Are you tasked with developing a global marketing strategy? Whether you lead a marketing department for a growing startup or an established enterprise, elevating your brand to the global stage can unlock new opportunities. However, since global audiences have distinct cultures, they may engage with brands differently than the followers and subscribers in your home country. Marketers should approach this task with care and curiosity, backed by thorough market research.
Your global marketing strategy ought to consider how local audiences will perceive your value proposition, how your brand may need to adapt, and whether you need to hone your delivery to spark their interest. The key to all of this? Understanding local audiences before investing in content, advertising, and campaign assets protects your team’s bandwidth and budget.
If you can show up authentically when engaging with global audiences across every channel, you can count on stronger results. Here, we will discuss how to maximize audience engagement and growth, while also remaining efficient and supporting revenue.
Conduct Market Research for Global Audiences
To prime your global brand launch for success, it is important to acknowledge that there are many unknowns. What works in your home market may not be as effective in a different country. Great brands are built on awareness of and engagement with cultural preferences, trends, and tendencies, which is why you need to start with market research.
Too often, the market research phase is overlooked in favor of taking immediate action, which means teams end up relying on outdated information to build their strategy or, worse, only gain valuable cultural insights after it’s too late to use them. What’s at risk? Content that is out of touch with your audience could flop, wasting your investment, or worse, might tread on sensitive topics that inadvertently cause offense.
Which products, trends, stories, and aesthetics actually inspire your target customers? Market research will help you answer this question. Demographic data, such as age, gender identity, income, and education, and psychographic data, such as values and behaviors, paint a clear picture of who you’re trying to reach. You need to understand the emotions, events, and motivations that drive them. This information helps determine whether your existing campaign concepts already align with local preferences or whether strategic tweaks to content, framing, or messaging will enhance your pitch. This decision represents a key turning point—where intent translates to impact.
Sourcing these insights, especially from a distance, is not always straightforward. There are many avenues to approach this effort. Hiring strategic globalization consultants, building partnerships with local market researchers, and engaging local influencers can provide a strong foundation for tapping into the local scene. Copy testing and design testing should also be on the agenda. Of course, you should also plan to consume plenty of content from the local competition and adjacent industries.
Market research doesn’t just enhance your campaign success. It should also empower your team with confidence, because entering a new market with a clear, data-backed vision will increase the likelihood of executing your plan successfully.
Create a Multilingual Website
Once you have a strong working understanding of who you aim to reach, your next step is creating a home base for your global audience. A multilingual website is essential for a successful global launch. Creating one, however, involves much more than simply translating your existing website content into new languages.
Keywords, region-specific search engine trends, and localization of content must all be evaluated to identify the needs and wants of your new target market. Sometimes, a multilingual website may be the best approach. Yet, in geographically distant language regions, it may be beneficial to create a dedicated website, utilizing fresh market research and local customer-focused content.
Localize Your Content
Copywriting, an integral part of every marketing strategy, is at the heart of how you communicate with customers. As your brand’s voice, copy is vital to every successful global launch.
Today’s audiences expect their favorite brands to put out engaging stories, contribute to culture, share valuable information, and even provide entertainment. From website and social content to email campaigns and blogs, your brand’s content should always provide audiences with a new reason to trust your vision and believe in your purpose.
For global audiences, translation is not always enough; you also need to ensure you are speaking the same language. Localization is mission-critical to global content because it takes translation a step further, bringing contemporary, local value to stories and visuals. It requires the professional expertise of localization experts, who possess the market-savvy knowledge of native speakers and genuine, in-country cultural experience.
Without localization support, your content may not be useful. New audiences may perceive you as inauthentic, rather than feeling like they are part of a cultural experience. In short, failing to localize content can stand in the way of cultivating strong relationships with new customers.
Craft a Global Social Media Strategy
Social media is a vast, almost boundaryless platform for global brand building, audience development, and growth, but with these opportunities come some significant challenges. To cultivate a strong voice on social media in new regions, you need to ensure you’re equipped with cultural know-how, a strong brand identity, and agility—all of which are hallmarks of the best global brands on social.
Consider all the factors that affect how audiences interact with your social presence, from the types of social content that resonate to the voice, tone, and messages that align culturally. Algorithms continue to prioritize video, and video localization requires more than just copy rewrites. You will need models or actors who reflect the region, a graphics and editing style with local appeal, and many other touches to ensure content speaks your new audience’s visual and verbal languages.
Regardless of the platform, how you communicate with your new customer base is just as important. Localized social media content is crucial for effectively connecting with your audience. Hiring local influencers to promote your social presence lends credibility as your brand team experiments with ways to connect authentically with local audiences.
Enhancing Email Targeting and Timing for Global Subscribers
At home or abroad, email marketing campaigns rely on a delicate formula. It takes time to develop engaging, informative content for your consumer base that drives positive open, read, and engagement rates.
Consider segmenting your audiences and tailoring email content to specific groups of recipients that share key characteristics. For some brands, this approach has been key in enhancing performance outcomes and sustaining audience interest.
Aside from effective targeting, timing is everything. By getting to know your global audience segments, you can identify peak times when they are most likely to read your emails and time campaigns to coincide with these windows of opportunity. The most important thing to remember is how your target demographic differs between different regions, and ensure you are marketing to each group directly.
Win Global Customers through Marketing Localization
As you prepare your business to expand overseas, marketing localization provides tailored messaging to new audiences, enhancing the efficacy of your efforts and increasing your growth opportunities. At PGLS, our experienced team of strategic globalization and localization experts can help your business launch successfully in new markets, servicing over 200 languages and almost any region of the world. Get in touch to learn more.