Reaching Global Audiences: How to Localize Your Marketing Strategy

Welocalize provides tips and

best practices on how to localize your global marketing content to

support your brand and align to your overall

business goals.

Marketers are challenged today by the demands to go and grow globally. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s survey of 478 high-level marketing executives worldwide, more than 80% say they need to restructure marketing to better support the business. In the same survey, 29% believe the need for change is urgent. Faced with the demand to increase engagement and demonstrate results by increasing revenues, marketers are looking for ways to maximize impact through content. Effectively reaching a global audience requires a strategy that produces and distributes value-driven content directed to a precisely defined target. It needs purpose. It needs to be accessible. It needs to represent the brand. It needs to accurately reflect the culture and values of the intended audience.

Millions of words are published online, every minute, with the intention to build brands, sell products, evoke emotions and create reactions. For every product launched, thousands of new words are written in the form of product guides, websites, sales materials, advertisements, taglines, online help, blogs, social media, articles and much more. The investment of time, resources and spend into content marketing continues to accelerate exponentially year-over-year. We also know that not all created content is equal or universal.

Localization and translation has to be core to an effective overall global marketing strategy. In order to achieve global growth and reach international audiences, a content marketing strategy needs to match the diversity that exists in all of your audiences. Your marketing content must be readable, targeted and searchable to global audiences in order to fully actualize the investment and provide a viable return.

In this e-book, we cover some of the key challenges and considerations facing today’s global marketers. We provide tips and best practices on how to localize your global marketing content to support your brand and align to your overall business goals.

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1. Why Localize Global Marketing Campaigns?

2. What Challenges Global Marketers Today?

3. Why is Content Marketing Key To Global Business Success?

4. Creating Marketing Content for the World

5. Measuring Impact — Transcreation vs Translation

6. Preparing Your Source Marketing Content for Localization

7. Summary

Why Localize Global Marketing Campaigns?

PLANNING FOR A GLOBAL AUDIENCE

1. Start with Localization in Mind. Develop central messaging and all source content with a view to localization.

2. A r t i c u l a t e B r a n d E x p e c t a t i o n s . Understand how your want your brand treated and represented in your global markets. Definitive brand standards and guidelines will help you achieve a better localized brand experience.

3. Evaluate Your Distribution. Know the paths your content could take in reaching your global audience. Audit any content or content channels, intended or unintended.

4. Define Your Audience. Know who you want to reach with your content. Create personas for your targets.

5. Measure Content Impact. Work with localization experts to assess the different content types used and to what extent they need to be localized in order to achieve the right impact.

6. Set Clear Direction. Decide what to translate and what not to translate. Your language service provider can help you understand the limitations and values in translating different content types into different languages.

Localization experts will tell you whether your brand has different positions in various countries. Adopt a nuanced approach to individual country markets.

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Most content developed as part of an international company’s overall marketing mix requires adapting it to multiple languages in order to maximize its reach. Words, imagery, color, comedy, music and even numbers have different meanings to a global audience. Content is not universal.

One of the biggest mistakes made by marketers today is implementing a standardized marketing strategy in one source language, which assumes that everyone has the same needs and speaks the same language. Proper localization can reduce the overall cost of a campaign by personalizing the experience, which significantly increases the return on original content investments.

Content is an expense and an asset. It has value. The investment you make today in producing content can increase dramatically in value if it is localized to extend your reach beyond the language of the original content source. Once written, multiple times localized can provide significant returns on your content.

The world is your audience. Before everything was published online, marketing tools were much more controlled. Marketers knew that certain communication pieces would only be read by certain audiences. Distribution was limited. With the dramatic increases in online publishing, anyone can potentially read your content today.

Summary: You have opportunity to reach a global audience. In order for your content to have value to your global audience, it needs to be localized. Planning ahead will save you money and it will increase the value of your content.

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Knowing by whom and where your marketing

content is read, is important to today's

global marketer.

Challenge number one is that the world is a small place. Global marketing is always evolving. With the growth of the Internet and digital media, the landscape has changed significantly on how you connect with your customers. Reaching customers online has reduced physical trade barriers. Cost of entry to international business has dropped dramatically due to the growth in e-commerce and online tools, like email and social media.

There are now more than 3 billion people worldwide online and 10 billion devices connected to the Internet. According to the “Internet of Everything,” we have yet to learn of all the possibilities of how we will be connected online — today and in the future!

