Language is often the first barrier for brands expanding into new markets. In order to get your message across effectively, you need to be able to translate your online and offline marketing material into a language that’s understandable by the local audience.

Talking specifically about translating online marketing materials, one of the most important parts of this process is to include an international SEO strategy, this strategy should include website, landing pages, campaigns, and social media localization.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how a website’s keywords and metadata translation can be a game-changer for your SEO strategy.

Keyword List Translation

Finding the words in your target language that are appropriate substitutes for keywords that describe or relate to your business is a KEY. The words your target audience uses to search for information about your business might be different from your source language and the keywords that

come from a literal translation. It’s important to be aware that literal translations of keywords might not be the most effective way to reach your target audience.

In order to understand and define the proper keyword list for your new target market, international keyword research should be conducted by a native speaker expert. It is crucial to do the research and find the most accurate keywords before expanding into your new market.

Metadata Translation

Metadata is information about your website, such as its title, description, and keywords. The most two important elements of on-page SEO are meta titles and meta descriptions. The title tag is the main text that appears on the search engine results page (SERP), while the meta description is the short text that appears under the title tag.

When translating meta titles and meta descriptions, it’s important to use relevant, keyword-rich language that accurately reflects the content on your website in a summary way. This will help you to ensure that your website appears in the appropriate search results for your target audience. In addition, be sure to keep your translations concise and easy to read; otherwise, potential customers may not bother clicking through to your website.

Why Keyword and Metadata Translation is Important

Translating your keyword list may seem easy at first, but it really can make or break your SEO efforts. There are many challenges associated with keyword translation. One of the challenges is not knowing what you’re up against. When optimizing sites for search engines, it is important to remember that a phrase may have different meanings in different countries. A searcher in America and a searcher in Great Britain may enter very different keywords into a search engine. The concept of translating keywords to deliver appropriate results for both countries seems simple enough, yet many companies treat it as an afterthought, rather than something they should be doing from the start.

Same for metadata translation, it’s essential to translate all your website metadata and content into the languages relevant to your target market. This makes it easier for users who are looking for products or services you provide to find your site in their native language.

Best Ways to Incorporate Keywords into Content

When it comes to SEO, keywords are essential. But how do you incorporate them into your localized content in a way that doesn’t feel forced or unnatural? Here are some tips:

• Use advanced keyword research tools to come up with a list of the best keywords for your new target market.
• Work those keywords into your metadata and throughout the body of your localized content in a way that makes sense.
• Don’t stuff your keywords in; use them sparingly and only when they make sense.
• Use synonyms and related terms to mix things up and avoid repeating yourself.
• Make sure your content is still readable and do not sacrifice quality for the sake of keywords.

How to Use Metadata to Enhance SEO Outreach

Metadata helps search engines understand what your page is about and can influence how your page appears in search results. Here are some tips on how to use metadata to enhance your SEO outreach:

1. Use Keyword-Rich Titles and Descriptions.

Make sure your titles and descriptions include the new localized keywords you want to target. This will help search engines understand what your page is about and can also help your page rank higher in search results.

2. Optimize Your Images.

Including relevant keywords in your image file names and alt text can help search engines index your images and improve the visibility of your website in the new target search engine’s image search results.

3. Use Social Media Tags

Social media tags (or meta tags) are special HTML tags that provide information about your content to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, WeChat, etc… Including these tags on your pages can help improve the visibility of your website when people share your content on social media.

Conclusion

Speaking your customers’ language helps maximize reach, build trust, and increase sales. If you want to reach all your customers in the right language, make sure to localize and SEO your website in your most strategic languages.

The post Keywords and Metadata Translations for International SEO appeared first on Globalization Partners International.

Article originally published on Arab News

With social media becoming more and more strewn about, it is important for brands to design their social media strategies intricately to be distinguished. In this regard, Twitter had some interesting and vital insights on how MENA brands can remain relevant and jump ahead of the marketing curve in Ramadan.

Studies show that there is more than 80% correlation between the cultural relevance of the brand and its investment in Twitter. In addition, there is more than 70% correlation between that relevance and the intent of audience purchase. This happens because Ramadan is a principal cultural moment and event of the year not just in the MENA region, but in the world as well. This enables brands to build cultural relevance by making use of that opportunity. Not only will it increase perception and favorability for the brand, but also sales and revenue are likely to experience an increase.

Consumers in key Arab countries, such as Kuwait, Egypt, UAE, and KSA spend more in Ramadan than they do at other times of the year. This is in addition to their willingness to scout new brands and buy them during the holy month. However, it is important to remember that in order to take the most advantage of this marketing strategy, it is important to start connecting with your audience a while before the month actually starts. This gives the brands a chance to build a longer connection over a longer period of time which will extend over to the holy month. Most of the time, the Ramadan vibes will start in the two weeks prior to the start of the month, and culminate on the first day and then continue. This can help brands build an audience or customer base before the month starts to guarantee higher sales and favorability.

