What Is Localized Marketing?
Localized marketing, or marketing localization, is targeting a specific locale and targeting, promoting, and selling products or services to that specific locale. Localization in marketing combines translation into a targeted language and a consideration of cultural aspects of that culture in those areas, to come up with localization strategies to target that area for marketing.
So, for example, if you were targeting NYC, you would think about localing your campaigns for that area, keeping in mind tourism, pop culture, and even food, whichever is relevant for your industry. You may think about making localized content about pop culture like 10 Things NYC Celebrities Wear, or an email marketing list of tourism spots like Coney Island or Governor’s Island.
Neil Patel says, “Let the corporate marketing team establish the overall tone of your brand. They are responsible for ensuring all markets recognize your logo and likeness. Your local marketing teams should lay the foundation to earn consumer trust in the communities.”
According to Neil Patel, working with localization specialists is key to “understanding your consumers language, culture and behaviour.” Localization specialists are local experts that will work with you for your localization strategy.
Localization for marketing campaigns can drive the right consumers to your brand, and these leads could generate higher revenues for your company. Excited to find out? Read on.
How Do Marketing Localizations Drive Sales?
The process of localizing marketing campaigns is a tough one. A localization strategy defines how your business will connect with local audiences around the world. There are a few things to keep in mind when coming up with a localized marketing strategy:
Linguistic and Cultural Considerations
Linguistic and cultural considerations should always be part of your market research, even before you begin your marketing campaign. This means you have to tap into local expertise, and truly personalize the experience for your audience. If you’re marketing to South Africa, you’ll have a very different audience than in Saudi Arabia, and localization is just one part of personalizing their experience so that you can promote your services and products better to these cultural demographics.
Multilingual SEO
SEO should be a priority for any marketing company. Multilingual SEO is different from regular SEO, because it takes into account different languages and different ranking factors for Google based on the language or region. According to The Guardian, “Even English – the largest and potentially most diverse Wikipedia edition – contains only 51% of the articles in the second-largest edition, German.” There is a lot of linguistic diversity on the Internet, and if you’re thinking of optimizing your SEO only in English, you’ll be out in the dark.
Content Localization
Content localization should be a part of your content marketing campaign. The process of content localization is adapting your content to suit local audiences. This also takes into account the linguistic and cultural differences between regions and language groups, and needs extensive market research for your target region/audience. Whether for social media, email marketing, inbound marketing, or affiliate marketing, localizing your content for your desired demographics is another step to personalizing content for them.
These steps all require translation, localization, and other language services, done by local experts. But these are all preliminary considerations. Here is the step-by-step guide to developing a localization strategy for your marketing:
Internal Valuation
Preliminary steps will be determining the cost, the time, and the manpower for this strategy. How many countries or regions do you plan to target? Which ones? In which order? You must do a bit of internal assessment before you embark on a localized marketing strategy.
Localized Market Research
Of course, if I haven’t stressed this enough, you need to do market research, research, and research. You might research which local experts, influencers, language experts, and project managers you need, if you’re considering developing your own team. Market research will apply to all your considerations, from data analysis to content writing to social media to graphic design.
Developing the Localization Strategy
You need to develop exactly what you’ll localize, be it your email marketing strategy or your branding slogan. You also need to know in what order you’ll be doing the tasks. Then, you’ll translate for your content, social media posts, blog posts, web pages, or emails for your locale. If you have an app or a game, you’ll need to translate the strings as well. Then, you’ll figure out the costs, the timescales, and the objectives and key results of your strategy. You might even apply local lead generation to your strategy. And lastly, you’ll figure out your key performance indicators, from sales to rankings, engagement levels to conversion rates.
Marketing Localization Testing
If you think by developing your strategy, you’re done, then you’re wrong. You have to test your localization strategy. You have to tweak and fine tune to achieve the intended results, as needed.
The benefits of marketing localization is a four-step process. When you apply localized marketing strategy to your marketing campaigns, you can generate better brand awareness, which acquires more customers which turns into higher conversions and turns into higher revenues for your company. Thus, marketing directly to your audience by region, which is marketing localization, can turn your marketing campaigns into a success. Here is a simple flow chart of the benefits for the benefits of marketing localization:
Successful Localized Marketing Campaigns
If you still don’t think marketing localization converts, just look at two bands, Netflix and IKEA, who have gone over and beyond the standards for localized marketing. They’ve both achieved so much success, with the baseline of a great marketing localization strategy. Here’s their marketing localization tactics:
Netflix
Localized marketing made Netflix a success. Have you ever looked at Netflix Korea and realized they have different content than Netflix USA? How did they do it? Well, they collected a ton of data for each of the regions they targeted, having a collection of cultural data to inform their decisions. They went beyond translating their films and included multilingual websites, localized video content, localized marketing messages and ads, and local films in their repertoire. Now, Netflix is available for streaming in 190 countries, and all their platforms for 190 countries are localized. Their library of shows and films are different for each country, which makes them a localization expert.
IKEA
IKEA went beyond cultural and linguistic market research, but actually went into regular people's homes in their target regions so that they could find the best, local furniture for those regions. They’ve managed to conquer the Indian market, the Chinese market, and other countries in their 32 countries, 706 million customers, and 378 IKEA stores. Their website is translated and localized as well, showing different content for different countries, so that IKEA Japan is different from IKEA Korea. And, their website IKEA.com received 3.6 billion visits in 2020. If you think they’d stop there, you’re wrong.
Now they’re using their own brand of localization with the best automation in the global market. They’re using AR and VR with Apple’s ARKit, which is making their localization strategy more successful. People from all over the world can superimpose the picture of their desired IKEA furniture into their own local homes. Great idea, right?
Key Takeaway
Reaching a global audience with marketing localization is now easier with marketing localization, or localized marketing. It makes sense: promoting your services should be naturally tailored to the country which you’re going to branch out to.
Localization is a way for companies to truly connect with your desired multilingual audience, to promote directly by region. A great localization strategy targets your desired audience in a specific locale with adapted content and languages that will directly appeal to them. This is already a step towards personalized marketing.
As you have seen in this article, marketing localization strategies include much cultural and linguistic research, a highly developed strategy, and even the use of local experts. A marketing localization strategy is the baseline of what Netflix, IKEA, and other brands are doing.
It’s a surefire way to not only connect to, but also convert, your consumers.
