Global marketing is the generalised launching of messages intended for everyone around the world, but localised marketing centres on a more specific target audience.
What’s being sold might be the same, yet strategies will differ depending on the language, country and cultural norms of each target market, with a view to creating a message that feels more familiar.
Tips for successful localised marketing
1. Market Research
The first thing to be done is an analysis of the target market for your advertising campaign. Products or services that do particularly well in one country might not be as sought after in another. Therefore, it is vital that you are aware of the customs, values, beliefs and language of the people who live there.
Without thorough knowledge of the society of any given country, it is tricky to get it just right, so you ought to enlist the support of a native speaker. For example, had KFC done more research and worked alongside linguists before launching its campaign in China, it would have avoided its mistranslation of “It’s finger-lickin’ good” as “Eat your fingers”.
2. Alliances with Strategic Partners
Communication is key, but there are many other elements that need streamlining when getting a company ready for internationalisation. Partners such as Go Global Ecommerce, a Merchant of Record, help brands to increase global sales by taking care of payments, returns, legal compliance, tax, reconciliation, currency and language conversion, fraud, risk and much more.
It is also important that online campaigns are segmented according to the market of each country, given that buyer persona can change from culture to culture. With this in mind, digital agencies such as JEVNET have exclusive access to demographic, economic and industry data, on top of digital opportunities in each geographic.
3. Tracking and Measurement
In every campaign, performance must be monitored. Besides sales data, it is crucial that businesses know the opinions of local consumers, which can be collected via surveys, focus groups or from post-purchase online reviews.
4. The Mobile-First era
Lastly, across the globe we live in an increasingly mobile-first society, and smartphone enquiries vastly outweigh desktop enquiries. As a result, it is integral that your business website works optimally for mobile devices, both to achieve a positive user experience and to guarantee that search engines such as Google position it amongst top results.
