3 Top Tips for a Stellar International Marketing Strategy

A successful international marketing strategy often involves translation and localization of your assets. While it’s easy to understand why translation is important, you’ll learn more about localization and why it matters in international marketing as you read this article.

Tip #1. Incorporate localization principles

Localization is about adapting your content until it’s suitable for your target audience. Localization is necessary to not only make your brand relevant but to also capture your target audience’s attention. You can do this by incorporating a variety of factors to form an impactful tailored edition of your marketing content;

Cultural references and preferences

This includes your target audience’s pop and traditional culture and including their aesthetic preferences. By incorporating aspects of their culture that they respond to positively, your marketing content will be able to resonate well with them.

If you have the means and resources, then you can also get in touch with local figures such as influencers or even celebrities. They are prime local assets that will almost definitely give a boost to your localization strategy and your brand’s relevance.  

Avoid prevailing social taboos

You should equally value your target audience’s likes and dislikes. In this context, avoid references that relate to their social, political, and even religious taboos. Indeed, you need to establish relevance with your target audience but not in that manner. In some countries, displaying certain images and messages are actually against the law, so it’s best to tread carefully and do extra research.

Linguistic nuances

With regions that speak the same language such as Latin America, you have to be mindful of linguistic variations such as dialects and other regional vernaculars.  If your target market is a Latin American country, your chosen Spanish translator should have local knowledge of the country’s dialects and other linguistic nuances. Ultimately, they can help you find the perfect angle to maximize your marketing content’s relevance.

Tip #2. Localize your online presence and online content

In today’s digital economy, having an online presence is often necessary for businesses of all sizes. But if you’re looking to attract international traffic, it’s best to translate and localize your website and online content.

Multilingual websites

A website is the prime digital asset for any brand. In this case, you’re looking to drive more international traffic to your site. Standard practices include creating blog posts and generating backlinks to increase your ranking in Google.

However, creating a website that’s accessible to a multilingual international audience means translating it and deploying it in multilingual versions. To do this, find the right translator who’ll work alongside your development team. 

You can check if your website translation and localization strategy works through numerous online tools such as the Google Marketing Platform. There, you’ll find all the data you need to optimize your website and whether or not your localized online presence is working exactly as you intended.

Translated closed captions and subtitles on your video content

Videos are now seen as an indicator of professionalism and legitimacy. With that in mind, you can attract a wider international audience if your videos have translated closed captions and subtitles. You can maximize your viewership if you can support the top global languages such as Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

However, you can’t create accurate captions through automated translation software. For example, YouTube’s closed captions software is still nowhere near reliable enough to translate various linguistic nuances. Videos are often filled with speech fillers, slang, and other nuanced vocabulary and phrasing, so it’s best to have it done by a person who can naturally understand and translate informal speech.

Tip #3. Promote multilingual content through social media

With social media, you can establish meaningful connections with billions of people around the world. But as you know, interacting with a multilingual audience entails some changes to your social media marketing strategy.

You’re essentially repurposing the same principles from your website translation and localization process as outlined earlier. A good international social media campaign involves translating and localizing your multilingual social media content.

You can do this through multiple multilingual social media pages instead. This way, each page is tailored to a specific foreign audience. Again, it’s not a good idea to use free online translation tools even when translating simple posts; the last thing you want is a flood of comments questioning the quality of your content.

Final takeaway: be open to change and adapt whenever necessary

30 years ago, the concept of social media marketing and video marketing didn’t even exist. Multilingual marketing did exist but it was as simple as translating from one language to another. Localization didn’t really take off until the early 90s when companies were looking for the best solutions to succeed in the global arena.

At the end of the day, the best international marketing strategy is one that can adapt to whatever is in store now and in the future. What might work now might prove to be inadequate or even out of date in the near future. It literally pays to keep yourself updated on the latest trends and developments in marketing, including new technologies that redefine how we connect with each other. That way, you can find fresh opportunities to capitalize on and to stay one step ahead of your competition.