5 Best Practices for Engaging a Global Audience

*Today’s post was written by guest blogger, Liz O’Neill Dennison, content marketing manager at Kapost.

Engaging today’s hyper-connected, self-sufficient buyer is a challenge for enterprise companies operating in different markets. They must serve a variety of different audiences with targeted, relevant messages that promote actions, while still remaining true to their brand voice, tone, and thematic, and business goals.

Here are 5 best practices to follow:

1. Identify Themes for your Messaging

Content that’s created for the sake of it will end up in the trash bin.

Ensure all the the messaging you produce is informed by customer pain points, needs and questions or internal business goals by identifying overarching themes first. Gather stakeholders from each major market and team in your company to develop these themes and then use them as a blueprint for your  messaging strategy in the quarter to come.

2. Develop Buyer Personas

If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, your messages won’t resonate or drive desired action. Take the time to develop detailed buyer personas for each market you’re operating in. These buyer personas should include details like language, cultural perspective, daily digital routine, needs, and priorities. They should tell your team when your audience is online, how they consume content, which messages resonate with them most and why. Use these personas to tailor your content accordingly. Each content asset you create should be associated with at least one buyer persona.

3. Develop Content with a Global Audience in Mind

Repurposing content and messaging from one market to another is a lot easier if it was developed with a global audience in mind. Translating idioms and phrases can be difficult from one language to another. Create a style guide that encourages clear writing and includes guidance on word choice, tone preferences, terms to avoid, product names in each market, etc. For great multilingual style guide examples, check out Microsoft’s approach.

If your company is translating a large volume of content, it might also make sense to centralize your translation efforts in one place, like a translation management system.

4. Build a Workflow for your Team

Writing, editing and publishing across different teams and regions can be chaotic. Building a step-by-step workflow to govern the tactical elements of your marketing campaigns is essential for keeping your team on track. Workflows will differ based on your needs. A one-off blog post workflow will differ from a multi-market campaign workflow. But how you build workflows remain the same: identify needs for each piece of content you’re producing, assign each task to a specific person, and establish a centralized communication method so your team can stay on track.

5. Select the right Distribution Channels

Your marketing efforts are worthless if no one can find your content. The best global distribution strategies not only incorporate an equal mix of paid, earned, and owned distribution channels but also take into account how these channels differ across markets.  If you’re marketing in Brazil and don’t have a presence on Orknut, their most popular social media channel, you won’t be that effective. Talk to representatives in each of your local markets, do audience research, and map out the most important distribution channels in each region or country.

Want more tips for connecting with a global audience? Download this global marketing campaign kit.