To continue reading the full article, it was originally published in Arab News.

The post News: Twitter Provides Tips for Ramadan Holiday in its Latest Webinar appeared first on Globalization Partners International.

Are you thinking about expanding your business into Arabic-speaking countries and want to begin with a solid online presence? If that’s your intention and aiming for high visibility in the Middle East market, then you may want to consider adding Arabic SEO and Digital Marketing in your plan. Getting the Arabic SEO right can give your brand a broad online exposure, which then improves your business’ awareness resulting to successful leads. In this blog, I will share with you some useful Arabic SEO tips for the Middle East region.

Arabic SEO for the Middle East

Talking specifically on SEO for Arabic, it is the process of enhancing your Arabic website’s online visibility in the Middle East region. It will help the search engines crawl and index your Arabic content and rank it accordingly. Arabic SEO is a cost-effective tool that allows your business to break into the Middle East market.

According to statistics, there are more than 180 million Arabic speaking online users worldwide, and Arabic language is one of the most used languages in the internet. This is why Arab consumers are so targeted audience by the small to large-sized companies.

It’s well known worldwide that Arabs are active in using the internet with an intent to buy local products and services. Therefore, you are right to start considering and expanding your brand into the MENA region.

Arabic SEO Tips:

1. Identify your Target Search Engine

First things first, before you step into your targeted country or region, you should research about the search engine penetration in that particular market.

It is well known that Google is the world’s dominant internet search provider across major online markets, truth be told, it is also the most used search engine in the Middle East. Considering Google as your target search engine while planning your expansion into the Middle East region is a vital thing. Focusing on this channel will shorten the journey to reaching your audience.

2. Arabic Keywords Research

Should you decide what would be the targeted keywords to reach your Arabic-speaking audience? What would be their search and buying behaviors? Where are they located? The Middle East region has 22 countries with different local dialects being spoken. Decide on these aspects before starting your Arabic SEO efforts.

3. Arabic Content Creation

Arabs are more likely to trust brands that know about their traditions, cultures and language. Accordingly, your website’s content should reflect these factors too! It’s highly recommended to create an Arabic version of your website for your intended locale so they can connect emotionally and interact with your brand. Translating your website content and connecting with Arabic-speaking customers is a process that must be led by a native Arabic speaker. Ultimately, a professional copywriter who lives and breathes Arabian culture can transform your content into localized, and not just translated. Localization adapts content on a cultural level.

4. Arabic On-Page Google SEO

Title tags and metadata descriptions play an important role in your page’s rankings on search engines. The title tag displays the title of your webpage when your website is shown on the search engine result page (SERP). Likewise, the metadata description serves as a summary of your content and appears in search results directly beneath the title. If you want your website to perform effectively in different countries, localization of title tags and metadata descriptions is crucial. To be successful in translating the title tags and metadata descriptions, the translator must consider the audience’s diversity when choosing keywords for different countries.

5. Link Building

In Arabic SEO, the link database is particularly significant. As a result, you should make every effort to gain as many high-quality backlinks as possible to rank your website high on the local search engine results.

6. Arabic Website Design

Arabic is a Semitic language and, like Hebrew, is written from right to left. Moreover, Arabic letters are shorter and wider than Latin characters which may cause some issues in many Arabic localized websites. This often leads to a website redesign, as menus and page headers will need to be flipped horizontally (mirrored) to improve usability and conversion. To avoid these issues, you should hire a company that can provide a full website expansion package.

7. Mobile-Friendliness for Arab Consumers

According to Statista report, the Middle East region is expected to have over 357 million mobile internet users in 2025, up from 264 million in 2019. By 2025, the region’s mobile internet penetration rate is expected to reach roughly 53% of the population. So it’s wise not just to prepare your website for desktop but it’s mandatory to optimize it for mobile devices. Doing so will reach a wider audience with a responsive, mobile-friendly website.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the website you create for the Middle East market expansion is a wise move. However, if you are going to do it, it should be done properly. Applying the Arabic SEO tips compiled in this blog can give your brand exponential online exposures, which then improves your business’ awareness resulting to conversions.

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“You cannot stop running water” – the truth in this Native American saying is more evident in the travel and tourism landscape today. Despite the pandemic, there were about 50,000 new hotel rooms worldwide in October 2021 alone. The global hotel market is now over 16.4 million hotel rooms and more to come. This thriving industry is worth $1.6 trillion globally, and 10% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Needless to say, with a vast market comes stiff competition. Therefore, consider these Top Global Digital Marketing Trends in the Travel Industry when allocating your marketing efforts and budget.