Creating and sustaining growth is another challenge for global marketers. According to a study conducted by Statistica, 26% of marketers around the globe stated that customer acquisition was one of their major concerns in regards to their current year business success.

Acquiring new customers globally is a big challenge. How do global marketers reach customers and new geographies, engaging them in a language they understand?

Successful marketers have a clear view of what the customer wants, across different geographies, industries and demographics. They tailor their message, brand and marketing materials to resonate with each local target group and they have the right technology in place to measure the impact and ROI of each campaign.

The third challenge is getting the internal structure right. If the product managers, marketing managers, technical writers and localization managers are all separate then successful global marketing will not happen.

Today’s global marketing strategy must bring together the various divisions so that each group is thinking and acting globally. If a product is launching in a new market, then marketing, localization and sales all have to work together from the planning stage.

Engagement is critical for today's global marketer. If you aren't talking to your prospects in their language, you may be

missing your reaching your targets. Lack of engagement emphasizes marketing cost, not value.

What Challenges Global Marketers Today?c

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Why is content Marketing Key to Global Business Success?

“Brand stories are nothing new. What’s new is the challenge to

communicate the same narratives across an ever-evolving media

landscape.”

Bryan Rhoads, Digital Strategist at Intel & Content Marketer of the

Year 2014

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the idea of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by creating and curating relevant and valuable content that is then published on relevant media and online channels. It is a form of relationship management and relationships are a pathway to growth and revenue.

In a report by CMI, 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends for North America, 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did one year ago and 83% have a content marketing strategy (with 35% having a documented content marketing strategy). The same report highlighted that measurement is a key area where B2B marketers are struggling, with only 21% saying they are successful at tracking ROI.

As volumes of content are produced for digital distribution, the value of content is equated by the conversion from touch to consumer. PricewaterhouseCoopers reports, “The biggest challenge is monetizing the digital consumer. Although consumers are embracing digital content experiences, consumer revenue from digital sources – excluding Internet access – will reach only 17% in 2018 from 10% in 2013. More must be done to encourage not just consumers’ digital behaviors, but their digital spending.”

As noted, each digital touch point helps to scale the incremental opportunity for engagement and conversion. The key is to marry the content distribution channel with the right story - a story that connects and relates to your audience, in their preferred language.

Publishing valuable content to targeted audiences helps tell a brand’s story and this content can easily be distributed, using digital channels, to reach international audiences and generate leads. It is a tool for engagement. Both B2C and B2B markets are now actively using content to reach customers and prospects around the world.

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Global marketing

content types

Global Content Never Sleeps As long as marketers publish valuable fresh content to the right audience, content marketing is

an excellent way of engaging with different groups of customers and potential customers around the world. It garners relationships and enables new customer acquisition and retention.

Infographics  Memes  Videos    Blogs    Social Media    Product Reviews    Forums    

e-books    Case Studies      Banner Ads      SEO Podcasts        Webinars Quizzes    

CLIent Surveys          White Papers  UGC          Vlogs Wikis          Websites  

Twitter:    500  million  tweets  sent  per  day  and  288  million  ac5ve  users  

(Source:  Twi<er)  

Facebook:    1,415  million  ac5ve  users*  

LinkedIn: 288  million  ac5ve  users**

YouTube:    More  than  1  billion  users,  300  hours  of  video  uploaded  every  

minute.  YouTube  is  localized  in  75  countries  and  61  languages  

(Source:  YouTube)  

Instagram:    300  million  ac5ve  users,  30  billion  photos  shared  (on  average,  70  million  per  day)  70%  of  users  are  

outside  of  USA    (Source:  Instagram)  

eMail: 108.4  billion  emails  sent  and  

received  each  day  

Websites: One  billion  websites  live  at  the  

end  of  2014***  

*h<p://www.radica5.com/wp/wp-­‐content/uploads/2014/01/Email-­‐Sta5s5cs-­‐Report-­‐2014-­‐2018-­‐Execu5ve-­‐

Summary.pdf  

**h<p://www.sta5sta.com/sta5s5cs/272014/global-­‐social-­‐networks-­‐ranked-­‐by-­‐number-­‐of-­‐users/  

***h<p://www.internetlivestats.com/total-­‐number-­‐of-­‐websites/5

According to Forrester Research “Buyer Behaviour Helps B2B Marketers Guide the Buyers Journey,” prospects don’t contact sales until they are between 60 and 90 percent of the way through the buying process. That makes content the primary way for prospective customers to engage with your organization and a crucial precursor to closing a deal.

Most marketing now takes place in the digital world. Even product and post-sales content is often published digitally, such as technical product manuals, and quite often customer communities are being engaged to help shape this content.

Content marketing and technology are hand-in-glove. With larger scale content marketing campaigns, especially those executed in a number of different geographies, using marketing automation and technology tools can also enable content campaigns to be monitored, thus providing crucial analytics and ROI measurement to relevant stakeholders. Data can be collected on email campaigns, webinars, customer events, social media, website click-through rates and those users who have actively downloaded content, for example white papers and e-books.

Data collected can assess the success (and failure) of a global digital marketing campaign and the impact that content has on the different international audiences.

TOP TIPS

• Document your content strategy

• Have dedicated content marketing resources

• Create and curate targeted content – blog posts, infographs, e-books, case studies, videos

• Select the right media – blogs, social media, website

• Optimize content for everything – search engines, mobile

• Collate data and ROI from content campaigns

Use content marketing to reach new, global customers through a strategic and targeted approach

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rCreating Marketing Content for the World

The world economy never stays the same. There are many global opportunities for organizations to engage with customers all over the world. There are some brilliant channels opening up in some of the emerging markets.

To drive a successful global content marketing campaign, you must integrate localization into your overall marketing strategy. Prepare and plan early. Don’t get to the final product launch and suddenly wish you had considered localization from the start. It will be more complex and potentially cost you more when the content or multimedia formats are already baked. Making your language service provider (LSP) part of your global marketing team, can help you avoid pitfalls and save you money with careful advance preparation.

If you do business globally, then you will have ongoing localization and translation needs. Common Sense Advisory reports that it takes 24 languages to reach an audience online. You need to have ongoing access to expertise and resources to make sure marketing materials are effectively developed and delivered to your international audience.

What Do We Translate?

In any commercial setting, there will be constraints on what gets translated and what doesn’t get translated. This is mainly due to budget and resources. In an ideal world, everything would be translated and localized to exceptional quality, in all target locales. However, the marketing and localization team must work with internal groups and budgeting decision-makers to make the choice as to what to translate and what not to translate.

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If there is a region of little or no sales, money may not be allocated to localization. It can be tricky to ascertain the ROI of localization in advance of a launch. Most marketers realize you can’t run two separate marketing campaigns, one with localization and one without and then choose after the results. It could be detrimental to the bottom-line and expected ROI. You have to gather information and intelligence from all stakeholders and use the expertise of your LSP team to decide what content to be translated into which languages for the greatest measurable return.

return

on investment of

LOCALIZATION

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We often hear two scenarios that global marketers want to avoid:

I localized the marketing campaign for this territory, and we got no sales! Is this because of the marketing materials or bad advice or planning from the sales and strategy people?

I didn’t localize and now sales have taken off! Do we start localizing now or is it too late?

Avoiding these scenarios requires preparation, communication and good market intelligence.

What IS important is to make sure you have localization consistency across each campaign. If you are running an online banner ad campaign that links to a landing page, then make sure a Spanish banner leads to a Spanish landing page. If you set expectations at the beginning then carry them through. Just translating sections of a campaign could actually alienate groups of people and you will appear disjointed and unprofessional.

Website Localization

Deciding what to translate will depend on a number of different factors. The argument is always strong for investing precious localization dollars on localizing the main company website or relevant landing pages or website set up to support direct email campaigns. Why? According to independent research firm, Common Sense Advisory, 72% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language and only 27% of Internet users speak English as their first language.

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Your website is accessible from anywhere in the world and you want to create the best possible user experience. There is a strong chance that your website will be the first place any potential customer will visit to start the buying process and the first time they will “meet” the brand. Launching a multilingual version of your website is, relatively-speaking, an economical way of going global.

It can also be the central point for publishing other marketing materials and hosting blogs and forums that invite customers to interact with you and your brand.

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What NOT to Translate?

Quite often in the B2C global sectors, organizations consciously retain some of the original brand and intentionally convey “foreign-ness.” Selling American goods in Asia and keeping US English tag-lines, providing they are culturally acceptable, can be the good strategy. Some eastern cultures admire and desire western branded goods, which can translate to increases in sales and brand exposure.

With the Internet generation, content is often expected to be in English. Most global audiences have grown up watching YouTube video footage in English, so translating or adding subtitles to certain messaging and content can be less than desirable to some target audiences.

