Global content marketing extends and adapts your home-market content strategy for all your target markets.
To effectively connect with buyers in a new market, you need to speak to audiences in their own language, with respect to their own culture and preferences, with reference to local happenings, and about the issues relevant to them. At the same time, you have to maintain a common and consistent brand message and meaning that’s instantly recognizable wherever in the world you are.
Culturally-centered messaging + recognizable brand = brand success in a new market. Easy enough to articulate and understand, but hard to execute.
For example, if your content is full of stories and data specific to your home market, you might be alienating local audiences and undermining your ability to build relationships there. Also, the colors and images in your blog post might offend another market.
What elements of content are different in other markets?
Did you know:
- Using a dog in a marketing campaign would be offensive to Muslims – they think dogs are unclean and impure.
- Hand signals don’t mean the same thing in all cultures. The peace sign in the US is an insult in Australia.
- Colors don’t mean the same thing in all cultures. Red can be problematic: in the East it means happiness, good fortune and prosperity; in the middle east it means danger, caution and even evil.
- Japanese websites often have flashy banners, lots of text, multiple columns, many small images and an overall cluttered, crowded look — vastly different from the clean aesthetic North Americans are used to.
So how do you take your brand to new markets in ways that will reach them specifically yet preserve your brand at the same time? You need a global content marketing strategy so you can grow your audience base, improve search traffic, increase conversions, and boost your growth in your new market.
The Elements of a Global Content Marketing Strategy
Strategic planning with your team is required before you can publish even one word.
But what does a global content marketing strategy look like? Your marketing strategy for each locale should include:
- Goals for your content – awareness? Website traffic? Increased leads?
- Your voice and tone – is it the same or different? Some locales prefer a more formal manner of address than is typical for North America.
- Who your buyer is, their cultural realities and preferences and what motivates them. (Check out my buyer persona template).
- What topics you should create content about – what’s of concern in that market?
- The types (formats) of content you’ll create – what works in that culture?
- How you’ll distribute and promote the content – where does the customer search for and get their information?
- How you’ll manage content creation and publication – the process for getting it all done
- Your SEO strategy and how you’ll optimize for search engines – what local users search for is different than in your home market
- What you’ll measure to understand content performance
You don’t need to have all this understood and documented before you create local content—when it comes to content marketing, getting started is more important than doing it perfectly. But you do need to be thinking about content marketing holistically and working on the grand plan.
If you need help creating a global content marketing strategy and (even harder) applying those insights in your content development process, reach out to a global content marketing agency.
