How to create a localization content marketing strategy to achieve international growth

Looking to expand and find a way to increase your presence in the global market?

Then it's important to learn how to create unique content for international markets!

Spoiler alert – Your friendly Globalization/Localization team and their Language Providers might be your best ally in this journey you are considering!

If you want to grow your business sooner or later you will start considering how to reach other countries. It’s just a question of time …

If that’s the case, then you’ll need to understand the fundamentals of content localization and how it can help and even reinforce your overall marketing strategy.

And there’s something that you need to understand from Day 1

You cannot get anywhere with a content strategy to grow in other markets if you don’t get the right help.

And the right help is your G/Localization team and/ or specialized LSP.

They are language specialists; they know the target markets and they will help you to engage locally with your potential local users. 

Your Localization team or LSPs know how to create a tailored and personalized experience for each of your target audiences.

Make sure you reach to them and involve them in your marketing content plans

When you involve Localization activities as part of your expansion plans from Day 1, these are the results you might expect to achieve

• strong brand recognition for the different local markets

• establish and maintain meaningful relationships with your global audience in your international markets - content that resonate with them!

• avoid cultural pitfalls           

Content localization is essentially the process of adapting content that is appropriate to your target audience.

To create and market your content that is both relevant and appealing to an audience of a specific culture there are different aspects and steps you need to consider

Click HERE to download the infographic

Step 1 Understand your audience

 There is no one-size-fits-all in content marketing, if we want to engage with a global audience we need to take a customized approach, especially when a business wishes to appeal to a diverse global audience. Finding the right balance between standardizing or localizing your marketing content is something many companies struggle with. 

It might be tempting to save efforts and take a similar approach for all content, but this will likely lead to failure. For this reason, understanding your audience is something you need to include in your content matrix and, in your content strategy! And remember you can’t expand without understanding the market you’re about to enter!

 How to know your audience

According to Entrepreneur, there are 4 major aspects to consider, when doing market research:

• Determine the key points of your research.

  • What do you need to know about potential markets?

  • Do you know the target markets well enough, or there are some special areas to consider?

    Explore as much information as possible and make sure that all your questions are answered;

• Prioritize your findings

  • As soon as you get all the answers, prioritize them.

  • The highest items on your list should form the central points of your marketing campaign. 

• Consider surveying the target audience.

  • An important step in researching potential markets is getting to know your target audience.

  • Survey them and ask them what their market lacks and how your product could be useful to them. 

• Don’t skip web analytics and social media data.

  • Social channels provide marketers with valuable social data that can be used when researching potential markets.

 Step 2 Type of content

 Your content matrix should include the different types of content you are dealing with. 

Not all the content has the same visibility, or importance, or goals. 

Taking the time to understand the different types of content your marketing expansion is dealing with will bring clarity to the process

 There is different types of content you might be dealing with:

• Marketing content

• Sales content

• Legal content

• Product content

• Customer support

• Technical content etc…

 You can prioritize content localization by content type and that can help to iterate your marketing expansion strategy depending on the results you aim 

Prioritization also takes into consideration that not all content types require the same process so this is an excellent moment to discuss with your Localization partner how different types of content will be adapted globally. 

 Step 3 Content distribution channels

 Great content is a waste of time and money if your audience doesn’t know it exists.

Thinking about channels is an integral part of your content strategy matrix.

Content distribution channels are the channels through which you share and promote the content you create

These channels can be categorized into three groups: Owned, Earned, and Paid.

• Owned Content Distribution: This includes distributing content to web properties that belong to you, like your blog, email newsletter, social media, or microsite.

• Earned Content Distribution: This is when third-parties distribute your content or content about you through press coverage, guest article contributions, retweets or shares, or product reviews.

• Paid Content Distribution: This is when you explicitly pay for content distribution. Payment could take many forms but often works on a cost-per-click (CPC) model where the owner of the content pays a certain amount every time someone clicks through to view the content.

Photocredit: Outbrain

 Step 4 KPI

 To make sure that your content marketing is having the impact that you want it to have, you must have the right KPIs to measure your progress.

Tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, and proprietary systems within companies have made digital marketing analysis more simple and accessible even for those that are not great with numbers (I'm one of those!)

There are three main KPIs that you should consider to track (Reach, Engagement, Sentiment)

Reach

1. Unique Visits

• UVs are the most standard measure of how many individuals have viewed your content within a given time frame (typically a 30-day window).

• This KPI provides a good baseline for which to compare different forms of content and trends over time

2. Geography

• Understanding where your content is being read is important to understand where to allocate more budget and resources based on where your audience is.

• If you see that one region is performing better than others... or if you see you are having visits from markets you are not currently localizing, maybe you could revisit your language strategy expansion based on the results you get from your KPIs

Engagement

3. Bounce rates/time spent

• It’s important to keep track of the time our users are reading our content or…. when we lose them.

Sentiment

4. Analyse Comments

• This is extremely useful and In the age of social media, almost everything you make available online becomes subject to two-way conversations.

• Spending time analyzing Setiment KPIs and the users' feedback is a good KPI to get a better understanding of the emotions we are triggering with our content.

There are many ways to measure your success and if you want to go deeper. Here are 14 key performance indicators (KPI’s) to measure your content marketing efforts

Final thoughts 

The right international content marketing strategy can do wonders for a business looking to expand globally.

If your company is aiming to do just that, remember that is a great idea to discuss your plans with your Localization team and/or LSP. They are SMEs in cultural and language topics so why not joining efforts to fully benefit from their international expertise?

Have a wonderful week!
@yolocalizo