Are you wondering what a localized marketing strategy is? You are not alone.

Since globalization has made all products available to everyone everywhere, business owners have to develop a strategy to market their products and services to the rest of the world.

Does that mean you can simply start selling your product in any region of your choice and increase your revenue? 

No, selling to foreign consumers is not that simple. You need to ensure that your offering is relevant and tailored to foreign customers. To be able to sell successfully in a foreign market, you need a localization strategy.

Read on to discover what that is and what it entails. 

What Is a Localized Marketing Strategy?

Localized marketing is the opposite of global marketing. Global marketing primarily utilizes English to reach a broad audience, aiming to enhance brand visibility and boost sales.

A localized marketing strategy takes local purchasing habits, customer behavior, and the culture of a target region into account. A localized marketing strategy targets a group of consumers or demographic based on their location.

The goal is to create the illusion of a locally developed product or service perfectly tailored to address the target audience’s specific needs, masking its foreign origin.

When they enter your online store, their customer experience must feel familiar to them, just like any other buying experience from one of their local retailers. This involves much more than just translating your website, including

• Modifying the style and layout of your website and marketing campaigns to accommodate local preferences.
• Using popular local communication channels to market your offering.
• Displaying product prizes and measurements in the local currency.
• Displaying dates, addresses, and phone numbers according to local practices.
• Using payment options commonly used in your target market.
• Being aware of and complying with local regulations.

Continue reading to discover the essential aspects of a localized marketing strategy that will boost your sales and the bottom line.

Marketing Localization Figures

Businesses that take local consumer culture, language, and etiquette into account when marketing to foreign consumers have a chance to achieve enormous success. Here are some research figures that prove the point. 

• There are almost 4 billion daily internet users worldwide, yet only about 25% of them speak English. While only a quarter of the world speaks English, more than half of all Google searches are not in English. Can you see the huge opportunity this holds for your brand?
• Marketing content in the customer’s native language increases purchase likelihood by 72%. 
• According to Common Sense Advisory, 56% of respondents say having brand knowledge in their native language is more important than price.
• Native English speakers make up around 5.4% of the world’s population, and Internet users who prefer English make up only 25.3% of the overall Internet market share.

Localized Marketing Challenges

Localized marketing is an ambitious undertaking that involves extensive research, The marketing team needs to find answers to a myriad of questions:  

• Does the market need our product?
• Are there already similar products? 
• Will users in the new market use our app in the same way?
• What payment gateways do they use? 
• What about keywords? Do we use the same ones or different ones?
• Can we use influencers?
• How do we set our prices? Do we have to take local economic conditions into account or other factors?
• To what extent will we be able to use analytics to track user behavior?
• Do we have the legal resources (and budget) to adapt our legal documents like privacy policy, terms, and conditions? 

As you can see localization is a time-consuming process. Entering a new market is not a process that can be rushed – that will only result in poor outcomes that may mean the failure of your attempts to enter a new market.

What Happens if You Don’t Have a Localization Strategy?

A localization strategy involves doing market research to avoid embarrassing blunders when entering a foreign market. There are many examples of companies that didn’t do their due diligence when entering a new market. All too often this oversight has led to nonsensical or even offensive marketing campaigns.

A famous example is Pepsi’s attempt to expand to the Chinese market. Pepsi’s marketing slogan was “Pepsi Brings You Back To Life.” In Chinese it translated as “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From The Grave”.

You can’t adopt a standardized marketing approach and hope it will work in all markets. Different markets require their own unique localized marketing strategies. Let’s look at some localization tactics to implement.

Localized Marketing Done Right

1. Do Market Research 

Any major business decision should be preceded by thorough market research. It becomes even more crucial if you are planning to enter unfamiliar territory. If you don’t do your homework beforehand, you are bound to make mistakes that can harm your brand and sabotage your attempt to win new customers. 

To succeed in a new market, you must understand its consumers. Learn as much as you can about your intended customers. Find out:

• What languages they speak, including dialects.
• About their culture and traditions.
• Their likes and dislikes.
• Their pain points.
• Their shopping habits.
• Their preferred payment habits.
• Their aspirations.
• The challenges they face, and so on. 

2. Use Local Experts for Your Marketing Localization

For the best results, consider hiring a team of local experts to help you with the research. They can provide you with first-hand knowledge and experience that you won’t get from online surveys.

You can also consider hiring local web designers and developers or localization specialists who are familiar with the market that you plan to penetrate. They will have the skills and knowledge to help you with the localization of your website and messaging. Local developers and graphic designers will be in a better position to produce a storefront and a customer experience that look familiar to buyers in the region. 

This way, you would be developing your website for the new market from scratch rather than trying to adapt it to local conditions. Professionals with local knowledge will know exactly what will appeal to local buyers and how you can target your messaging to them. 

