As you continue to localise your brand identity abroad, the more you’re likely to see an increase in the complexities in managing, maintaining and distributing localised assets across global marketing teams. These complexities are likely to be seen if you are using more than one language service or creating multiple marketing campaigns in a year across multiple markets.
Furthermore, you might even see increased pressure on other departments within your organisation to meet the needs of your growing international consumer base.
So how can you be more proactive in your approach?
Produce localisation-first content
If you’re creating marketing campaigns for your domestic market with the intention of localising it at a later date, take into consideration how your messaging is going to be received in other markets you operate in.
It might seem like a premature task, but thinking about your international customers while you’re road-mapping domestic marketing campaigns can mitigate frictions when you eventually localise your content.
Furthermore, if you plan to distribute content to your global marketing teams, having their interests in mind during the content creation process will improve efficiencies in the localisation pipeline when they adapt the content for their locale.
Identify assets in your team
If you employ a centralised marketing process within your organisation, employees who are native to the countries that you’re targeting will be highly prized assets to your team.
Not only will they be able to provide key information on how you create localisation-first content but they’ll be able to sense check localised content that you’ve received from your language service provider.
Identify and centralise the right department for globalisation
Creating a localisation-first organisation doesn’t just stop at your marketing team. If you’re an eCommerce retailer, for example, there are multiple touchpoints of your business where localisation will have a huge impact.
Your product development team should also be considering international customers as some products or services might be received well in different countries due to cultural or social differences.
Furthermore, your customer service teams will need to think about the expectations of your international customers. You’ll need a pragmatic and proactive approach to handling emails and calls that might come from customers outside your domestic market.
This might look like getting employees native to markets you’re targeting to reply to emails. Even hiring customer relations executives to exclusively manage the linguist demands of international customers can help strengthen your relationship with them.
Want more information about how some of the world’s top retail and travel brands adapt their business to meet the expectations of their international customers? We partnered with Econsultancy on a research report identifying localisation opportunities and challenges with a panel of eight leading brand marketers.
You can download the report for free below.
