software solution, once you’ve translated a word or phrase, you will never have to pay or wait to have those words translated again.

You’re probably asking—how is it possible to know nothing about this tool? Chances are, unless you’re using a marketing globalization solution with a unified translation memory capability, your language service providers and translation vendors control it—and there are likely multiple versions of it if you’re using several vendors.

If you’re not in control of your own translation memory, you’re spending more time and money on translation projects than you need to, and aren’t ensuring global consistency of messaging across your global campaigns.

Step 5: Automate your Global Demand Creation #FTW

It’s time to start thinking about marketing globalization the same way you think about marketing automation—as a business process that can be optimized. Take a critical look at your organization to understand how marketing assets, pre-sales materials, and campaigns are created and delivered across your tools and technologies. Now is the time to optimize your global content operation just like you would any other business process.

For example, your marketing content moves through your content management system, web content management, and marketing automation technologies. To quickly and easily deliver all the localized materials your markets demand—and benefit from an efficient, cost-effective way to go after global opportunities—you don’t want to be stuck in copy-and-paste purgatory. Rather, you need a solution that integrates these critical technologies and lets them work together to help you execute against your goals. Use technology to your advantage and avoid old school manual processes and project management tools.

By eliminating inefficiencies in your local campaign creation process, you can create more local marketing campaigns. That means more MQLs, which means more opportunities, which means more revenue for your company.

Step 6. Capture More Global Revenue Faster

In an increasingly competitive global economy, companies are continually improving their marketing campaigns to stay ahead of the competition and engage consumers through multiple channels to generate leads and grow revenue. However, many companies fail to engage successfully in international markets because their global marketing strategy and localization processes haven’t been optimized to reflect new advances in technology to deliver those campaigns on a global scale.

Whether your objectives are to increase brand awareness, expand into new markets, or grow your existing ones, it all boils down to being able to deliver compelling, effective messages to the marketplace that engage global audiences. By integrating the localization process with your marketing automation and taking a new approach to the way global marketing is done, you can engage and sell to your target audiences better and faster than ever before.

Companies with global-minded marketers who leverage the best tools available to them and collaborate well with their global peers will be the ones who dominate their markets in the end. The world is waiting for you. Go for it!


Original article published here: Business 2 Community

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Adapting to cultural contexts is key

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When marketers take their brand positioning and messages global, a lot can be lost in translation. Although brands are thinking and behaving more globally than ever before, due to the connective tissue of digital, many are still repurposing communications for different geographies and cultures at the executional phase or with mere language translation.

However, as content becomes more portable, we must place a stronger emphasis on context, by strategically and creatively adapting communications and content for cultural relevance.

The same sharing pathways that made “What Does the Fox Say?” a global viral hit in 2013 can give consumers insight into how brands present themselves to different consumers across markets, which can pose an authenticity threat to marketers trying to create a consistent brand identity. After all, if you tell one story to a teenager in New York and a different story to a businesswoman in Shanghai, which of those stories can really be trusted?

To get to creative ideas that can live globally, advertisers can borrow from social psychology, which recognizes core variations between cultures that can help us understand what different people value, how they prefer to be communicated with and what cultural tensions can be tapped to create compelling stories. One framework for understanding these variations is social psychologist, professor and former IBM employee Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, which lays out a set of cultural variables that can give insight into adjustments that can be made to bring a creative idea to life across cultures.

Here are four of those variables and how they can be applied to strategically adapt campaigns for audiences around the world.

Individualism vs. collectivism: Ads in individualist countries often celebrate people who achieve great things on their own or emphasize the importance of the individual over the group, while collectivist countries emphasize progressing together. A prime example of this dimension at play in global advertising can be found in Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign. Unlike its “Sketches” execution in the U.S., which asked women to see the beauty in themselves, Dove ran a series of print ads in China, a market more oriented toward collectivism, that featured pregnant women with their bellies intricately covered in calligraphy with questions for society as a whole—”If you knew I’d grow up to weigh 140 jin [154 pounds], would I still be your baby?” The reemphasis of the creative idea prevents it from being only about the individual.

Being vs. doing orientation: In doing-oriented cultures, there’s a strong tension between being successful and enjoying life that advertisers often leverage to create desirability for their products. When Johnnie Walker brought its iconic “Keep Walking” campaign, which features ideas about progress and success, to Brazil—a culture less focused on personal achievement and progress than the U.S. and Western Europe—the image used was not of an ambitious young man, but rather the nation as a whole. Johnnie Walker avoided the stigma against careerism and ambition that can be present in cultures more oriented toward “being” than “doing.”

High context vs. low context: This describes communication between people, and how much meaning is carried tacitly by their relationship or context to an ad’s theme or subject. In high-context cultures (e.g., Japan and Korea), sensitive subjects like conflict or sex must be dealt with less directly. This becomes clear when you look at brands that use sex to sell in markets where context is higher—brands like Axe/Lynx dial down the overt sexuality and dial up the subtext of their branding in order to maintain respectability in markets that appreciate subtlety.

Uncertainty avoidance: High-uncertainty avoidance cultures often emphasize the risks of not using a product versus the possibilities of using it. This dynamic can be seen with Airbnb’s first few forays into advertising under the “Belong Anywhere” campaign. The first spot, called “Views,” is very much about possibilities, evoking the many views you might see from the window of your Airbnb rental. The second spot, “Welcome to Airbnb,” is much more explicit about the rental process, describing the steps a renter undergoes to find the perfect rental at the perfect price.

Each ad performs a clear role in the overall idea. The first speaks about possibilities to people who are comfortable with uncertainty, and the second speaks about realities to people who fear it, all under the same overall idea of belonging anywhere. Portugal, Greece and Japan are a few examples of countries that are highly avoidant of uncertainty. Singapore, Scandinavia, and Hong Kong are a few examples of regions more tolerant of uncertainty.

By tapping into these truths, and combining them with social listening to cultural cues, we can evaluate and develop communications and content that resonate across cultures.

Only then will the world be ours.

Original article published here: ADWEEK

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