Some industries are also dominated by English. IT phrases and terminology that have been developed in English stay that way across most languages spoken in the key B2B markets and economies.

The key is to know your audience, how they want to read and digest different types of content and information. Engage with the end-user and content consumer. Know how they like to be engaged and what language preferences they have in the various geographies you are targeting. Third party market intelligence and customer sentiment surveys, along with working with your LSP will help you understand how to engage with your audience.

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Make localization part of

the overall marketing strategy. Knowing what to translate and what NOT to translate will help prioritize time

and budget.

KEY TIPS

• Prepare and plan to integrate localization into the overall marketing strategy • Know what to translate and what NOT to translate • Keep localization consistent across each campaign • Your company website is a good starting point for localization in order to create a

good user experience for all potential customers

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High Impact Marketing Content

High impact marketing content can be expensive to create and therefore, you want to get the highest return on your content investment. Putting certain content through a standard localization and translation process may not be enough to get the desired results and could do more harm than good to what should be your most protected asset – your global brand.

Transcreation, often used to localize high impact marketing content, usually requires a team made up of creative and localization experts that revisit the drawing board and recreate the content for a specific market. Creative copywriters with local knowledge and experience may be brought in to help adapt the brand. Ideally, certain brand elements and moods should be retained where possible. Tag lines, media advertising, websites, logos, all can be high impact brand content that requires a transcreation approach.

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Low Impact Content - Social Media and UGC

Another key challenge for the global marketer is the ever-changing face of content. There has been a recent explosion in social media and UGC. Many of today’s big digital organizations operate global business models that publish or facilitate the publishing of social media and UGC in real-time. This significant shift in the way customers engage and interact with a brand will affect any global marketing strategy.

Social media and UGC content are short packages of content, published rapidly online via a variety of platforms and devices, with little attention paid to grammar and linguistic accuracy. Pushing content out through social media channels, including tweets, posts and updates, is a good way to publish marketing content quickly and engage personally with your communities and customers. Global marketers need to ask themselves: Do we need to publish social media content in more than one language to engage all our customers? This often depends on your followers and knowing your sales regions and demographics.

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High Impact Marketing Content

High impact marketing content can be expensive to create and therefore, you want to get the highest return on your content investment. Putting certain content through a standard localization and translation process may not be enough to get the desired results and could do more harm than good to what should be your most protected asset – your global brand.

Transcreation, often used to localize high impact marketing content, usually requires a team made up of creative and localization experts that revisit the drawing board and recreate the content for a specific market. Creative copywriters with local knowledge and experience may be brought in to help adapt the brand. Ideally, certain brand elements and moods should be retained where possible. Taglines, media advertising, websites, logos, all can be high impact brand content that requires a transcreation approach.

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Low Impact Content - Social Media and UGC

Another key challenge for the global marketer is the ever-changing face of content. There has been a recent explosion in social media and UGC. Many of today’s big digital organizations operate global business models that publish or facilitate the publishing of social media and UGC in real-time. This significant shift in the way customers engage and interact with a brand will affect any global marketing strategy.

Social media and UGC content are short packages of content, published rapidly online via a variety of platforms and devices, with little attention paid to grammar and linguistic accuracy. Pushing content out through social media channels, including tweets, posts and updates, is a good way to publish marketing content quickly and engage personally with your communities and customers. Global marketers need to ask themselves: Do we need to publish social media content in more than one language to engage all our customers? This often depends on your followers and knowing your sales regions and demographics.

H I G H

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Translation Automation

Use of machine translation (MT) and post-edited MT (PEMT) can be effective with low impact content like social media and UGC. Communities don’t expect this type of content to have linguistic accuracy and high level journalistic quality. They simply need to know the main points and facts.

Putting social media posts and customer reviews through an MT engine and applying light post-editing can enable an organization to republish content in more than one language, without incurring the high costs of using a team of professional human translators.

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Knowing what is being said about your brand in social media is equally as important. This content isn’t always published in one language, so how do you quickly get feedback to HQ for potential issues that need to be addressed globally? Product development teams also need to understand product and customer reviews that are posted online. The immediacy of social media content and the potential pitfalls like bad publicity or a product that is not working properly are perfect for translation automation. It saves time and money, with potential immediate turnaround.

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ive Measuring Impact — Transcreation vs Translation

One key consideration in global marketing is to assess the IMPACT of your marketing content. High impact marketing content often needs higher budget due to more expertise and higher quality of brand visibility, while low impact content can be addressed by translation automation solutions.

