Guest Post By Elisa Labbott
Every company, which operates globally, should adapt its marketing strategy to the local markets through localization. It’s the only way to engage the target audience effectively and boost regional sales. Marketing localization is an approach to reach people from other cultural backgrounds in their native language while keeping the brand tone of voice consistent.
If you want to learn more about the localization process, let’s consider a few great examples. They will inspire you to design a brand new marketing strategy, which will take your business to the next level.
Website localization
Global competition is getting fierce, and it’s getting harder to enter new markets. Today, only those companies, which properly localize their multi-language websites, can achieve international success.
There are a few essential elements, which every international website should have:
- Country and language options
- Local currency and payments options
- International shipping
- Local customer service
- Localized SEO
Let’s take a closer look at two brands, which perfectly localized their websites.
Swarovski
Swarovski company designed an outstanding multi-language website, which runs smoothly and generates high sales. This website has many advantages in comparison with not-localized sites developed by competitive brands.
Firstly, Swarovski’s website allows users to enjoy browsing through pages in their native languages. Secondly, it displays prices are in local currencies. These two factors strongly influence a customer’s buying decision process.
In addition, Swarovski’s SEO experts optimized product names and descriptions. They combined two names (one in English and another one in a foreign language) in a long name. This approach helped to improve local SEO ranking and increase the click-through rate.
Renault
Renault’s website contains two types of content: translated articles from a core website, and localized news and announcements. This approach to content marketing helps the company to achieve two important goals: to engage the target audience and to maintain brand consistency.
Moreover, Renault provides multi-channel customer support on a local level. The website encourages users to contact an agent, who speaks their native language. Users can start a live chat, make a call, or ask their questions via social media.
The rule of success in international business is simple: the more local support the company provides, the higher regional sales it gets. So make sure that you design your website in accordance with this rule.
Content localization on social media
Most international companies wrongly believe that marketing localization is all about designing a multi-language website. However, it’s much more than that. To take your brand closer to the buyers, you should also localize your social media content.
If your in-house content creator doesn’t speak foreign languages and can’t localize posts for Instagram and Facebook, don’t worry. You may visit PickWriters, a translation review website, and choose reliable localization service.
But first, let’s check three illustrative examples of how to localize social media content.
Pandora
Pandora has recently launched a new marketing campaign with a famous singer Shakira. This campaign calls women from all over the world to follow Shakira’s example and to become better versions of themselves.
At first sight, this brand message seems to be simple and understandable for everyone. But Pandora decided to localize it in order to make it more appealing to the local shoppers.
Here you can see two similar Instagram posts. The first one is taken from the international profile, the second – from the Colombian profile.
The message of the international post is the following: “From a mother and philanthropist to a global artist, get inspired by @shakira and embrace every side of you.” A caption, which targets Colombian customers, sounds differently: “Get inspired with new Shakira’s look and enjoy new adventure this year.”
As you can see, Pandora decided not to use word-to-word translation to ensure that Spanish-speaking buyers will understand a caption. The point is that words like “philanthropist” and may be unfamiliar for Colombian women. So, marketers rewrote the caption using such simple and understandable words as “adventure” and “enjoy”.
Under Armour
Under Armour offers Facebook followers to utilize switch region feature to see new posts in their native language.
For instance, Australian customers can browse Under Armour’s feed in English. Posts on this page are dedicated mostly to gym workouts and fitness.
Screenshot source: Customers from Argentina can browse Under Armour’s profile in Spanish. Here they can find tons of content related to soccer.
The point is that soccer is much more popular than fitness among Argentinean. And for this very reason, Under Armour is forced to produce special content, which suits the preferences of the local target audience. If the company simply translated Australian posts from English to Spanish, it would not work.
Starbucks
If you want to see one more excellent example of content localization, take a look at Starbucks Instagram accounts. This famous coffee company proves that when you clearly understand who your local customers are what they actually want, you can design an outstanding marketing strategy.
It’s obvious that coffee lovers from different countries prefer different drinks, speak different languages, use different hashtags, and have different cultural backgrounds. So it’s just impossible to create content, which will work effectively across all regions.
For this reason, Starbucks created a separate Instagram profile for every country, in which it operates. If you compare Japanese and Canadian accounts, you will see that they look absolutely different.
A color palette of Japanese account is pink-and-white, of Canadian – brown-and-grey. Photos from Japanese profile capture small details, while most Canadian photos depict only one element – a cup.
All these differences are not random. In fact, they accurately reflect the dissimilarity between Asian and North American customers in terms of their attitudes, values, shopping behavior, and lifestyles.
If you take a look at two following posts, you will see how Starbucks localize hashtags. Depending on the preferences of the target audience, the coffee company uses local-language or English-language hashtags. In Japan, all hashtags are in Japanese, while in France, hashtags are in English, not in French.
In Conclusion
In today’s business world, content marketing localization is not an option, but an absolute necessity. If you want to build the global presences for your brand, you should analyze the preferences of local buyers in details. It will help you to adjust your strategy in the right way and achieve your business goals in the nearest future.
