How to Approach Your Brand Market Localization for International Customers?
Global brands integrate localization into their market practices to make the most of their international marketing campaigns. It not just gives your brand a competitive edge but also helps you get positive customer responses in less time. Many big brands like Coca-Cola, strongly believe in localizing their marketing campaigns to make their brand resonate with their audience.
In the process of understanding how to approach your brand market localization for international customers, it’s essential to recognize the far-reaching benefits of international expansion for your business.
You must approach your marketing strategy the right way to seamlessly go about the whole marketing localization process. For this, you must focus on adopting the best practices, methods and tools for executing your marketing plan. This article talks about the best market localization practices you can integrate into your brand expansion strategy to drive better results.
Market Localization Best Practices
Work With Local Agencies and Partners
To know your target markets, you must build your network of local experts. It will be challenging for you to navigate through the market when you have a very brief understanding of the culture and other demographics. Partnering with local agencies and service providers will be a good initiative because it will let you effectively operate in a foreign market. You can benefit from the experience and market knowledge of your partners and build marketing strategies that will go with your best interests.
Prioritize Your Content
Not all content is equal in its significance and the results that it drives for your brand. You must prioritize your content wisely, so your teams would know where they are meant to put the maximum effort. It will also help you to understand which content needs to be localized and translated into other languages. For marketing content prioritization, you can build an editorial calendar considering the significance and significance of each content task. A professional localization management platform may provide you with all the features that you may need to manage your content translations, including an editorial calendar.
Leverage Machine Translations
Your teams may get overwhelmed with the excessive translation workload as you enter a new marketplace. To get away with a large number of content translations, you can use professional machine translation software. Machine translations do have their own drawbacks but you must use this technology wisely to save your time and cost. Machine translation post-editing will be a more effective way of integrating machine tools into your overall translation management strategy.
Check Out: 7 Factors to Consider Before Expanding Internationally
It also depends on which type of content you are working on. For instance, machine translation works really well with e-commerce translation. However, you must not use automated translations for marketing copies and highly sensitive medical data.
Use A Localization Management Platform
If you really want to reach your maximum potential in a foreign market, you must invest in the latest technology that brings automation to your localization processes. A professional localization management platform will streamline your marketing operations and allow you to optimize your workflow. Such tools also contain multiple features and integration options that increase your project execution speed and increase your team’s work efficiency. Choosing the right localization platform with suitable features is critical to your seamless marketing localization in a foreign region.
3 Key Marketing Localization Mistakes to Avoid
Lack of Market Research
One of the main reasons why your marketing efforts don’t work out in a foreign market is the lack of sufficient research. If you haven’t done your research about market demographics and never identified the market gaps, it will definitely lead to the superficiality of marketing strategies that will never get you the results that you are looking for. So, before tapping into any market, you must first get some understanding of its culture and local customer preferences. Only through the original market data, you will be able to create culturally relevant and effective marketing campaigns. In the process of understanding how to approach your brand market localization for international customers, it’s essential to recognize the far-reaching benefits of international expansion for your business.
Out-of-Context Translations
Most companies, while dealing with the technical aspects of brand expansion and marketing, completely overlook the translation bit. Translations have a huge role in building a strong brand identity in a foreign market. Mistakes in your translated content and out-of-context translation make your brand look shady and unreliable to the customers. Sometimes when going for direct translations of marketing campaigns it may totally change its feel and intent in the target language. So, if you want your marketing to not misguide the customers about content, you must hire experienced native translators to effectively translate or recraft your brand message for other languages.
Poor Resource & Process Management
It is not always the strategic issue, sometimes things can also go wrong when you haven’t paid enough attention to the operations management. Streamlining your translation operations and not effectively managing your resources can lead to costly revisions. When it comes to effective resource management and optimized marketing processes, you need to rethink your methods and invest in modern TMS technology. It’ll eliminate inefficiencies, improve the quality of work and enhance performance by reducing the excessive workloads from your translation teams.