Localized Marketing Strategy – Increase Your Conversion Rate

⏱ Reading Time: 6 minutes

The internet community is huge and it’s only natural you want to reach the biggest audience with your marketing campaigns. The language of your advertising is extremely important. You might think that the right way to go is sticking to English. Hey, it is the international language of business communication and it’s widely spread to most parts of the world. However, there’s more to a successful marketing campaign.

🚀Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First?🚀

Marketing experts say: think globally, act locally. Statistics show that only 25.3% of internet users worldwide are English-speaking users. That leaves you with approximately 75% of the internet community which doesn’t understand your website nor your ads. It’s almost like shutting your door to potential customers and choosing to please the minority.

This is why you need a localized marketing strategy for your campaigns – and this is where we jump in. Here are a few things you should keep in mind.

Localized Marketing Strategy from Scratch

Even though only one fourth of internet users speak English, English is still used by 59.6% of all the websites whose content language we know.  How silly, right?

In addition, research shows that:

• 55% of users buy only at websites where the information is presented in their language
• 74% of consumers spend are going to buy from an online store again if there is customer support in their language
• French, German and Turkish customers prefer buying in their mother tongue the most

The facts are alarming for all of you who only consider using English as the language of your marketing campaigns.

If we’ve got the facts covered, let’s take a look at what are the steps you need to make in order to localize your business and make it more successful.

Analyze Your Traffic

The first step of building a localized marketing strategy is detecting the target audience of your newly planned, localized marketing campaign. This will give you an insight into your potential new markets and help you decide what to do next.

By analyzing your traffic we imply:

• collecting data
• inspecting the users
• evaluating the current situation
• drawing conclusions

Let’s say you analyze your traffic and find that 27% of your traffic comes from Germany and Austria. It’s a clear cut sign you need to address these users more directly and make sure you retain them. How? Localize to German.

Based on your traffic, you can draw conclusions on which languages to choose. It’s best to start with only one language, especially if you’re launching your first localized campaign.

Related: What Is Performance Based Advertising?

Baby Steps

You don’t want to rush into anything. Make sure to take one step at a time in order to test your new strategy and see if there are results.

Start with a small detail, like running one ad in the new language.

Translate it and launch it, paying attention to:

• conversions
• converted clicks
• click through rate

Analyze the results to make sure you’ve reached the target audience. If you’ve succeeded, then it’s time to take things further.

Build a Localized Marketing Strategy for Your Website

You’ve got the results of the test drive, and now you’re buying the car.

There are different forms of website translation. Take a look and think about what suits you best.

1. Just translate, don’t adapt

This implies you will simply allow your customers to choose a different language on your website, but the entire content will be the same for both languages.

2. Translate and adapt

This step takes it a bit further.

It implies translating the content into different languages, but it implies adjusting the content to the local people. That means converting the:

• currencies
• metrics
• units

For example, here’s how it looks on Romwe.com.

Picture 1. A look at Romwe’s official website

This makes the whole process easier for customers. They don’t have to convert themselves and you bring your offer closer to them.

All they have to think about is whether they like your products and services or not.

3. Translate, adapt and culturalize

This step means going all in.

Not only will you translate the content and convert everything to local units, but you are also making a change in your design, layout and visual elements to suit the culture you’re targeting.

Take a look at what Coca-Cola does.

Picture 2. Coca-Cola Serbia advertisement

Coca-Cola Serbia is featuring Serbia’s traditional food with the motto: “Unforgettable tastes of Serbia”, along with traditional recipes for you to try out. They are portraying the drink as an integral part of the country’s cuisine.

Picture 3. Coca-Cola Italian advertisement

Coca-Cola Italy asks “What do we talk about at the table?” and shows the drink in the company of pizza and pasta.

Do you see where we’re going with this?

Culturalizing implies:

• images relevant to the country (symbols, landscapes)
• local habits, tradition, and customs
• holidays
• food

Connecting your brand to all of these will bring it closer to your customers, make them emotionally bonded to it which will consequentially increase your conversions.

Careful with the Translation

Translation is far from easy. It is a complex process and you’re not getting anywhere by using Google Translate.

There are things such as idioms, local expressions and set phrases which can’t be translated word to word. Every language has something unique about it, and that uniqueness needs to visible in your campaign.

This is why you should be careful when translating.

You have to consider:

• Hiring a professional translator

A human translator is always better than the machine. If you’re not sure who to choose, take a look at Pick Writers, translation companies review website.

• How translation affects design

Some languages take more space than others and you need to be aware of essential design adaptations.

Read Top 3 Consumer Psychology Tactics to Increase Conversions

Additional Steps

Translation is the first and basic step toward localization, but you can take additional ones in order to gain more publicity.

The more people understand what you offer and make a personal connection with your brand, the more publicity you gain.

In order to achieve this with localization you can:

• partner up with a local influencer
• target local users on social media ads
• address major events in the target region (sports championships, cultural events, celebrations etc.)
• Improve public relations

The key to great public relations is communication. You can improve it further by:

• ensuring localized customer service
• working on non-advertising communication

What to Expect?

What’s the bottom line of carrying out a successful localized marketing campaign? You should expect:

• increased conversion rate
• more page clicks
• more social media engagement
• new customers
• increased sales/downloads
• customer retention

Conclusion

Localization of your marketing campaign implies so much more than pure translation. The main task is to capture the essence of the people you’re addressing and their culture. You’re aiming for their hearts and you’re striving for making a long-term impact on their customer experience. This is why you need to take localization seriously and make sure it well-planned out and well-performed.

Take small steps toward building a local marketing strategy. Analyze, test and analyze some more. Make all the necessary changes and try adapting the content to the chosen language-speaking region as much as possible. Take care of details. Once you get a hold of the localization, you’ll see an increase in conversions, sales, and publicity.