How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand

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Going global is one of the best moves a company can make. Accessing different markets offers you the opportunity to spread your business and increase your chances of long-term success.

How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand Nowadays, with the help of technology, it becomes easier to take your business global. But what troubles many entrepreneurs is how to approach their marketing strategy in that case. One of the crucial aspects of marketing is content marketing.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your business. It is your chance to win over the audience without physical contact. Some assume that an international audience simply requires translating existing content into new languages. Such an assumption can be harmful to your business.

The international audience deserves just as much dedication as you show to your local audience. For that reason, here are some tips that will guide you through the process of creating an international content marketing strategy.

If You Already Have Localized Content…

If you’ve already implemented localization practices, there is one step you need to complete above all else: determine how effective your current content is. Why? If you add bricks to a crooked foundation, the establishment will collapse. That is exactly what will happen if you pile new content on top of poor-quality material.

You are probably already aware of how successful your current localized content is. Do you have many subscribers? Does your blog attract many new leads? How many social media followers do you have? Which content is localized and which isn’t? These are some of the questions that you need to answer in order to get the information you need.

Who Is Your Global Audience?

How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand It is safe to say that every marketer and business owner understands how important defining the target audience is. Knowing your audience is the basis of every good content marketing strategy. When you know for whom you are creating content, you can deliver material that matches their preferences.

The same applies to your international content marketing strategy. You need to know your target audiences. Only 20% of all Internet users are native-English speakers. Not to mention that 72.4% of consumers say that they would rather purchase a product with information available in their own language. This shows that choosing the right audience and the appropriate language matters.

Those who plan to expand across borders should consider which countries show interest in your niche. Check out your competitors—especially the highly successful brands—to see for which countries they have localized their content.

How Will You Present the Localized Content?

There are two options: maintain a global gateway for your current website or create different websites for different countries. The choice is yours. If you choose to stick with your existing website, you need an option that will lead users to their preferred gateway. Adding a global icon is possibly the best choice since it is noticeable but does not negatively affect your design.

For example:

How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand Adding a small icon next to the word “language” helps users who visit the website recognize where they can choose their preferred language. A flag icon also works well.

Tailor the user experience on different gateways based on A/B testing and cultural relevance studies.

The other option is to create different URLs for each country. This gives you a blank slate for crafting a completely new experience.

Take P&G as an example—their websites for the UK and USA markets are completely customized for each targeted country.

Localize, Don’t Translate!

There is a huge difference between the two. Translation simply converts content from one language to another. Localization, on the other hand, adjusts the content to the target audience’s culture. Having your content merely translated may seem like the easiest solution, but it can harm your business. You could spend a lot of money on translation that your target audience won’t appreciate.

Not every country shares the same puns, jokes, customs, or holidays. Adapt to your target audiences of different nationalities by localizing the content. If you plan to hire someone for the process, make sure they offer a specific option for localization. For example, The Word Point provides both translation and localization services.

Emphasizing that you need localization, not just translation, will eliminate any confusion.

Work with Native Speakers

Natives can be very useful for creating a highly effective marketing strategy for each country. Just think about it—who is more qualified to talk about their people’s preferences than a native?

How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand They can give you insight into what works best for that target audience, how to approach content promotion, and many helpful tips on content strategy.

Working with marketers from the targeted countries is the smartest choice. Marketers’ job is to know what works best for the audience in their countries, so they can tell you which aspects of the content you need to be careful about.

If you’ve attended or plan to attend international seminars for your industry, get networking and build relationships that can benefit this process. Another solution is to hire a freelancer who is a bilingual marketer in that country with whom you can cooperate when needed. Use sites such as Quasa Connect to set a job post and send proposals to fitting candidates.

Identify Topics of Interest

What you also need to consider is that not all countries are interested in the same topics. Depending on their culture, customs, and beliefs, their points of interest will differ.

How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand Each country or nationality you target should be researched. Collect information on what interests them most.

You may also come across their pet peeves or wording they find offensive. You need to be extra careful about how you approach content creation for each nationality, since their perceptions of certain terms can differ.

For finding trending topics that you can use for blog posts, for example, use Google Trends. This online tool will provide you with information on the hottest topics in any country that interests you.

It can also be useful to check competitors’ websites and user comments on their posts. This way, you’ll gain insight into users’ thoughts and discover which topics they prefer.

Localize the SEO

How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand You might already know this, but SEO is one of the most important elements of content marketing. You can invest all your time and money into creating the best content, but if users can’t find it, what’s the point? Localizing your existing content is one aspect of localization, but SEO localization is another. It is a must if you want to drive more leads to your localized content.

Let’s suppose you translate your content from English to French. You take into consideration their culture, customs, and appropriate wording. But once the French reader clicks the link, it leads them to a page in English. This can completely ruin the experience. That is why you need SEO localization.

Focus your SEO localization efforts on the following:

Adapt the links that you include in the content (both internal and external)
Create a source language termbase (find equivalents for product keywords, transactional keywords, brand keywords, etc.)
Keep your keyword density below 2.5%
Adapt the translated headlines and subheadings to include source language keywords
Localize the images’ ALT text

Adapt Social Media Platforms

Social media is an inevitable part of content marketing. The popularity of social media across the globe encourages marketers and business owners to put extra effort into creating interesting social media posts.

The thing is that not every country shares an interest in the same social media channels. They also won’t understand the posts if you only feature them in one language. For that reason, during the localization process, you also need to localize your social media profiles.

You can create different social media profiles for different audiences. This will allow you to customize posts to their preferences and run separate, personalized social media marketing campaigns.

How to Implement a Successful International Content Marketing Strategy for your Brand However, if you want a simpler solution, just adapt your current social media profiles. That would mean, for example, that your Instagram posts contain descriptions and hashtags in all targeted languages.

For Facebook, you can use their localization option which makes it easier for users to read your posts in their target language.

Keep in mind that using the same social media profiles means you will need to put in extra effort to create posts that appeal to people of different nationalities.

Are You Ready to Develop Your International Content Marketing Strategy?

Localization isn’t just an aspect of content marketing. It demands the same attention and strategic moves as your initial content marketing. Depending on your target audience, their preferences can differ a great deal or they can be quite similar. Your content strategy needs to consider and reflect those preferences for content creation.

If you follow the steps mentioned above, your path to international content marketing will be less challenging and more successful. Take every aspect of this new challenge seriously and give your best to create content that every nation will love.

Below we have collected a number of interesting articles that almost completely cover all the current problems of promotion and optimization; add them to your bookmarks and keep them always at hand:

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