Reinforcing Safe Travels Protocol

The world’s “stay home, be safe” slogan in 2020 resonated so clearly that even toddlers rhyme with it. Many hotels and airline brands will continue to highlight safety-related digital campaigns to transition the consumers from their “safe at home” belief to braving the outdoors.

Travel and hospitality sectors, whether government or private, need to comply with the safe travels protocol to get a SafeTravels Stamp. This global stamp gives both travelers and host countries confidence in the resumption of the inbound travels. New normal travel jargon includes the green list of countries, vaccinations & RT-PCR tests, contactless payments, bubble facilities, quarantine protocol, travel corridors, and more.

The rise of robotics & AI technology in the name of safety in the travel industry is a phenomenal shift. The goal is to further enhance traveler’s experiences by providing an ‘always-on’ virtual assistance such as chatbots, language translators, and wayfinding. Humanoid robots start to co-exist to provide services in the areas of sanitization, information desks, and housekeeping.

Travel Search Marketing

Do you want to know something? Habit or not, you’ll start with a Google search. This search giant is the world’s most popular search engine with 91.66% market share as of October 2021. Mobile search for local services “near me” with purchase intent is more prevalent and continues to rise. To rank high on the “near me” category, you need to have a Google Business page, or pages if you operate in multiple locations. Likewise, a location-based page with the URL format: www.yourdomain.com/location-services is key to increasing visibility on SERP (search engine results pages). Google’s “mobile-first indexing” means having a mobile-optimized website is no longer just an option but a must-have to be searchable. Internet users will continue to embrace the use of voice, photos, 3D & augmented reality as their search interface.

One of the top global digital marketing trends in the travel industry is the shift on the search engines’ market penetration. Bing, Baidu, Yahoo! and Yandex complete the big 5 list.

The rising share of the other 4 search giants

Bing is the second largest search engine with Yahoo! operating in the same SEO algorithm. To appear high on SERP, your website should at least fit into the mobile frame (also called viewport configuration). Ensure clear title tags that match the search query you are aiming for. Keywords on both SEO meta descriptions and page content are essential. If your business has social media pages, they can also affect your ranking on Bing and Yahoo!

The ever-growing China’s king of search Baidu crawls mainly on a .CN domain as .COM sites are almost invisible. Any websites with duplicate content and are not written in simplified Chinese won’t be indexed. To own and publish a website in China, you need to have an internet content publishing license (ICPL).

On the other hand, Yandex search is tailored for the Russian market and has closed the gap on Google. Android phone users in Russia no longer have a Google search by default, so Yandex search visibility is key. Websites can rank high in terms of geo-tagging, domain age (older websites rank better in Russia), user engagements, sitemaps index, and commercial factors.

Social, Local & Mobile (SoLoMo)

In 2021, Facebook boasts a record of 2.9 billion monthly active users, making this social media giant the most popular in the world. YouTube is its close counterpart with 2.3 billion users followed by WhatsApp and Instagram having just above 1 billion. TikTok users grew tremendously reaching a billion mark in September 2021. UGC (user-generated content) will keep pouring as platforms continue to evolve with engaging tools available for users to express their creativity. Premium access and subscriptions to these digital content will also rise and be highly monetized.

For the travel and hospitality marketers to ride on this tide, they need to allocate more energy to their live video content and tie it up with in-stream conversions. In fact, social-mobile commerce is here now and will continue to increase its share in the market. By 2023, 100 million direct purchases are expected from the U.S. social media users alone – a skyrocketing 80% growth since the start of the 2020 pandemic.

Travel Sites Reviews & Reputation

While travel and hospitality marketers can spend tons of dollars on their online search and social media, brand reputation is something that no money can buy. To get 5-star reviews, one must provide 5-star service first. Travel sites such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com, Google Business Reviews, and Facebook will continue to influence bookings. According to statistics, 81% of travelers always read reviews before booking a hotel. The good news is, brand reputation management tools are evolving to be smarter and more personalized.

Google Alerts, Falcon.io, Mention, and Brand24, are some examples of effective tools to scoop the internet about your brand. For medium to large businesses, online Brand & PR (public relations) have their dedicated team. However, a holistic view of the brand’s reputation data can ultimately impact the digital marketing efforts and budget.

Multilingual Digital Touchpoints

Language translation and localization across digital marketing channels will rise tremendously. Bookers read reviews and are twice influenced by the content written in their native languages. Multilingual booking engines, e-concierge, websites, apps, emails, and social media content are digital touchpoints users expect to “speak their language”. The global translation industry sees the growing demand for translating and localizing content into these languages: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Japanese, French, Italian and Polish.

