Best Localization Strategies to Grow Your Brand

These days, brands must reach across borders and engage with international audiences to boost brand awareness, brand growth, and stay competitive. But engaging with new customers involves more than merely bridging the language barrier. Culture sits at the heart of consumer behavior, and to navigate these waters; you need an innovative localization strategy!

Localization strategies allow brands to adapt to the culture, local needs, competition, regulations, and the market as a whole when entering new territory. It will enable them to resonate better with global audiences and address the unique needs of every new audience they engage with.

If you’re not sure what the best localization strategies for brand growth are, here are a few starting points you might want to consider to help you create a more substantial, global customer base.

Create a Localized Marketing Strategy

Localization marketing is basically an investment in resources that’ll help you scale your marketing efforts through localization. This can be done in addition to creating native content and driving local campaigns.

Localized marketing is generally seen as a process that sees brand messaging created to resonate with the target audience. However, marketing localization goes beyond just the brand message and adapts the entire experience.

So, in marketing localization, the goal is to have a process wherein an experience is created with the intention to resonate with new audiences. Elements like brand messages, visuals, and UX get adapted with marketing localization.

However, with localization marketing, the focus shifts to a digital marketing strategy that leverages localization to achieve brand growth. The systems and processes that support the strategy are the elements that are adapted through this approach.

Add a Human Touch to Your Localization Strategy

The last thing you want is to let customers feel like they’re being excluded due to language barriers. And in order to promote inclusivity, you need to consider the human element at every stage of the journey.

Any brand that’s entering a new market needs to shift its focus from the company towards the customer. When you localize your offerings, your customers can tell you care about them through your design and translation efforts.

But inclusivity revolves around much more than just words. You also need to pay close attention to cultural nuances, norms, and expectations.

Establish an International Community

The goal of expanding your brand is to establish an international community and loyal customer base. But are you really connecting with them on a deeper level?

Strategic localization strategies will help you ensure that you’re meeting the preferences and expectations of your global audience through localized marketing campaigns.

Once you’ve established a global community, you’ll need to adjust every marketing campaign according to local cultural expectations. Professional localization services typically include a full suite of solutions that include website localization, document translation services, linguistic testing, and the creation of new content for the target market.

Build a Global Brand Identity

If you want to take your brand to the next level, you’ll need to localize your brand identity too. And your website is the foundation of your brand’s identity, so it might need to be altered for all local markets and regions for a successful localization strategy.

However, it’s best to start with the basics and test it out on the local level first. You can stick to your baseline identity and then offer localized marketing content to serve each individual market that you target.

Optimize for ALL Channels

It’s not uncommon for brands to go all in and place most of the emphasis on their localization strategies on their websites. However, your mobile-friendly content also deserves attention as part of your global marketing strategy. If you’ve got an app, it presents a unique growth opportunity since there are so many consumers that prefer using their smartphones instead of their laptops.

Just as you need to pay attention to mobile apps, the same rings true for social media channels. Not all countries use the same social platforms, which means you need to take local networks into consideration when you localize your offerings.

Always Use Localization Experts for the Localization Process

Brands that want to expand into the global marketplace with the least amount of effort must use professional website localization services from a language services provider with in-country experience for each and every one of their target markets.

Local isn’t the focal point of LOCALization for no reason. Using local experts is one of the most critical steps in ensuring your localization strategies actually result in measurable brand growth. When it comes to translation and localization, a reputable service provider will ensure your strategy meets every requirement while never forgetting about the cultural differences at play!

Focus on Technical Localization

There’s much more involved in the localization process than just content translation. Brands need to pay attention to technical details like website layout and design to ensure they’re catering to the needs and expectations of their foreign audiences.

This becomes even more critical when you’re targeting cultures and languages that are a world away from English, like Russian and Chinese. Not considering character size and font sizes can quickly turn off potential customers and see them heading over to your competitor instead.

Empathize with Your Target Market

According to a current master in visual design and communication, each sign is commonly followed by a reaction. Brand localization is based on empathy because it’s supposed to generate positive emotional responses in your target market if it’s done right. By localizing your brand, you’re showing empathy towards the audience by acknowledging their needs. This effectively builds trust and bridges the cultural and language gap between the global market and the local market your brand originated from.

Wrapping Up

The best localization strategies to grow your brand are the ones that focus on localized marketing strategies, inclusivity, international community building, and brand identity. You can boost the performance of your existing localization strategy by optimizing your offerings across all channels, focusing on the technical aspects, and working with a professional translation and localization service provider.

If you’re focused on growing your brand in the international marketplace, localization is imperative. This can be done either by staying in your same location or through business immigration to another country. Localization will help you increase sales and reach more potential customers.