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Not all content is created equal

Transcreation — Adapting High Impact Content

What if your marketing campaign just does not translate well in a targeted location or language? What if you have decided to enter a new market after the key messages were formed and without a native perspective? This is when translation requires transcreation.

Welocalize defines transcreation as being the process of adapting and recreating high impact brand content for a target market or language.

Standard localization services may not consider the creative and non-tangible elements of a brand. Emotions and moods cannot be translated or taught through glossaries or translation memories. Your advertising agency may have performed user tests on certain international markets and they just don’t like or understand the messaging and content. Transcreation can resolve these challenges.

Transcreation: [trans-kree-ey-shuh n] the process of adapting and recreating high impact brand content for a target market or language.

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Not all content is created equal. Global

marketers must identify the impact content and

decide which localization tools and methods are

appropriate.

KEY TIPS • Identify the impact that each element of your marketing campaign will

have on your brand

• High impact marketing content, like tag lines, may need full transcreation to reach global markets

• For low impact content; social media and UGC, consider MT and PEMT

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ixPreparing Your Source Marketing Content for Localization

For medium impact materials, including marketing datasheets, technical manuals, online banners and advertisements, web content, help desk and Q&A information, a key factor to successfully producing multilingual marketing content is to consider localization and translation when developing the source content.

top tips when creating content for a global audience:

Keep text to a minimum. As translation is often based on the number of words, keeping it short and concise will keep costs down.

Keep text clear and unambiguous. If a native speaker has trouble understanding the source content, pity the translator and subsequent target audience.

Allow room for text expansion. Most languages are longer than English by 15%. Russian can be 40% longer. Also avoid narrow columns, as this will prevent the translator or DTP engineer having to use hyphenation, which could result in more reviews and impact speed of production and cost.

Avoid embedding text in graphics and illustrations. Too much text in graphics will simply add on to time and cost, as it requires more preparation and manipulation by DTP experts. Use in-line graphics.

Keep graphics culturally generic. Take into consideration the range of cultures or religions in your target markets. Each culture, not just limited by language or geography, has different value systems, varying beliefs and interpretation of non-verbal communications.

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GLOBAL CONTENT

Avoid tabbed text and hard returns, especially in tables. Tabbed text can result in text being broken into separate translatable segments, which on their own could be meaningless. When translating technical documentation, this could be harmful if mistranslated and not caught in the final checks.

Use consistent terminology. Using consistent phrases and regular brand vocabulary will help the source and localized versions to be more effective. Build and develop terminology glossaries and translation memories for your translator teams.

Create source video with localization in mind. Consider whether to use voice-over or subtitling. Both have their advantages. Try to avoid using a script and actors for producing a video, as its localization can be expensive and time-consuming. The more actors you use, the more voice talents, editing, studio time and lip-syncing is required for localization.

Remember SEO and keywords. To integrate SEO translation into your global marketing campaign, review the chosen keywords in the source. It may not be appropriate to simply translate the chosen keywords. Different cultures may search for different words. Draw on SEO expertise that is familiar with the target market and industry.

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en Summary

This Welocalize e-book on global marketing and localization is a quick guide for global content marketers. It is designed to help you make important decisions when creating and distributing marketing materials for global audience. Here is a quick summary of key points:

• Adapting marketing content to international audiences will personalize campaigns, avoid offending cultures and get greater return on content.

• Increased competition and challenging economic factors means creating and sustaining growth is one of the biggest challenges facing global marketers today.

• Localize marketing materials consistently across campaigns and partner with a global language service provider that has market experience and expertise in your industry.

• Online marketing content can be seen all over the world and represents valuable brand equity.

• Complex internal structures and teams can result in a fragmented global marketing strategy that requires careful planning and preparation.

• Create marketing content for the world by considering localization at the early stages for your primary development of your primary content types and source materials.

• Engage your LSP as part of the global marketing team and involve key internal stakeholders in the localization process. Localization affects many divisions and often has a direct impact on your business goals and strategies.

• Do I translate, transcreate or automate? Consider the impact of your content and audience to decide where and when to invest in localization services.

• Think global. Act local.

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About Us Welocalize, Inc.,

founded in 1997, offers innovative translation and

localization solutions helping global brands to grow and reach audiences

around the world in more than 157+ languages. Our solutions include global

localization management, translation, supply chain management, people sourcing, language services and automation tools including MT,

testing and staffing solutions and enterprise translation management technologies.

http://www.welocalize.com

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