The amount of content produced every day is truly mind-blowing. With social media users and businesses producing tons of content on a daily basis, it’s extremely difficult to calculate the total volume of content that’s currently out there.
Instagram, for example, gets 95 million new photos from users every day. Just think about it: in just one week, Instagrammers create 665,000,000 new photos, which translates into trillions of kilobytes of data.
Don’t forget that Instagram is just one of the many social media networks out there. Even not the most popular one.
A large share of online content is produced by businesses. Content marketing has been incredibly popular in recent years with more and more businesses investing millions of dollars into content creation.
Why Content Marketing?
There are several reasons why content marketing has become a popular technique for building online presence and connecting with customers among online businesses:
- Google’s requirements. Google has made it clear that quality content created according to its requirements is key to ranking high and avoiding penalties
- Hard sell advertising. People are bored and tired with in-your-face advertising, and content marketing is a great, non-salesy alternative to that
- Cost-effectiveness. Content marketing costs less than outbound marketing but generates up to three times as many leads.
That’s why content marketing has been developing at the speed of light.
One of the emerging trends in content marketing that has a potential to generate a higher engagement rate with content is localization.
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Why Localize Content Marketing?
Offering people content tailored to their region, culture, and language makes a total sense because it makes it easy for customers to relate to the messages and connect with the businesses. Studies done as early as 2012 have found that:
- 72.1 percent of global consumers say they spend most of their online time browsing websites in their native language
- 72.4 percent say they are likely to make a purchase from a site that offers information in their language
- For 56.2 percent of customers, the price of a product is not as important as the ability to get information in their language.
Clearly, localization matters to customers, and it goes beyond translation. A company doing business within borders of one country also can localize their content marketing by tailoring such factors as slang, units of measure, spelling, accent, and many others.
If you would like to find how to truly localize your content marketing to increase its effectiveness on both local and international markets, check out the rest of the article.
How to Localize Content Marketing
1. Use Customer-Generated Content (CGC)
Simply explained, CGC – also often referred to as user-generated content – is content that has been shared online voluntarily by customers to show their experience with a business. For example, customers who have a good experience are often motivated to share them with their friends on social media, discussion forums, and other appropriate online places.
For example, take a look at this example of great customer-generated content on Facebook. A satisfied customer shares her experience of celebrating her birthday at a Bostonian restaurant and praises the service she received. This is
For businesses, CGC has become one of the most effective ways of promoting themselves because this type of marketing puts customers front and center and involves genuine experiences.
This nature of CGC also makes it popular among customers. According to eConsultancy, 85 percent of Millennials claim that CGS is a good indicator of the quality of a brand because they take information shared on social media when they make a decision to buy.
If your content marketing strategy involves CGC – and it should – then consider using it for specific locations to attract local customers (especially Millennials). If your business doesn’t attract a lot of CGC, you can use these tips:
- start a social media campaign and ask your customers to share pics with a specific hashtag showing their experience with your company’s local branch
- Host events. This is a great way to scale your CGC strategy and provide a boost to your online presence with localized marketing. For example, you can raise awareness of a local issue, host a contest or conference, a charity event, or any other kind of event that your target customers might be interested in. Encourage them to take photos with a specific hashtag
- Use local influencers. They can test your products and share the findings with their followers to raise awareness of your brand and generate some CGC in specific countries or areas.
2. Translate
Translation is a major part of localization, obviously, and we already know how important it is for global customers to read about products and services in their own language. English is not the only language out there, so if you’re planning to enter a market of a country where it’s not the official language, then you better translate your site and write content in that language.
Everything you write on social media for international customers should also be in the local language. Here’s a post shared by the official Italian Instagram account of IKEA. The post is fully translated into Italian, uses the local currency, and features a product available in local stores.
Source: Instagram
Cultural relevance also plays a critical role in translation of marketing materials. For example, one of the famous international marketing fails occurred with a well-known fast food brand KFC in China. The company’s traditional slogan – “Finger-lickin’ good – was translated to a not exactly delicious phrase “Eat your fingers off.” The translation cost KFC a lot of customers and a slow start on the market, among reputation damage.
To ensure the quality of translation, companies often hire local professionals who are familiar with local culture, slang, and other unique features. Local professional translators can be found on sites like PickWriters to make sure that the copy is translated correctly and doesn’t contain typos.
3. Take Care of Video
If your content marketing strategy features video, take a look at these localization best practices to ensure that your message attracts as many international customers as possible:
- Use locally relevant statistics and information
- Provide subtitles in the local language where needed
- Limit important visuals and text appearing in the bottom of the video frame to avoid blocking subtitles
- Consider local cultural sensitivities
- Keep the rate of speech slow to help viewers read subtitles.
One good technique to increase the viewership of your video on the local market is to broadcast live videos from local social media pages of the brand. Since platforms like Facebook seem to be betting on live video by changing the algorithms to give preference to them, it makes a perfect sense to try live broadcasts to improve social media engagement with content.
Localization is the New Trend in Content Marketing
The bottom line here is that localization matters to customers, so your content marketing strategy should meet this requirement. It’s clear that localized content is quickly becoming a new trend in content marketing because if done correctly, it can generate serious engagement and boost online presence.
Give your business an opportunity to target a local consumer group with content that’s properly localized, therefore, is more likely to attract their attention.
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Featured Image Credit: Unsplash
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beautifully explain how to attract customers with localized content marketing well done keep it up