Below we’ve summarized the key takeaways from several presentations regarding strategies to localize marketing content. The presentations included localization professionals from different global companies such as ASICS Digital, HubSpot, FedEx, Tinder, and others.
Native content strategies
To maintain consistency, localization teams should work together with brand and marketing teams to identify key terms and create the term base right at the beginning of a new launch.
Native content, locally created content is most suitable for local markets. Teams need to decide whether it is better to localize content, or whether it makes sense for the local team to create it (directly or through agencies), and whether it make sense to create a hybrid approach. The strategy chosen for one market doesn’t necessarily make sense for another. Often one market might have native content and another market localized content.
Smaller companies tend to focus on the translation and localization side of things. Agile companies should do agile marketing too. Make sure you’re measuring impact of localizing content the same way it’s measured in the source content. Measure it not only by language, but by region too.
Data is the voice of international non-English users. There really isn’t a process in most companies that is tracking that, so localization teams should stay on top of that. The scalability of the work of localization teams really depends on empowering other people in the company to seek out global data and make decisions based on that. Product and marketing teams could collect data and make decisions that are from international standpoint.
Integrated marketing offers opportunities to break through to consumers in new markets.
Betsy Holden
Stakeholder buy-in
Localization teams support regional marketing teams in their regional campaigns. The regional campaigns might include digital and non-digital assets. Also, they support digital marketing teams who run paid search campaigns. But one of the main stakeholder is the website and the team making updates to the website.
If you work based on data. If you understand how your customers are interacting with the content then you will be able to create the content that your customers are looking for. You need to sell “What’s in it for them?”.
Centralization
One of the things that benefit from centralization is the website. When migrating the website, the localization tools work best when the process is centralized. Although different countries have a different service, but if you analyze your content you can find the sweet spot of content that could be centralized. This benefits the global business and then still gives room for local content that needs to be tailored the needs of that region.
Access to data
Some localization teams don’t have time and resources to look at the data of global usage. Looking at the usage data could help decide which pages to continue localizing on the website or help content pages.
Performance metrics
Make sure to monitor page views, how long users stay on a page, etc. For instance you can check how many people are downloading a given PDF to decide whether is worth localizing similar content in future.
Testing
Content placed online has to be approved my marketing teams, in-country reviewers. Those teams are always the bottleneck, because the people reviewing are checking translations on the side and have other jobs, so reviewing translations as an extra task could be stressful for them. Having in-country reviewers is adding value, but are they actually having enough impact on the work?
How to make sure that localization projects have a greater impact on performance?
Be as close as possible to the content creation part of the project, be a part of the KPIs. Be involved upstream in content creation. Normally localization teams are the last step before content gets rolled our globally and they don’t have the chance to influence the performance metrics, whereas if they are part of content creation and they know what the targets are and what you want to get out of the content, then they can influence the KPIs put towards this content.
Steps in a Successful Marketing Process
- Discovery.
- Strategy.
- Implementation.
- Measurement.
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