The travel market, more than any other consumers, rely on digital information before they make any purchase decision. With tough competition to capture their decreasing attention span, your brand will standout if you can connect to them using their language. Being one of the leading global language technology providers, Globalization Partners International helps travel industries communicate and position their brands in any language and any locale.

Conclusion

For Digital Marketers to predict the future of the travel industry, they don’t need a crystal ball. There is no shortage of helpful blogs, articles, and statistics to keep you updated. Travel and tourism will continue to grow despite the pandemic, albeit more safety-focused. The top global digital marketing trends in the travel industry includes the evolving AI technology, robotics and language translations to enhance the travel experience. Search engines’ use of Augmented Reality (AR), photos, and voice searches will become a customary practice. Social-mobile commerce is the biggest trendsetter, with direct purchases to increase by 80% in the U.S. alone by 2023.

Because 81% of frequent travelers read reviews before they book, it is non-negotiable to keep your online brand reputation healthy. Use intuitive aggregating tools to collect publicly available reviews, comments, and sentiments about your brand. Finally, digital marketing touchpoints such as websites, apps, booking engines, social media posts, and emails will connect deeper to the audience. The language technology industry plays a great role in the success of your global digital marketing initiatives.

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For most business owners, the problem isn’t how to create a website or even start a blog; it’s how to attract potential customers to visit that virtual location floating around in cyberspace because increasing website traffic is the goal of many business owners and marketers. Visitors to your website can learn more about your products and services, establish trust in your brand, and eventually convert into leads and consumers. Read more to learn how to increase traffic to your website:

1. Implement Google Search Engine Optimization

Nowadays if you don’t know about SEO you are doing a disservice to yourself. Learn the complexities of SEO so you can engage in the appropriate traffic delivery techniques. You can boost your results by having a thorough understanding of SEO.

2. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

A fully optimized Google Business listing receives a 7x higher number of hits than one that is incomplete. Remember that your listing contains a link to your website, so this is an excellent approach to increase traffic to your site. Google’s results pages are becoming increasingly intelligent. If your listing contains all the information that a potential consumer requires to make a decision, they may choose to contact/visit your business location directly rather than visiting your website – which is even better! See example:

Image Source: LOCALiQ

3. Build Backlinks

A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Backlinks from relevant companies or industry leaders will not only raise your company’s visibility but will also drive qualified traffic to your website.

Furthermore, Google notices backlinks and will place more faith in your company if it attention to other reputable websites linking to yours. More Google trust means higher rankings, which means more traffic. Quality backlinks will help you get recognized on Google.

4. Social Media Marketing

One of the most popular free marketing techniques is social networking, which helps drive traffic to your website. Promote blog posts and other relevant pages on your website using social media platforms for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. If you post shareable material, you may convert your social media followers into website visitors and generate traffic from their networks.

5. Email Marketing

Regularly sending out newsletters and advertising special deals via email is a wonderful way to stay in touch with clients and may also help drive traffic to your website. Provide useful information and links to areas on your website where they can learn more, such as blog posts and landing pages for specific offers.

6. Responsive Website

Mobile devices are used to access the internet by more people than ever before and requiring your visitors to pinch and scroll their way across your site is practically asking them to leave. Even if you only have a simple website, it must be viewable and available on multiple devices, including handheld smartphones.

7. Website Speed

Have you ever had to wait for a webpage to load for thirty seconds? I don’t know either. If your site takes an eternity to load, your bounce rate will be exceedingly high. Make sure your pages are technically optimized, including photo file sizes, page layout, and the use of third-party plugins. It’s important if your website is quick to load.

8. Blog

Blogging is good for SEO because it helps with several important ranking factors. If you have a blog that is updated regularly with a high-quality blog on topics that are important to your audience, it might make a huge impact on how well your entire website performs in search engines.

9. Internal Links

The number of sites linking back to your website isn’t the only factor that influences the strength of your link profile; your internal linking structure can also be influential. When creating and posting content, keep an eye out for internal linking chances. This not only helps SEO but also improves the user experience.

10. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free to use, and the information it provides can help you increase the number of visits to your website. Use tracked links in your marketing campaigns and monitor your website’s metrics on a regular basis. This will help you better understand the factors that contributed to the success of your campaign and learn from the ones that you can improve on.

