5 Tips to Maximize the Impact of Your Global Content Strategy

82% of marketers are actively investing in content as part of their marketing strategies.

Hubspot

At the same time, research has shown that translating branded content into local languages improves customer experiences and leads to a greater likelihood of purchase. This makes high-quality translations crucial for achieving your marketing KPIs (such as increasing brand awareness, building customer relationships, and driving sales) in foreign markets. 

Thanks to differences in language and culture, a common challenge faced by global marketing teams is unifying their content strategy across different markets while meeting the local audience’s needs.

Here are some suggestions for optimizing your global content marketing strategy from Milengo — a language service provider that helps over 400 companies deliver marketing messages to their customers globally.

Tip 1: Centralize Your Content Creation Workflow

As you expand your business overseas, you must have a centralized approach to your content strategy. This means that in addition to having local experts create content for different target markets, you should ensure that their efforts align with your overall business objectives and that there is consistency in content planning, publishing, and monitoring. This will help you avoid duplicating efforts and minimize miscommunications between local teams and company management. By regularly evaluating all your local content marketing efforts, you can identify areas for improvement and opportunities for economies of scale.

Automotive giant BMW shows a great example of localizing its marketing content across different countries, while still delivering the same brand message in each market. The company positions itself globally as the world’s leading provider of premium products for individual mobility. At the same time, it has adjusted the slogan Freude am Fahren (the joy of driving) to The Ultimate Driving Machine for the US market. Both slogans reflect the advantage of BMW over other automotive brands, but the second one is focused more strongly on prosperity and status – factors driving purchase decisions in the US, where American muscle cars are popular.

Tip 2: Pay Special Attention To Multimedia Content Localization

A study by HubSpot found that video was the primary form of content being created in 2022, followed by blogs and images. Compared to written text, localizing multimedia materials such as videos requires careful consideration of cultural references contained within visual and audio elements. Additionally, video content often includes subtitles or voiceovers that must be timed precisely to match the on-screen action. 

Given these challenges, it is worth searching for a reliable video localization vendor in advance before launching your international marketing campaign. Despite the availability of AI-based text-to-speech translation services, it is crucial to ensure that your video localization process includes a quality check by local linguists who can review translated videos and confirm that they are clear and engaging for each foreign market.

Tip 3: Centralize Your Terminology

Keeping translations of core company terminology in one location is crucial to ensure consistency in your company’s tone of voice and brand messaging. It also avoids individual glossaries being maintained in each region. By centralizing company terminology, you can ensure that all marketing materials, communications, and documents are accurate, regardless of the region. 

This approach also minimizes the review efforts for in-country teams and increases overall translation speed. Furthermore, by keeping company terminology unified, businesses can improve brand recognition and customer trust, as customers are more likely to trust a brand that maintains consistent messaging across all channels. 

A study by the International Association for Technical Communication, Tekom concluded that there are clear advantages to managing terminology in your company. Consistently applying terminology on your website will positively affect visitor experience and retention. Maintaining consistency between this terminology and your target keywords will also benefit your business regarding search relevance for potential customers. Investing in terminology and effectively implementing it is a helpful step towards optimizing your site and reinforcing your brand reputation in global markets.

Successful Terminology Management in Companies

The Google style guide for developer documentation shows a great example of developing terminology with localization in mind. The guide sets detailed requirements for using companies’ product names and terms consistently, to make further translation and localization easier.

These recommendations include:

Be consistent: If you use a particular term for a particular concept in one place, then use that exact same term elsewhere, including the same capitalization. If you use different names for the same thing, translators might think you’re referring to different concepts, and thus might use different translations. Inconsistency in terminology and phrasing can greatly increase translation costs, particularly when translation memory and machine translations are used as first steps in translation.

• Don’t use the same word to mean different things. In particular, avoid using the same word as both a noun and a verb in close proximity. For examples of the multiple-meanings issue, see the word list entries for once and since.
• Use standardized phrases for frequently used sentences, introductory phrases, and other common tasks. For examples, see introducing links, introducing output, and introducing code samples.
• Use standard English word order. Sentences follow the subject + verb + object order.
• Try to keep the main subject and verb as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible.

Google

Tip 4: Reuse Approved Translations

One of the key benefits of modern translation technology is the ability to reuse approved translations regardless of file format, which ensures that businesses never pay for translating the same content twice. This approach can significantly reduce the scope of translation, improve turnaround times, and reduce translation costs. 

Additionally, some language service providers, like Milengo, can support update projects by only translating new and updated content, allowing businesses to save time and resources on translation projects. By using only one translation vendor, organizations can maintain consistent messaging and branding across all channels, improving brand recognition and customer trust.  

Tip 5: Consult Regional Management

It is essential for marketing experts in global companies to integrate feedback from regional colleagues since they would know the product and market best. By gathering local managers’ feedback, you can better understand each market’s unique needs and preferences and adjust regional marketing strategies accordingly. This approach enables regional managers to ensure that marketing efforts are fruitful and relevant to local consumers.

In conclusion, creating localized content across multiple markets can be challenging for marketing teams. To maximize the impact of a global content strategy, companies should centralize their content creation workflow, terminology, and translators’ management, or outsource the marketing localization process completely to an experienced language service provider. By implementing these tactics, businesses can improve brand recognition, customer trust, and ultimately drive sales in new markets.