Localisation has become a key factor when businesses implement global marketing strategies and is a process that involves a wide range of disciplines and affects almost every customer touchpoint in your target market.
If you want to remain competitive in the long term, you also need to look within your business to ensure that it has a solid foundation to manage long-term brand localisation strategies. A localised company culture can make these strategies a success.
Global heart, global mind
Marketing and product development teams in your domestic market should have a vested interest in the global outlook of the business. As a result, marketing campaigns, brand messaging, customer service and the way you develop products should always take into consideration how they can be adapted to meet the cultural and linguistic expectations of customers in markets you operate in or plan to target in the future.
Asset management
Whether you partner with a language service provider or rely on local marketing teams to adapt your content, how you manage your marketing assets will greatly impact your production workflow. This includes setting up brand and social media guidelines that are readily available for local marketing teams to ensure the integrity of your brand voice when they launch campaigns in their locale.
Furthermore, editorial, campaign, images and brand guidelines should be kept in a centralised location that can be easily accessed by, and distributed to, local teams.
This also ensures that global marketing teams can easily monitor global campaigns and optimise effectively.
In-house localisation
If you’re a large or mature organisation, investing in an in-house localisation team can provide your business with dedicated resources to stay ahead in the global marketplace.
A localisation manager would not only oversee the production of localised content, but they should also be working with marketing and product development teams in a strategic way to prepare entry into new markets by understanding the behaviour and motives of the target audience and devising products and messaging accordingly.
With an in-house localisation team, you’ll be better prepared when making strategic decisions about which locale and languages to target, creating a solid framework for translation projects and as well as building your own brand-focused glossaries.
Want more information about how some of the world’s top retail and travel brands adapt to a localised company culture? 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.