Conclusion:

We have mentioned the best ways and methods that are used to increase the number of visits and views to your website. Of course, many other ways can be implemented, however, we have narrowed them down to include the fundamental and proven ways to help increase website traffic

References:

• WordStream
• LOCALiQ
• Forbes
• HostGator

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Marketers who want to reach out to a variety of target consumers from a specific class, geography, and cultural will benefit from applying cultural research to their international marketing strategies. Some marketers may target a small population with similar cultural values, focusing on their code and value, while others may promote items that can be marketed across cultures and engage in cross-cultural marketing.

What is Cultural Research:

Cultural research is the study of human behavior and psychological processes following the ways where subculture builds and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations, and power.

Cultural Influences:

There are five essential elements to consider when beginning your cultural research activities:

• Geographic Influences: Each region, country, city, and neighborhood have its unique communication styles, historical influences, and worldview. Some people have lived in the same place their entire life, while others are newcomers. As they are exposed by various events over time, this can have a significant impact on their perception. Consider how you would communicate with Chinese and then American people, and how their differences are influenced by their geographical location and cultural differences.

• Influential Figures and Movements: Cultures revolve around idols who are well-known among the community. Each country, subculture, or fashion trend is based on a group of people who have been actively involved in the cultural movement’s growth, either historically or now. They might be politicians, musicians, artists, or activists, or someone who becomes known as the perfect embodiment of a cultures ideals.

• Language and Memes: Memes, or language and image references, are at the heart of producing resonant material. You should look at how people communicate, including the words, phrases, and memes they use to express feelings and ideas, rather than just the simple language hurdles that you must overcome to reach new markets. All of these can assist you in determining your preferred mode of communication, whether formal or casual, including how to use these styles to integrate into a community.

• Historic and Current News: History, news, and events all impact the path that cultural movement takes, resulting in a richer experience. New cultures have a limited number of influences, experiences, and organizations looking for common ground to gain exposure. Other cultures are minuscule and might never develop because they do not exchange news or are not apparent in the media’s attention spectrum, therefore they will be more difficult to study since their history and news are not central.

• Rules and Mores: Generally accompanied with a set of norms, is the cultural aspect of people, places, religions, and beliefs. A simple example is religious dietary restrictions, such as avoiding eating pork or beef, and so on. Other regulations, such as not using specific brands because of their beliefs, and avoiding specific colors that have an undesired meaning, may be more subtle in some cultural movements.

Cultural Research Tools:

In the digital era, marketers have many tools at their disposal for conducting cultural research.

These tools can be used for classic audience research, but they make it much easier to target certain cultures.

Below are some of the most common cultural research tools:

1- Social Media Conversations

Keywords, Facebook groups, Twitter communities, hashtags, and influencers are all useful tools for understanding how a certain community is communicating, talking, and interacting, as well as their level of involvement with your business or product.

2- Audience Research

Marketers will be able to use audience research firms study on certain cultural groups. This may be done by firms such as, eMarketer, Nielsen, and many others. However, it can also be done by specialist firms that will create dedicated reports and case studies on what worked and what didn’t while working on cross-cultural campaigns. Scholarly research may also be a valuable source of information as it is more in-depth and specifically tailored to certain subcultures.

3- Dedicated Platforms

Following the customers journey through content is another method to utilizing digital media to further your cultural study. You may learn about all the prior concerns we’ve covered and understand what values are of most importance to the cultural group by locating and visiting niche websites, influencers accounts, dedicated applications, blogs, and forums.

Conclusion:

Cultural research is essential when expanding to any new target country, it helps reducing the risk of misunderstanding or causing offense, which might result in negative publicity of the company. Marketers will be able to decrease risk, and have their campaign effectively accepted by that new culture by understanding the cultural background of the audience.

Resource:

Digital Marketing Institute

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Not only is the current world situation an avid reason for everyone to turn to the digital world, but the internet itself has eased the distance between people, thus making people see more products and services and have greater access to business, even if they are not local ones.

If you are an owner of a business, global marketing is a must as no matter how small your business is, you can sell and ship your products and services to consumers wherever they are in the world in just days.

What is Global Marketing:

Global Marketing is essentially how businesses organize and advertise their products or services globally. International corporations have been doing this for years with their vast range of employees and representatives situated around the globe, but now you can easily do this with your small business too.

Global Marketing Strategies:

A global marketing strategy is basically your planning phase of how you will reach out to the world. Two key steps and strategies to ensure success are:

Firstly, the brand and image must be established to be popular and recognized on the local level, this can lead potential customers in other countries to be curious about your product.

Secondly, a marketing plan must be made based on the investigation of your goals and aligning them with the needs of the region. Make sure to adjust this as you move from region to region or country to country. Don’t forget to personalize and localize, as the more you speak in your target audience’s native language, the more likely they are to relate to your product and service, and thus more likely to make a purchase.

