International Marketing: How to Plan and Manage Global Marketing Campaigns

 

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.

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Managing International Market Research Campaigns

It is not unusual nowadays to design a market research campaign covering many countries. This isn’t unreasonable as most corporates service global markets and must understand their different needs. However, international studies bring with them a number of research implications.

Before committing to carrying out research in a dozen countries, it is worth considering why it is necessary to cover such a large number. The immediate answer may well be “because we sell in all these countries and they are all important to us for different reasons”. However, it is unlikely that all the countries will be of equal importance. Indeed, it is more than likely that just two or three countries will dominate. The question therefore should be, “which countries are crucial to the objectives of this survey and which are of peripheral interest?” It may be that a question of this kind can narrow the countries down and in so doing, will simplify the task.

When designing a multi-country study, consideration has to be given to 5 important factors:

 

Data collection methods. From a practical point of view, what methods of data collection can be used in the different countries? It has now become virtually impossible to carry out telephone interviews with large companies in the US if the researchers do not have access to a direct telephone number and a contact name. Even then, the use of voicemail makes telephone interviewing difficult and expensive. This has led to the domination of online panel interviews in the US. However, online panels of business-to-business respondents are often few and far between or of low quality in many countries outside the US and the more developed countries of Europe. Therefore, telephone interviews may be the most obvious and practical option. This being said, getting hold of people by telephone in certain countries, such as Japan and South Korea, is not easy because in those countries it is not normal protocol to divulge even quite ordinary insights to an unknown person at the other end of a phone line. Multi-country studies may well require different data collection methods and the different methods could require different approaches to questioning. Melding the results is something to think about before the study commences.

Questionnaire translations. Almost certainly a study involving a number of different countries will require a mix of different languages. If the questionnaire starts in English (and usually it does) then the questions must be simple and straightforward so that as little meaning as possible is lost in translation. It should not be assumed that anyone with a command of a language can act as a translator. Interviewers carrying out the foreign language questionnaires are not usually the best translators. Translations are best left to translation agencies and there are a number that specialize in market research questionnaires.

Extended timelines. Arranging the translations and having the translations checked inevitably burns up valuable time. A study planned in a single language that would take eight weeks to carry out could well require 12 weeks if it is to be conducted in multiple languages. Checking the translations and managing the quality checks on the different country studies is a painstaking process which should not be scrimped.

Inter-country comparisons. Bringing together the results from a multi-country study presents different challenges. To what extent can you compile data from different countries into one result? Equally, how comparable are the different country results? We know that certain cultures, particularly in developing countries, can be more generous in their responses than others. Normalizing data from different countries isn’t easy and it is often best to look at each country within its own country norms.

Budgets. Finally, all this comes with a cost. In the enthusiasm to carry out a multi-country study, budgets can be forgotten until the proposals roll in. The shock wave of finding out that there is a $200,000 price-tag may jolt the study back to reality and instead of research across a dozen countries, it steps back to a study of the three or four countries that really matter.

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