Globalization offers growing businesses more opportunities than ever. You can reach a potential new client in India over Facebook. An existing customer may email your blog or latest deal to a relative at back home in the UK, Japan or Angola.
For your podcast to make the most of these opportunities, you need to do more than hope this kind of sharing happens. It would be best if you had a concerted, global strategy.
Marketing strategies are tricky enough at the best of times, let alone coming up with one targeting beyond your borders. Here, we break down some critical steps to creating a great global marketing strategy.
Know Your Audience
Like with any marketing strategy, you need to know your audience. Each market will be different, so try to do more than just creating a universal global plan that you deploy in each market.
Consider your audience’s demographics and habits and the way those metrics may affect how they engage with your products. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics provide all kinds of data and information to help you assess audience demographics. These tools can give you unique insights into the habits of different audiences.
Differentiate Your Product Offerings
Different countries — and regions within those countries — will have different priorities when it comes to your products and services. One of your services may be incredibly prevalent in country A while your other services struggle, or all of your services may do alright in country B.
This kind of challenge highlights how you need to market different products depending on the country. With the audience data gathered during your market research, you should develop a good idea of what is popular in each country you are targeting, and how popular you are.
By differentiating your product offerings, you can make the most of your service or product’s popularity in each country.
Consider Cultural Differences
Global marketing and multilingual content experts One Cup Digital note that accounting for cultural differences is one of the trickiest aspects of this type of venture.
Sometimes, cultural differences are subtle. Other times, they may be quite stark, but that difference may still express something you know well. It may be challenging, but you need to put the work into navigating these differences.
Take the time to research apparent differences such as language, dialects, units of measurement and currency, idioms, and politics. Showing you have put the work into this research will prove to an audience that you have invested in them, and you will derive legitimacy and trust from getting this stuff right.
In turn, you can use the lessons you learn in the research to better tailor your marketing messaging to local markets.
Translate and Localize
Of course, to account appropriately for cultural and local differences, you can’t always assume that using English — or whatever your business’s native language — is enough to get by. English is a global language, but that doesn’t mean that everyone speaks it. Even when people do, it won’t resonate in the same way a mother tongue does.
Consider writing content and messaging in the audience’s native language. Often, you won’t need to create new content from scratch. You can hire a translator to write your content in the target language.
Most translators will have a keen sense of cultural differences, so they will also be able to help you craft your content, so it makes the best sense possible once it gets translated.
If a translator is beyond your budget, enable Google Translate on your web pages, so that users can translate content into their own languages.
The Takeaway
When you put in the work and go beyond the basics of an armchair traveler, you can tap into the deepest needs and desires of your global audiences. Do the research, understand your demographic, and know how your podcast bridges cultural differences and translates to the target audience, and you’ll be well on your way to global success.
