There’s no such thing as one-size-fits all content marketing strategy, especially a business that wishes to appeal to a global audience beyond translation. 

Up Close and Personal with Global Audience 

$37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year from ads that fail to engage the target audience, according to a white paper by Marketing Evolution. 

One of the best ways to determine who your target audience is to start looking at who are already buying your products or services. Some data points you may want to consider are: 

• Age: It can be an age range you are targeting
• Location: In addition to finding out which geographic areas to target, this helps you figure out what the regional business priorities and important hours to schedule your digital ads and posts to ensure best visibility 
• Challenges: What are some pain points your customers are facing? And how are your products or services addressing those challenges? This will help create a tailored messaging that addresses their needs. 

It can help also help get your localisation right. Many content professionals think that localisation in a narrow way, focusing on translating content, rather than tailoring your content and making it relevant to a specific audience. 

When approaching a written piece on cybersecurity trends, you may notice the ASEAN authorities respond differently compared to mature markets like Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). Financial institutions in ASEAN are prime targets of security threats according to Palo Alto Report.  Meanwhile in ANZ,  the education sector is experiencing more than double the monthly attacks compared to other industries. 

Speak their language 

While English is widely spoken as a second language throughout the world, it is wise to use native-speaking translators who are ideally based within the target country when translating content or websites.

Native translators are professionals who use their mother tongue and have a deep understanding of the local language and culture. They can adapt texts written in a foreign language to a local audience. Hiring a native speaker not only increases the effectiveness of your campaigns but can also avoid cultural misunderstandings. 

Some examples of mistranslations: 

Amazon fell victim to a lewd translation of its Swedish retail site in 2020. To start with, Amazon chose the wrong flag: the Argentinian flag was put in place of the Swedish flag in the country picker. Swedish shoppers also found numerous spelling mistakes and “automatic translations”.  Another, a banking tin was described for use with “feces” and giant roosters was translated into words referring to male genitalia. 

Just as languages differs from one country to the next, users also search similar content in different ways. For instance, when searching for “Free Trade agreements” in the US, the “North America FTAs” rank the highest while in Singapore, “Singapore FTA” and “ ASEAN Hong Kong China FTA” are more popular. International SEO is just as important when you first build your local content. To appear at the top of multi-market search results, you should build topics around hot keyword matches specific to the market. 

Tune in the channels you need to reach 

From Facebook, to blogs to emails, there are many marketing channels to choose from. While some channels are great for lead generation, others are good for connecting with target audience. 

In 2022, B2B marketers’ social media spending budget went up 14.5%. A B2B brand could get away with just a website and a LinkedIn page just a few years ago. But nowadays buyers are getting their latest industry scoop, thought leadership pieces, reviews and even initiating with sales persons over social media.   

Whether it’s Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or TikTok, find at least one platform that your customers use the most. If you’re looking to engage with Gen Z? Get on TikTok, Instagram and/or Twitch. Over half of Gen-Z are on TikTok compared to 39% of Millennials. According to LinkedIn, APAC professionals are engaging with content on issues relevant to them.”European Union” emerged as one of the top 10  LinkedIn popular topics in Singapore, China and Hong Kong when Brexit negotiations were finalized.  

Nail your content performance with key metrics 

No matter how interesting or well-written your copy is, at the end of the day, it all boils down by the value it can generate for your business. 

According to a recent survey by Ascend2, 44% of marketers found that determining content marketing ROI is the biggest challenge for them. 

To get a head start, outline the goals you want to achieve content-wise whether it is call-to-action (CTA) clicks, conversion rates or open rates. You can come up with a performance estimation with the following: 

1. Define content type and clear measurable goals as report downloads, bootcamp registrations, post retention
2. Document how well your content measure against similar highly or poorly performing content 
3. Get your data elsewhere by looking at your rivals to gain an understanding of the format and length 

Pro Tip! Take note of industry benchmarks. This will help you understand how your numbers are doing against others in your industry.

Once you’ve defined your relevant KPIs, you’re going to choose a tool that works for your marketing purposes. Fair warning: there are plenty of tools out there so choose one that really works for your budget and needs. 

Creating a global content strategy can seem daunting, but it is not impossible. Rather than copy and paste existing materials, it is a good investment to develop a content strategy that appeals more to the local audience.

Afterall, nearly 90 percent of non-English speaking consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service from brands with multilingual support systems and knowledge bases. This is huge as it shows that localised content works wonders when you want to stay in the global game.