Global Marketing Localization:

Global marketing and localization go hand-in-hand. If you fire off a message around the world without localizing it first, most likely your campaign will be a failure instead of being a global door opener for your company.  Global marketing localization is about adapting your content to your new target audience and prioritizing the cultural nuances and buyer behaviors of your target market. As an example: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and you will only be able to do that if you ask an actual Roman Using a localization service ensures that your target audience will understand and be engaged by your messaging and will interact (buy, use, recommend, etc…) with your product or service.

And while crafting your message, don’t forget the messenger. Whether a digital or mechanical platform, ensuring you use the appropriate technology and software is key. If a country doesn’t use Google as the primary search engine, don’t place Google Ads for that specific location. If they use Twitter more than Facebook, invest in Twitter promotions more than Facebook ones. If the platform is not used by your target audience, it is wise not to waste time and money on it. This means that you must also tailor your message to each platform: what medium works best and is a platform based more on pictures, videos, or text?

A Few Items Your Global Marketing Campaign Should Include Are:

-how sellable your product is across markets,

-what adjustments are necessary if any; take into account changes in prices when competing in foreign markets

-the placement and how your foreign customers choose and purchase

-how understandable is your message across countries

-are there any changes needed depending on language and culture (locale)

Why Bother To Localize Your Marketing Campaign:

Why must I adapt a global marketing strategy? There are many benefits in taking a localized approach to global marketing.

First, it usually increases the quality of your products and services as a result of the global exposure and getting more customer adoption and feedback, which is a natural effect of expansion.

Second, It will also increase the familiarity of your brand image and raise knowledge about it based on ads and commercials.

Third, the more you are established, the less marketing you will eventually have to do because your brand will market itself with the consumers’ recommendations which means you will be saving money as well.

Global Marketing Challenges:

There are some challenges that you must take into account.

First, you must make sure there is an existing market in the region you are considering. Market research and testing can take time and money.

Second, there is a greater financial risk linked to such endeavors. You may spend a lot of time and money only to find out “Eskimos don’t really need ice…” as the locale-specific saying goes.

Third, it is difficult to adjust to the different rules every time you enter a new market. There are legal, language and cultural rules to be followed in order to get your message across and be accepted versus rejected or worse.

Global Marketing Greats:

There are several great global marketing examples that one can observe, such as Coca-Cola, Dunkin-Donuts, and Nike.

• Nike, for example, bases each of its campaigns on famous local athletes.
• Dunkin Donuts offers several menu items, some of which are regional, such as the Sobia-flavored donuts and drinks in Egypt or the Qamar Al-Din flavored frosting, which is a seasonal drink made from dried peaches in Egypt.
• Coca-Cola also localizes its ads by depending on famous musicians. A known face of Coca-Cola in the Middle East is the Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram. This has created a familiarity of the brand and made it seem less international and more of a local experience that makes customers purchase it as opposed to actual local soda companies.

Conclusion:

While there is no reward without risk, doing your research before, during, and after a global marketing campaign can ensure your campaigns are successful. A well planned and executed campaign, utilizing a localized approach and following some guidelines, will ensure you open new country markets for your products and services resulting in more recognition, customers and reward…think dollars or dirhams or dobra

The post Localization and Global Marketing appeared first on Globalization Partners International.

Around the world, social media in all forms is becoming one of the most important topics for international marketers. Social media is influencing how businesses conduct all facets of their marketing, sales, and customer support.

In order to reach your current and potential customers, listeners, fans and friends from around the world, here are a few tips when conducting an international social media campaign.

Identify the Local Market

Identifying local markets is the key to building a successful social media strategy. There are several initial questions you need to be answered in order to identify the local market properly.

• What social media platforms do the locals use? Which platform is the most effective for your business/services?
  If Twitter and Facebook are the most active networks in your target market, but you are B2B manufacturing company, then maybe you will need to focus on video marketing or select LinkedIn groups instead.
• What are the cultural traditions of the local users?
  The culture of your target market is extremely important. Businesses need to localize communications and make sure they are culturally appropriate, timely and persuasive. Understanding your market’s holiday calendar, seasonal celebrations, and religious traditions, as well as sports and culinary preferences, are all part of the local culture you need to develop content around.
• What is the language commonly used on the local social media network?
  It is important to decide what is the most effective language to be used is for communications on the targeted local social media. Some marketers would like to have fully localized content for social media while some marketers will choose to have bilingual content. For markets like the UAE which is full of expats, a bilingual content strategy is the best tactic to follow.
• What are common social media behaviors for local users? What are the trending topics in the local market?
  You should always try to figure out where your offer will meet the most demand. You should constantly research the behavior of social media users in the local market, their trending topics and what the local market segments are talking about.

