Content marketing is now a well-established marketing function at most organizations.According to eMarketer, 60 percent of marketers create at least one piece of content each week. That being said, it is still difficult for an enterprise business to implement its content marketing team strategy on a global scale—even with company-wide buy-in and growing budgetary allocations devoted to digital. Going global affects every area of content marketing and requires a succinct strategy to ensure you’re getting results for your efforts.
Here, we highlight three key areas to focus on when rolling out content marketing on a global scale for your business:
1. FORMULATION: CENTRAL BRANDED CONCEPT WITH LOCAL ITERATIONS
Any good content marketing strategy must incorporate a central branded message. This DNA lies at the heart of what you are trying communicate with your content. Your message doesn’t have to be explicit; it can simply be implied by the content. In fact, this is often an incredibly effective strategy.
Red Bull, which employs some of the best content marketers in the world, understands the power of suggestion and often lets the content take center stage. The company’s involvement and proximity to this engaging content is enough to make its message understood.
As one reporter for the Red Bull–sponsored magazine, The Red Bulletin, put it, “I’ve never been asked to crowbar Red Bull into any story I’ve done. . . . The promotion of the brand comes through the activities I cover.”
However, such artful suggestion really hinges on understanding the audience you’re talking to. Marketing, as a class of communication, is concerned with understanding the sociological realities and social expectations of its target audience. A subtle message that is easily understood by a certain group can go completely over a different audience’s head.
One example of this in the wild is the way movies are marketed domestically versus internationally. We are very used to how movie posters look and how trailers are designed. Yet, different markets in different countries see wildly different posters for almost the exact same films.
This piece on BuzzFeed shows how stark some of these differences can be; they’re often hilarious to us, but that’s simply because they’re speaking to a different culture:
