Do You Speak the Same Language as Your Audience?

When it comes to one of the biggest challenges that marketers face we can blame the people of the city of Babel. When their ill-advised tower was destroyed their punishment was no longer having one common language which in turn makes marketing to multiple countries rather difficult. Marketing collateral is expensive and challenging enough to create in one language, adding translations and cultural preferences to the mix is almost impossible for the majority of companies. With the proper software that is able to translate and allows version control, localization can then become a reality.

Customizing content to resonate with different target audiences goes beyond where different personas are getting your messages and creating persona specific content. For multinational companies, personalization crosses into localization. In some cases localization has regulatory implications that are just important or even more so than marketing, which adds another layer of complexity. Let’s take a look at a few reasons beyond the obvious that investing in an efficient way to personalize content would be of value.

Boosting your brand

Simply addressing people by their first names increases click-through rates. If one easy step is so powerful imagine what you can harness with a tool that has massive customization features?

If you are creating a large-scale campaign the core message needs to be diffused across formats and platforms without diluting its impact. It’s not always a different language or a different culture that you need to redefine your collateral for, sometimes a message on across one channel is completely wrong for a message on another. A single concept could be repurposed into a long-form article for your blog, optimized tweet-length messaging for Twitter and eye-catching imagery for Instagram and print magazines.

Equally, these need to be localized to your audience’s preferred language of consumption - full localization of a website is proven to increase conversion rates by as much as 70%. This is a complex process which necessitates a strong understanding of local norms; for example, many Malaysian audiences react more positively to branding in English than in Malay, while French-Canadian consumers expect communication not just to be translated into French, but into their own variant instead of the European version, just as many English words and phrases differ between the US and the UK.

Overcoming operational difficulties

A concerted effort to optimize content for different platforms requires the ability to track audience insights to measure the value of your campaigns. Working across so many channels, however, leads many businesses into the trap of using too many separate tools to try to build a robust analysis, but this produces unintegrated metrics which are difficult to collate or compare together. Additionally, you shouldn’t allow further iterations, such as content-by-location or transcreated versions, to add new layers of complexity.

An integrated marketing solution enables your business to address each and every messaging variation in one spot and track the relationship between different versions. This allows you to have and share your marketing assets in one place, with an information-rich context of channel and language variations alongside easily integrated performance data and insights. This lets all members of your business - whether inside or outside marketing - follow the relationships between your assets, which allows for personalized and localized integrated campaigns that cross-pollinate through any interdependent departments.

While the world has a complex makeup of different cultures, languages, beliefs and forty-thousand other reasons that people have to be marketed to with different messaging with the right software solution you can speak the same language as your entire audience.

For more information on censhare's solutions for customizing your marketing strategy and better communicating with your audience, download our free whitepaper Why Marketers Need to Rethink.