Build a Multilingual Content Strategy

A lot is being said today about not just starting a dialog and making posts on social media, but companies need to have a solid overall content strategy. Language is part of this strategy. The need for multilingual content is more critical than ever. Some marketers tend to focus only on their native content strategy and forget to develop a multilingual content strategy for the local markets. Many major brands now believe in language specific content marketing and are devoting time, talent and tactics to their presence in foreign social networks in order to be successful in these markets.

There are several important tips for building a successful multilingual content strategy:

• Translate and localize your content (by a professional translation agency if necessary)
• Modify your content to be more useful and informative for social sharing
• Focus on the local trends and updates in the target market or locales
• Optimize your social media profiles’ content and messages for locales and target language

For more information, check our blog post: How to Create a Content Strategy for Multilingual Content.

Define Your Social Media Channels

Your website is one of the most powerful online channels available to your organization to communicate effectively with your audience. However, your customers are increasingly using their mobile phones and tablets to communicate through social media platforms. You ultimately need to establish your presence on the social media channels where your global customers can find you, receive updates and offers and communicate with your brand. A key element of your international social media strategy should be to define your channels and reach out to your customers and wherever they are.

Local language has a big impact on the use of social networks. In Germany, Twitter is not very popular due to the nature of the lengthy German language, as Twitter is limited to 280 characters. As well, some local networks are purely native. This means that you need to speak the native language to even exist on those networks. If you want to expand your business in Russia or China, these big markets and their popular native language social networks and users may not even speak English, so providing content in the local language is a must.

And let’s not forget about the political and governmental environment in local markets. The rules and laws and the ability to censor content can impact what you can post on some countries’ social networks. For instance, according to Google, Saudi Arabia alone is the biggest user of YouTube per capita worldwide. YouTube is the most popular network for Saudi users due to the internet blocking of websites that contains improper content. I would always advise online marketers who are targeting the Saudi market to focus on video marketing and YouTube ads.

Managing the International Social Media Accounts and Campaigns

Optimizing your global social media accounts and campaign management requires expertise. I would recommend using the services of a professional localization consultant and a native-speaking team to provide effective training to your team to manage your social media accounts or have them handle it for you. You will need to address several factors while managing international campaigns in addition to what I mentioned above:

1. Consumer behavior is not the same for each country or locale
2. Tracking results by country and language is critical to allow you to optimize campaigns
3. Managing communications (posts and replies) in different time zones requires the right staff
4. Reading and interrupting various reports. Some local social media channels provide different insights and metrics than your typical global social media channels
5. Some popular social media platforms don’t work in all languages
6. Optimized Blog Development and Design: Providing web design and development services for your blog
7. Multimedia translation: Providing multimedia translation for your local markets which include YouTube video translation, social games localization and graphic translation.

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With the growth of global communications and marketing, you need to adapt your social media communication to different cultural audiences and locales.

Localization means adapting all of your content to different local cultures. It involves more than just translation as it includes all aspects of communication.

Since social media is heavily influencing all of our communications it is no longer enough just to localize your content. In today’s dynamic, social networking-charged environment, you need to adapt your communication to match your intended target markets to make sure that your message and intent are successfully communicated.

Social Media Marketing Localization

Social media marketing in different cultures and different languages follow the same rules as those used in your own country. You must know your target audience well before you can create an effective social media strategy. You need to understand several important factors to create such a plan:

• The most popular local social media networks (various from one country to another).
• The languages used in the communication on the local social networks (some are bilingual and some are not).
• The modern languages and dialects used for communication on the local network (Arabic regions have a lot of dialects).
• The trending topics in each country and what are the local market segments talking about. It is important to always be up-to-date on locale-based trends because they can change swiftly and frequently.
• The target culture is extremely important and you will always need professional localization candidates to localize your communication and to provide advice about the content you are posting or sharing.

Adapt Your Social Media Channels for International Audiences

With good research and an efficient localization team, you will be able to have an effective strategy and social media policy for each locale that you are willing to join through social media tools and channels. Your translation company should be able to provide assistance in this area.

Twitter Localization

Try to learn more about how Twitter is being used in your target market countries.  The use of Twitter is very different from one country to another and even from one region to another. You or your translation partner will need to monitor each locale to learn their habits on Twitter.

Although Twitter is a 280-character microblogging platform, each region has its unique style of adapting to it. Differences between users in the different countries include trends heavily influenced by news and major global events.

Twitter usage is heavily affected by language. For example, Japanese users have more flexibility to tweet long text because the Japanese writing system can use an individual character to express a word. Germans are more limited in what they can Tweet because the German language usually has many more characters in words than English.