The Challenges of Marketing to a Large Country with Many Regions

Keep in mind that you can’t treat vast regions like China and India as homogeneous units. Both these countries (and others) are home to many different groups with their own languages and cultural traditions. Everyone in China doesn’t speak Mandarin, and everyone in India doesn’t speak Punjabi.

Although these are enormous markets that hold massive potential, they can’t be penetrated with one standardized marketing campaign. If you want to penetrate these markets, it might be best to first target one specific region.

3. Localize Your Website for the Local Market

Localization is much more than simply translating your website. In addition to translating your content, also pay close attention to other aspects of your website that can be adapted to appeal to local audiences so they feel as if they have landed on a local website.

Check out our article on How to Get People to Buy Your Product.

Consider if changes to any of the following will be necessary.

Website graphics – This is more important than you might realize. Different cultures have different tastes. What appeals to consumers in Germany won’t appeal to consumers in Indonesia. In fact, they might not relate to it at all.

Images – Use images of locals to promote your products, so they reflect the local culture and consumers can relate. 

Product pricing – display prices in the local currency so local visitors immediately know what to pay.

Units of measure – Display sizes and weights according to local conventions using the appropriate symbols. 

Encode your website content in Unicode (UTF-8) – this ensures support for special characters used in the different world languages.

Call to action buttons – Call to action buttons can look wrong once the local language has been applied due to the difference in character lengths. Make sure they still look right. Look at local websites to see how to solve the problem.

Domain and URL structure – Consider using ccTLDs and subdomains.

Legal requirements – Work with a local lawyer to update the terms of use, privacy policy, and cookies policy to apply to local and international laws.

4. Content Localization – Adapt Your Content For International Audiences

You need to localize your content if you want to enter a foreign market with your offering. Localized ads, blogs, and articles are adapted to the culture and language of customers based in a specific location.

The first step toward content localization is translating it into the language of your target audience because the following is true of global consumers:

• 65% prefer content in their language, even if it’s poor quality
• 40% will never buy from websites in other languages
• 73% want product reviews in their language

Translating content for international audiences holds a number of challenges.

• Translation is complicated

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re faced with an entiree website and tonnes of marketing materials to translate. In this case, it may be a good policy not to aim to translate everything in one go. The important point is to localize content using simple sentences that will succinctly get your message across. The trick is to use simple language that carries a lot of meaning. 

Also, be careful with the use of humor or cultural references unless you have access to a local localization expert that can guide your translation team. 

• Translation Only Conveys Partial Meaning

Communication is more than words arranged in sentences. Effective communication has an unspoken contextual element that’s difficult to represent in online text.  

Online, elements like the design of your pages, visuals, and colors take the place of non-verbal communication, which is integral to how people understand each other. It is these non-verbal elements that make your content take on the same nuance as local messaging.

It is challenging to translate marketing messages for the local market  in such a way that it resonates with customers in other markets.

• Translation Impacts Design

Some languages require more letters to convey a message. For instance, “Buy now” in English is translated as “acheter maintenant” in French. Obviously, you’re going to need two different-sized buy-now buttons for the two markets.

Tip: Use Unicode when translating to other languages. Unicode is a character encoding scheme that will ensure things like accents, umlauts, and unique letters like æ, Ꝕ, and β will be correctly encoded, so website text is displayed correctly in any language.

Cultural Aspects

While it involves translation, content localization goes broader. It takes cultural aspects into account to ensure the message resonates with the target demographic.

The idea is to adapt any type of content to fit in with locally accepted cultural norms. It takes into account aspects unique to the language in a geographical area like slang, idioms, and colloquialisms to speak to the heart of locals.

Brand Voice 

There are at least two aspects of culture that brand voice can clash with: formality and group thinking. 

For instance, in the West relationships tend to be rather informal and that aspect of the culture has penetrated advertising language. Such informality doesn’t go down very well in countries like Japan and South Korea, where the language used must suit the position of the person. In these countries, the language used must acknowledge the superiority of the person being spoken to. 

If your company has a very informal brand voice, you may have to reconsider your language use.

Western cultures prioritize individuality, emphasizing personal achievement and independence. In contrast, Eastern cultures often value the extended family and community above individual desires, fostering interdependence and collective harmony. 

Companies in the West should take care that their brand voice doesn’t idealize individuality and personal expression. In Eastern cultures, people don’t have the need to stand out, and the type of marketing that celebrates individual achievement may fail completely in collectivist cultures.

These pitfalls, once again, stress the importance of thorough research into the culture of the target market.

Other Details That Shouldn’t Be Overlooked

When adapting website text for local audiences, the creation of slogans requires special attention. Slogans are tricky  – what works in one culture, can totally tank in another. 

A classic example is McDonald’s “I’m loving it.” Even in English, this slogan uses poor grammar; trying to translate it into a language that has no present continuous tense is nonsensical. You have to come up with a completely different slogan.

