Laying the Groundwork to Success for Your Global Marketing Campaign

No longer restricted by geographical boundaries thanks to technology, the world is more connected than ever before. Companies now possess extraordinary means to reach out, communicate, connect, share, and spread information and messages to their customers using global marketing tactics. With the click of a trackpad, any brand can launch a piece of content out into the global ether via an ever-growing amount of social media channels and apps. They also have the ability to place ads that will pop up for targeted users—no matter their location—while they browse their favorite websites. 

This nearly limitless opportunity is like a magnet to marketers, pulling in brands both big and small and causing them to shift their focus toward creating and implementing global marketing campaigns. In fact, global ad spend is projected to reach $605 billion this year alone. In 2019, global social media ad spend hit $84 billion—the first time in history that social platforms surpassed print ad spend. This is not only a clear indicator of digital marketing’s dominance on a global scale, but a sign of how critical global marketing efforts will factor into a brand’s ongoing sales and marketing strategy for the foreseeable future. 

The Foundation for Global Marketing Success

Just because something is popular, however, doesn’t mean you should always partake in it. Executing a successful global marketing campaign is contingent upon ensuring that the campaign truly possesses an ability to connect and resonate with a global audience. And make no mistake, this is no small feat. Due to the sheer magnitude of what it entails to market something globally, it’s critical that brands do their due diligence and meticulously lay the groundwork to success with any global marketing campaign. 

Know Your Audience & Their Playing Field, and Adapt Accordingly

Implementing a global marketing campaign can be a complex challenge because of the many marketing differences and nuances between different geographical areas. One thing to have a clear grasp on are the different laws that govern marketing practices throughout many areas of the world. 

One of the most prominent examples of this is GDPR, a European law that regulates how companies can gather and utilize personal data from their customers. Because this is a regional mandate that applies to a large group of people, adherence to this law is necessary in a global marketing campaign. For instance, if you’re building a robust email marketing push to gain prospective sales leads as part of your global campaign, you’ll want to ensure compliance with GDPR and offer opt-out options to all recipients. Additionally, you’ll want to have boilerplate messaging in all email correspondences that is transparent in how you’ve acquired and plan to use a recipient’s personal information.

Outside of legal compliance, you’ll want to also be mindful of different turns of phrase or idioms across various cultures when crafting your messaging and marketing collateral. American beer company, Coors, discovered this the hard way when they launched a new global campaign with the slogan “Turn It Loose.” When translated into Spanish, the turn of phrase is more or less interpreted as suffering from intestinal issues. Coors quickly took steps to change the slogan for Spaniards and rectify this gaffe, but it’s a prime example of needing to ensure that all marketing collateral resonates in various cultures and areas while retaining its intended message.

Embrace Technology Solutions

A global marketing campaign will inevitably have tons of moving parts across the many months of its development, execution, and management. With that said, don’t be afraid to rely on your good friend technology to help. Project management tools like Wrike and Asana can be extremely useful in helping a marketing team establish clear, thoughtful, and efficient processes, while automating and making them more manageable in the process. They also help hold people accountable for their unique roles and responsibilities as you’re building out marketing collateral and executing your global marketing campaign.

Technology can also greatly help with organization, distribution, and customization of marketing assets. Take digital asset management (DAM) solutions for instance. A DAM can prove incredibly useful for global marketing campaigns, acting as a centralized, accessible, secure location for the storage and sharing of marketing assets and media files that you’ll be utilizing for your campaign. 

With a DAM, you can set up user permissions so that a campaign lead or project manager can control who on your marketing team has access to materials and collateral. This results in an organized place to find what’s relevant to an individual’s given function and role within the broader global marketing campaign. Additionally, a DAM allows for seamless content customization, meaning any wholesale changes to marketing collateral that need to be made in order to better resonate with specific geographic areas can be achieved easily.

You can learn more about MarcomCentral’s digital asset management solution by clicking here.

Ask Yourself: “Is This Campaign Helping Achieve Business Goals?”

At the end of the day, global marketing campaigns should always ladder back to your brand identity and overall business goals in order to be truly successful. So, be sure that every step or action within your campaign strategy has a clearly defined reason for its execution and a measurable return on investment or outcome to justify why you’re doing it. 

Global marketing campaigns can be incredibly costly and time intensive, so it’s important that whatever your ultimate business goal is (an increase in sales, effectively launching a new product, reaching out to new, prospective customers, etc.), it can be attainable with the time, effort, and money spent. If not, you’re merely chasing viral trends or awareness for the sake of attention and eyeballs. Sure you might get ink and great word of mouth, but will that result in a directly tangible and beneficial impact on business?

Go to Market with Your Global Marketing Campaign

A global marketing campaign’s success is fundamentally defined by all of the elements above. By strategically laying the groundwork ahead of time—knowing your global audience, translating collateral to suit different audiences, clearly establishing internal processes, utilizing advanced marketing technologies, and mapping back to business goals—a marketing team can launch a go-to-market global campaign with assured confidence. In doing so, you’ll be one step closer to building a better brand that empowers your business and augments your relevance on the global stage.