5 Ingredients Every Global Content Marketing Strategy Needs

Global Content Marketing Strategy Secrets to Help Your Content Shine

Content marketing often focuses on localized trends. Single-language and locale-based marketing are common for many businesses, but keeping a narrow view in your marketing efforts keeps your business growth from reaching global proportions. A global content marketing strategy is vital because reaching more customers means expanding your profit potential.

1. Infuse Culture Per Country

Think about the internal structure of your global business. Ideally, you possess a diverse team with its own corporate culture. Your people are what makes your business, and they are the contact point for your customer base.

Your content marketing efforts depend on these collaborative minds, so it makes sense to allow each part of your global team autonomy on its marketing messages. A variety of opinions and strategies will serve your company well, no matter the market.

In a podcast discussing her book on global content marketing, Pam Didner reasons that global companies like McDonald’s retain the same business model for every country in which they place stores. However, she points out, the product for each location is different, and often vastly so.

Consider this when applying global strategies to your products and business model. Slight, or in-depth, product changes may serve to reach a wider audience.

Studying business models of other companies, whether massive like the McDonald’s corporation or smaller like your competitor’s, shows the potential for effectively adapting your processes and products, and ultimately your global content marketing strategy.

2. Cater to a Global Audience

Part of understanding your company’s global position is reviewing your analytics. Like Jonathan Allen of Searchenginewatch suggests in a video interview with State of Digital, reviewing your online traffic referrals gives you an idea where your visitors originate.

By ranking these locations, you can expand into those markets via social media. Then decide whether the results are worth further expansion. View the complete interview below for more advice from Allen.

Developing a global audience is as simple as reaching out to the visitors your website already attracts. Honing your international online presence opens opportunities to cultivate a larger following, flowing from the slow trickle that already exists.

3. Create Customer-Focused Content

It’s all about the customer in both domestic and international markets. We know this already from business development at home, but it’s an important reminder for the development of your global content marketing strategy.

The challenge with going global is language barriers and cultural differences. With country-specific audiences, nuances in language hold power over the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

Authenticity in your messages and connection with your customers require focusing on language. While it seems overwhelming to translate marketing messages multiple times over, the potential for an expanded market is well worth the extra effort.

Resonate with customers internationally in both speech and customs, whether that’s via translation of marketing materials or focusing on specific or geographically relevant subject matter.

4. Find Your Niche

Global expansion is more than tossing marketing materials to the wind and waiting for clicks. Specifically targeting new markets requires research and preparation, and ideally sourcing a market that is not yet saturated. Following the above advice for tracking website traffic for hints, seek out smaller markets.

Developing a successful geographically targeted marketing plan is simpler and more efficient than attempting to infiltrate a saturated market with a product or service that must compete with a dozen others.

Accommodating geographically specific customers is also a consideration. Each market will ideally have its own website portal that retains your brand’s overall look and feel. Depending on the size of additional markets, you may go the route of Ikea and create a drop-down menu per country, or establish different URLs altogether.

5. Get Social with Media

Beyond language and cultural expectations for your brand’s social media presence, there are tricks to honing your business’s image via social platforms.

Consider taking LandtCo’s advice on global content marketing and create a hashtag to generate buzz. Use different taglines for each country platform to shape each branded offshoot.

Rather than copy and paste existing material from your original market, invest time in developing additional social media content with a unique angle. Just as each marketing message should conform to expectations and cultural needs, so should the accompanying social media posts.

To fully integrate into international markets, a comprehensive social media outlet serves to connect to customers and promote products in a custom-tailored way. After all, according to a study by CSA Research, more than half of consumers consider information in their native language more important than overall price.

This is huge for businesses expanding their global reach because it tells us that connecting with our customers in their native language should come first, and the product second. By adapting to our target market’s needs and values, we’re poised to maintain profits and retain a larger customer base.