As you take your brand global, you want it to be as impactful as it is in the existing regions. To facilitate this impact, you need to build a strong relationship with customers through communication. Since content drives communication and growth, creating a successful content strategy becomes critical for engaging your audiences and establishing loyal fans and repeat customers. How do you create meaningful content and make it appealing to your diverse audiences in each market? Determine your global audience The creation of quality content starts with knowing who your target audiences are. Kick-start the process by answering some fundamental questions like: Who are you creating the content for? Define your audiences and tailor the content accordingly to convert your readers into customers. Where are they coming from? Analyze the data sets coming from different sources, such as Google analytics, social listening and other popular tools, to unlock who you are currently reaching out to and what pieces of content will attract them. What do you want the end-user to do with content? Identify the call to action, whether it is to raise awareness, or to further engagement or conversions. Knowing the end goal will help you to set the right tone of the content. What is the literacy level of your target audiences? Discover the literacy levels and base the text in any visuals—pictures, diagrams, graphics, animations—so it can easily convey the information. The purpose of this exercise is to give you the strongest possible starting point for creating content that best addresses the needs and interests of your audiences. Understand cultural differences What works well in one region might not work in another. For example, in Germany, people gather more information and pay attention to factors such as price before buying any products or services. Conversely, in the U.K., people are more concerned about a product’s usage and benefits. They collect less information and connect on a more emotional level. Once you see that distinct audiences consume the messaging of the same products and services differently, identifying various aspects of culture becomes imperative. The content that resonates with their cultural values, beliefs and sensitivities will attract them the most. So, understanding the key dimensions of cultural diversity and putting them into action to create effective and engaging content will help you to establish stronger connections with customers. Map the content to the buyer’s journey The potential customers generally go through a buying journey comprised of these three stages: awareness, consideration and decision. Looking at how people engage with your brand over time and determining what types of content are most helpful during each stage can help you decide what to create. The best way to strategize your content efforts is to perform an audit of all your existing assets, map them to the buying funnel, identify content gaps and optimize content where you can. Here are some questions that may help: Is the content in the awareness stage, aimed to educate, inform and contextualize buyers’ problems and highlight approaches to solve the problems? Is the content in the consideration stage, encouraging users to start a free trial, request demos or download solution-oriented offerings? Is the content in the decision stage, providing the benefits and evidence of solutions to persuade prospects to buy from you rather than your competitors? This will allow you to gauge the effectiveness of each piece of content and optimize it to convert your prospects into customers. Choose the preferred media channels The next step is to identify the right channels for publishing your content. Ask yourself: Where are you going to promote and publish the content? What are the preferred social media and digital platforms in your target regions and the broadband infrastructure that supports them? For example, in China, WeChat is more popular than Facebook is in the US. What type of media is performing the best in the targeted regions? Is it ad copy, photography, video or a mix? In this way, you’ll know where to invest your content creation time and resources. Win at international search engine optimization (SEO) Producing SEO-friendly content can make a big difference. Optimizing content to appear on the first page of search engine results will increase your chances of grabbing the audience’s attention. However, remember that certain search terms like “holiday homes” might work for the U.K. market, but Americans or Australians might be looking for “vacation rentals”. You must find out how your target market searches for information. To ensure content relevancy and ultimately generate results related to input search queries, you need data-driven insights. These can come from analyzing organic search visibility, search volumes and traffic of keywords and the conversion rates coming from each international market. There’s a lot to consider when localizing for SEO, so to get the most out of your budget, take the time to do the research or find an experienced partner who can bring this knowledge to the table. Don’t just go for translation, but for transcreation Merely translating the words isn’t the key to high-quality global content. Transcreation generally means adapting content—including images, colours and idioms—to the local market. The translation is just a part of this. Transcreation preserves the intentions, emotions and core message of the brand and creative professionals are needed to do this work. Take Pepsi as an example: when they entered the Chinese market, they used the slogan “Pepsi brings you back to life.” They failed to realize that the meaning of words could differ based on different languages, regions and cultures. When this slogan was translated into Mandarin, it actually read: “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.” It may seem there are a lot of things to consider, but creating effective content to enter new markets is achievable. Use these principles as the backbone for a successful content creation strategy and you have got a good framework for expanding your businesses in the global marketplace.