International Content Marketing-How to Create a Global Strategy?

From building credibility, establishing your brand presence, all the way to improving engagement, the content has always been and continues to remain the most elementary segment of every brand’s marketing strategy. While technical SEO, social media marketing, and various paid campaigns all exist independently, they are all strongly linked to your content approach, how you weave your brand voice into your campaigns, and the like.

For brands that wish to earn a share of the global market, the challenges to crafting an appealing content strategy multiply. Audiences are different, their cultures shape their views and communication styles, and they might have the need for your product or service, but the way to present it through content can never be the same as in your local market.

In this conundrum, you need plenty of creativity and patience to continue creating a content strategy that will appeal to your global demographic. To make sure that you’re on the right track with your content output for your international audience, look into the following strategic moves you should consider for your strategy and tackle the world one stellar content piece at a time.

1. Collaborate with relevant local people

Influencers are no passing fad, especially when it comes to building trust in a new community where other brands have a long-standing reputation you cannot outbid with more affordable products. Taking that into account, you should never let your content game enter the new market without any support from locally relevant people. If anything, you should try to establish a relationship with them before you ever penetrate the new market, let them get a taste of your offers, and find someone who genuinely shares your values.

Then, they will be able to slowly introduce your brand into the market, share your content pieces, and even collaborate with you to create content together in the form of ads, promotional videos, reviews, photos on Instagram or Pinterest, you name it. When someone the local people respect stands beside you once you launch your business, your content will have a far better chance to rank better, get shared, and generate more engagement and traffic.

2. Get to know the local culture

As we’ll explain a little later, translation is not always the most optimal solution, and the same applies to your SEO and keyword research. Simply translating your existing keywords will not grant you the exposure you need among your new audience, especially when trying to dazzle a vast and culturally unique market in Asia, such as China.

In fact, you need to tailor your entire strategy to fit the local trends, culture, and preferences. To do that, you need to keep an eye on locally relevant platforms such as Week in China to get a better view of locally relevant news, trends, and topics you should cover. This also helps you understand where you should aim to publish your own content for better exposure. By staying in the know, you’ll be able to research topics of interest, diversify your content formats, and infuse your brand voice with what the local target audience will appreciate.

3. The translation is no longer the only option

Many brands with a strong local presence approach their global content marketing from a very linear standpoint: by translating existing content and simply publishing it for their new target markets. Alas, this is an extremely outdated and ineffective way to tackle your international brand voice. If anything, you risk using terminology that’s not appropriate, publishing stories that don’t resonate, and sending out videos featuring your own country instead of theirs – forever locking your brand image with your native market.

Although some pieces of your existing content will surely dazzle your new audience, you should strive to use trans-creation instead of simple translation. Trans-creation enables you to infuse your content with local culture, colloquial terms, publish on locally relevant platforms, and transform your content into formats that appeal to your new target audience. Maybe that blog piece meant for your New York audience would get a better response from your Singapore market if presented in the form of an infographic or a video.

4. Set clear objectives

It has been said before, but it cannot be repeated enough times: you need to set SMART goals if you mean to reach any of them when entering a new market. That same principle applies to your content creation, since each blog, video, podcast, ad, and newsletter needs to have a measurable metric you wish to reach, a set goal to accomplish, and a way to measure your progress. Without it, your content is merely a shot in the dark. So, before you let your eager team of content creators, marketers, and SEO gurus start crafting another complex content plan, make sure they know what you wish to achieve with said plan.

Do you want to use brand marketing to build brand awareness? Will you measure that in increased web traffic and social followers, or by some other metric? Do you have a specific target such as a 20% increase in brand awareness? What about engagement, do you want more shares on social media, more conversations, and more chats on your website? All of your goals should be clearly outlined, together with your content-based plan of attack.

Content marketing is essential for any brand’s global success, but it can either make or break your presence depending on how well you tackle your strategy. With that in mind, make sure that your approach to international content creation encompasses these listed factors, so as to minimize your risks of alienating your new audience and to make sure that you have a solid chance to win them over.