LinkedIn Localization

Communication on LinkedIn is not the same as any other social network because LinkedIn is far more focused on business and career profiles, It is the largest professional network.

LinkedIn is heavily used in the United States and India as a B2B and Human resources tool and the growth around the globe is on the rise.

With LinkedIn you have strong opportunities to create effective communications in the United States and many other countries, if you stay up-to-date, you will be able to find new global leads coming to this business network in the near future.

Facebook Localization

Facebook is the biggest social network in the world with members from all around the world. Facebook supports most languages, which gives it the advantage to cover many locales. With the newly improved Insights box on Facebook Pages, you can monitor some international metrics and your segmentations.

International Social Media Growth

The demographics in many countries are undergoing fast changes and this will eventually impact localization and cross-cultural communication with these countries.

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If you’re just starting to take your business globally, it’s important to understand that translating your social media campaigns isn’t the only language service that you need. To be able to truly address and engage your audience in each market with a successful social media ad campaign, you need to localize your social media content.

What Is Localization?

Localization is the process of adapting and adjusting content to fit into the culture of each global audience and helps them relate it to their own experiences. So it’s not just translation and language fluency that is important but also having a deep cultural understanding of the target audiences. Your audience wants to see content that’s meaningful for them and focuses on their needs, which includes being sensitive and inclusive to their culture while still promoting the essence of your global brand’s service or product.

Your audience will be the most impacted by content that they can really relate to and touches on their own experience. Your audience can be entertained or emotional if they feel like they’re having a unique cultural experience that they can relate to. If the content isn’t relatable, it’s much more likely that your target audience will bypass the social media post. Perhaps your audience will even negatively view your brand, since you’re not providing them something that they can relate to even if the content is in their own language.

This is the difference between translations and localization, and why localization matters so much. Localization can ensure that your intended message is communicated in just the right way for your target audience. Sometimes it means making light adjustments and adapting small things, and other times it requires more in-depth changes.

Some of the Items to Evaluate During Localization

As you can see, localization goes beyond mere language fluency and translation. We’ll describe just some of the many factors to consider during the localization process.

Cultural References

Cultural references include rivaling sports teams, celebrities, historical events, or cultural or religious holidays. During the localization process, your language service provider will look at these cultural references to ensure that the target audience is familiar with these references and are as specific as possible. This means you need to have a deep cultural and historical understanding of your audience. Most likely, you’ll need to consider hiring assistance that will provide you with the necessary cultural experts.

Cultural Values

Another element to consider while shifting your business to a new market is cultural values. If your audience feels a lack of understanding or respect of their history or values, the chances of your business succeeding will diminish. For example, a restaurant chain is quite unlikely to succeed if they promote a ham sandwich as their main dish in a Muslim majority country where pork is taboo. Also, consider that your audience may interpret or view historical events. Another cultural norm to think about is the different modesty levels in each location and how that can affect the kind of content you generate.

In addition, you should make sure that you represent the culture you’re trying to attract. Don’t just represent your culture in photos. Make sure members of that culture, whether they have special headdresses or are predominantly from the same race, are represented in your images, especially the ones about their holidays or historic events, or any other content you might create that is culture-specific.

Slang and Idiomatic Speech

Consider your audience’s slang and idiomatic speech. There’s no doubt that decorating your content with regionalisms and sayings or phrases particular to a place will add personality and make your content more engaging. However, they might not work for your target audience. It might sound challenging, so if you don’t have the resources to do this work, consider hiring a language service provider with this type of experience.

The idea is to find these phrases and adjust them to fit your content. First, look at your content for phrases that are already regionally specific and might not have the same intended effect on other audiences. Second, determine what your intended message is. What is it that you want to be the takeaway message from each piece of content? Will your audience understand it? Third, look for words or phrases from your target audience’s culture that can substitute them. Or, alternately, omit the phrase entirely and restructure the post so that it’s globally understood.

Measurement Units

Another important item to take note of is units of measurements. For example, the UK uses the metric system, but the US uses the Imperial measurement system. Although both countries speak the same language and so no translation is required, localization remains an important factor as both countries have different cultures and want to see content the way they’re used to. For example, a recipe video posted in the US that uses the Imperial measurement system doesn’t have the same appeal in the UK and vice versa. If you want to appeal to a UK audience, you’ll need to make adjustments. Differences in measurement units are another reason why it’s important to localize content to reach your audiences.

Conclusion

No two audiences are the same. Even if your social media and business goals are the same in every region, your strategy to meet those goals needs to adapt to each region. Promoting your global brand through social media marketing can be a great way to expand your business, but to unlock this benefit, localizing your social media campaigns is key.

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