Going global is the ultimate goal for every large enterprise. The chance to expand your business and sell products to customers around the world is also an opportunity to grow your revenue, bolster your brand, and solidify your company as a major player in its industry for years to come.
But it’s one thing to design and successfully launch a local marketing campaign to target customers you know in-depth. It’s quite another to plan and manage a global marketing campaign that sells your new offerings, whether they are products or services.
Today, let’s explore how you can plan a global marketing strategy that brings results and that elevates your brand to new heights of success.
What is a Global Marketing Campaign?
Put simply, a global marketing campaign is a marketing campaign intended to successfully advertise products or services to a global, rather than a local or regional, audience. Global marketing campaigns are broad, generalized, and not nearly as targeted as marketing campaigns you may have planned and launched in the past.
But don’t be fooled. International marketing strategies and their campaigns are massively complex, oftentimes by many more degrees than regional campaigns. Global marketing campaigns are also highly important for brands looking to expand to new audiences. Since global marketing can be expensive, you need to make sure your materials are designed correctly for maximum impact. Every wasted dollar hurts your finances more during a global marketing campaign compared to a regional marketing campaign.
What Are the Key Elements of an International Marketing Strategy?
Successful global marketing strategies require that you develop and implement multiple important elements. These include:
- Doing a lot of research
- Assembling a team made of the right people
- Using the right tools, such as software platforms
- Managing the project with the right approach
- Tracking the right KPIs or key performance indicators
- Localizing your marketing materials and assets
- Standardizing and automating your processes as the campaign continues
Let’s explore some of the best ways to plan and manage a global marketing campaign.
Research, Research, Research
For starters, you must do a massive amount of market research if you hope for your campaign to be successful. Market research is important for all marketing, of course, but you can’t rely on your previous market revelations and insights to apply equally to all of your future audience members.
What works for an American audience may not work for a Chinese audience and vice versa. Therefore, plan to go back to the market research drawing board and learn:
- What your target audience members want and need
- The kind of language that most appeals to your target audience members around the world and that won’t insult or negatively impact other audience members
- How your brand is seen or thought of in target markets around the globe
Information is power – that’s as true in marketing as it is anywhere else. Do as much market research as you can and your campaign will have much better odds of overall success.
Develop “Global” Personas
It may help to develop powerful global personas rather than smaller, regionalized personas for individual audience groups. Buyer personas can vary from country to country or even from area to area within individual countries. Cultural variations, furthermore, affect how your brand is seen by locals and the kind of messaging you need to push to inspire purchases.
Therefore, your marketing team should develop global personas with both detail and nuance. Try to segment different likely or prospective audiences, determine what will most appeal to them, and find areas of crossover. Those crossover areas – such as shared wants or needs, shared thoughts about your brand, etc. – can be areas to highlight for your global marketing materials/assets.
Assemble the Ideal International Marketing Team
No marketing campaign will be successful without the right team leading the charge. It’s important to have the right blend of people for your marketing campaign to operate as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Therefore, you need to have forward-thinking and especially agile project managers.
Global marketing campaigns are flexible by their very nature. Your team lead can’t get hung up on specific strategies or goals that may not work for multiple target markets. Instead, the ideal project manager or lead and their team members should be:
- Willing to adapt to changing circumstances
- Diverse – this is important so your marketing campaign takes multiple points of view and frameworks into account
- Consistent and known for deliverables
Target Local Team Members
You should specifically try to target local team members at the beginning of the marketing process. Work with local team members so you can:
- Find the most suitable ways for you to collaborate within a global plan
- Come up with new ways to reach target audience members who may have very different cultural or economic ideas/opinions
- See things from new perspectives that your core marketing team members may miss unconsciously
Use a Project Management Approach
Given the breadth and complexity of any international marketing campaign, you should look at it with a project management approach above all else. The project management approach allows you to orchestrate your program and set important deadlines right from the get-go, as well as control things like:
- Team member collaborations
- Dependencies across different agencies or departments
- Resource allocation and data management
- And more
In other words, your team leader should think of global marketing as a massive project with many moving parts… because it is! Don’t think of global marketing as any other, more basic marketing campaign. Marketing globally requires its own focus, multitasking capabilities, and cross-departmental collaboration compared to smaller, localized campaigns.
Leverage the Right Software for Global Marketing Solutions
You can’t run your global marketing campaign without the right tools on hand. You can make the job ahead much easier if you leverage appropriate software solutions, like Mediatool.
Mediatool is a comprehensive marketing campaign management platform that allows you to instantly see an overview of your international marketing strategy, plus provides real-time control for your marketing activities. With Mediatool, you’ll be able to:
- Create international marketing plans in one place so all team members and external partners can see what’s going on and collaborate easily
- Set budgets and KPIs
- Merge marketing data into the same place for better analysis
- Consolidate data in real-time and integrate marketing channels
- Demonstrate the ROI your marketing campaign has provided to your business so far
- Improve and optimize your marketing strategy as time goes on, leveraging the gathered data to make better decisions
Mediatool can truly bolster any international marketing effort; try it today!
Establish the Right KPIs to Track
Establishing and tracking the right key performance indicators is also important. Don’t rely on tracking generalized metrics to see whether your campaign is coming along strongly. Instead, work with regional teams and find the unique metrics that tie back to your overall marketing goals.
What may look like slow growth in one region or country could be a sign of fast growth in another. Again, this highlights how global marketing is more complex than localized marketing, and it may require a custom-tailored look at each region or unique cultural market you want to reach.
Localize Marketing Assets
Be prepared to localize many or all of your marketing assets. Localization means going beyond just translating copy, of course. It also means checking your marketing materials like CTAs/calls to action, photography, videos, and so on.
Regional cultural differences can impact how your marketing materials land for your target audiences. If you don’t localize your materials, your marketing campaign efforts, like your advertisements or social media posts, may not make the advertising splash you hope they will.
Localization takes a lot of time, but it’s well worth it in the end. Done properly, localization will allow your brand to reach a much wider audience and connect deeply with your target personas, even if they are much more numerous than before.
Standardize and Automate
Lastly, you’ll only be able to scale up your global marketing strategy and really let it take off if you standardize and automate workflows and processes. Standardization and organization allow you to boost your return on investment/ROI massively, while also allowing your marketing materials to reach as many people as possible.
For example, don’t manually read and translate every blog post or email. You can instead automate the process using digital tools and machine learning technology to maximize efficiency and productivity across the board.
Standardization and automation will enable your global marketing campaign to truly impact a worldwide audience, as well as free up your team leads for other work on the horizon.
Thrive in the Global Market with Mediatool
Planning and managing a successful international marketing strategy means doing tons of research, developing the right personas for your target audience, and using the perfect tools for the job. Mediatool’s marketing campaign management platform makes any international campaign easy to plan and manage. Don’t wait until your campaign is already full steam ahead – contact us today and see how Mediatool can help your brand thrive in the global market.