Localized marketing also requires an awareness of the connotations that colors have in various cultures. For example, while white symbolizes purity in Western cultures, it represents death and mourning in Eastern cultures. Localization involves making sure that the colors you choose for your website don’t have any negative connotations in the target region.

If you look at websites from different parts of the world, you’ll notice a difference in the type of images shown. This subtle detail offers a profound insight into a culture’s values and worldview. Images and photos that look fine on your local website might be alienating to users from another culture.

5. Make Use of Local SEO to Boost Content Localization

To get your website to rank high on local search engines in your target market, you need to adapt your SEO strategy. You can bet on it that SEO strategies that have worked for you up to now will be less effective in another locale.

On the subject of an SEO strategy for your new target market, you will need to:

• Perform local keyword research. Local keyword research is conducted to find out what search queries local users type into a search engine when they are looking for services or products near them.

• For SEO localization you need a keyword research tool that can scan data from the region you are interested in. You can use SEO tools like Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs when searching for localized keywords. 

• Depending on your research results, you may have to modify the keywords that you’re targeting, as the same keyword may work differently in different languages.

If you target the correct keywords, your pages should appear to users in your target area.

• Change the SEO tools that you usually use. It is likely that there’s an SEO tool specifically designed for the language of your target market, so it might be better for localization.

• Rewrite headers and titles, don’t just translate them directly. Remember, the purpose of headers and titles is to convey key concepts. As such, they must be written with care. 

• Rework your alt tags so your website images serve as a source of organic traffic.

• Review your meta descriptions. These short descriptions of website content are often the reason why users click on a link in Google.

6. Leverage Social Media as a Localization Strategy

Also, if you’re doing business in another country, create localized social media accounts so you can launch targeted marketing campaigns for those users. If you do this, you will be joining the  more than 88% of businesses that already use social media to advertise their products, 

Marketers for some international brands like IKEA, McDonald’s, H&M, and Zara have created separate Instagram and Facebook accounts for each of their target markets. These accounts are available in the languages of the various regions.

Localizing social media accounts will enable you to launch ad campaigns on the social platforms where your potential buyers look for products and services. 

However, do some market research to know which social channels are popular in the new market. For instance, it’s pointless to market via Facebook in China since the social media giant is banned in that country.

If you are marketing to the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and Japan, Instagram would be a good choice.TikTok is an immensely popular social media platform, used by young people  in more than 150 countries, so it’s a good choice if you are marketing to a young demographic. 

Benefit from Geo-targeting for Localized Marketing

Geo-targeting is excellent for marketing localization. It is a tool that helps businesses target a specific group of consumers based on their location. Social media channels like Facebook and Twitter use IP and physical addresses to ensure that messages reach a user’s potential customers on social media. You can segment your target audience according to Country, State/Province, and City ZIP Code.

According to Mindjumpers, an experiment done by Nieman Journalism Lab found that geo-targeted posts were 6 times more successful than posts shared globally. 

7. Consider Working with Local Influencers As Part of Your Localized Marketing

If your budget allows it, collaborating with local influencers can be an effective localized marketing strategy to introduce your product or service to a new market. According to data released by Matter Communications, consumers place more trust in family, friends, and influencers than brands: 

•  61% are likely to trust recommendations from a friend, family member, or an influencer on social platforms
• Only 38% are likely to trust recommendations from a brand on social platforms

According to Morning Consult, 86% of consumers believe influencer marketing is a trustworthy and valuable source of information, and 50% of millennials trust product recommendations from influencers.

Influencer marketing is flourishing on all social media platforms, with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube being the forerunners. 

So, the case for influencer marketing seems made, but it’s not without its challenges. 

Social influencers are expensive. The average fee per post is $1,000. Macro-influencers are even more expensive so most brands opt for micro-influencers who generate up to 60% more engagement than macro-influencers, partly because customers trust them more.

Keep in mind that you’ll need to find an influencer with brand awareness and business sense. Whatever you do, don’t launch a marketing campaign on social media that features a celebrity with no fan base among your target audience. It is bound to flop.

Obtaining the help and cooperation of social influencers is an excellent localized marketing strategy.

Check out our article on How Long Does it Take to Get Monetised on YouTube.

Benefits of Localized Marketing

Localization is integral to global expansion. It’s a marketing strategy that can help you to expand globally. The localization process is crucial to global expansion. The most successful companies tend to be the ones that are prepared to meet global standards while remaining locally aware.

Localization makes a company part of a growing global marketing trend, putting it at the cutting edge of global business development. It’s a marketing strategy that builds trust among local and international customers because it shows that the company understands and respects different cultures.

Final Thoughts

Localization is a growing global marketing trend. As a strategy to expand and grow a business, it is unbeatable. These days international consumers know that they can get superior products and services in foreign markets. Simplify the process by selling to customers in their preferred language and familiar sales methods.

The result for your business will be customer acquisition and increased brand recognition. Not to speak of the benefits to the bottom line.