THE BLEND AUDIO GUIDE TO MULTI-MARKET EXPANSION

When businesses start to expand globally - the challenge to fit into new cultures and countries becomes a major focus. To help you get started and make this process the most efficient possible, we created this audio guide, based on our top articles. We’ll explore topics such as localization both through text and visuals, multilingual keyword research, building local communities, and much more to help you translate your local success on a global scale.

Building a global brand can seem like a daunting task. How can you tap into so many different international markets that have no apparent similarities?

Monday.com, a small, Tel Aviv start-up is a great example of a global success story.

Originally, the company only offered all of its products and services in English. As the US, UK, Australia, and Canada are its biggest markets, this worked very well for them. However, very quickly they realized that if they wanted to become a truly global brand, they needed to expand their language options.

However, which languages should they focus on? Using several factors including:

• Traction – where was Monday.com already doing well and what languages were spoken in those markets?
  
  
• Language popularity – how popular and widely spoken is the language? Is it only spoken in that specific country or is it also spoken in other places?
  
  
• Region potential – does that specific region or language have a large potential for sales?

They were able to focus on 8 languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, and Italian.

Once choosing these languages, the next question that they needed to focus on was quality vs. quantity. In other words, should they use quick translation tools to churn out a lot of content quickly and then move onto other languages or should they focus on high-quality language-specific content? Based on their experience, they decided to go with the latter by hiring in-house, native-speaking Localization Managers to ensure the quality of translations.

After this, they focused on localization in 3 phases:

1. Build local support by hiring native language experts to create everything from web pages to onboarding emails.
   
   
2. Localize the marketing content and SEO. In other words, focus on creating a brand image that would appeal to local markets without completely changing the overall brand image. For example, their representative in the Japanese market let them know that the bright and bold colors in their branding wouldn’t work well in the Japanese work culture. Therefore, they were able to find a middle ground that still represented Monday.com’s image without offending local customs.
   
   
3. Close the gap. This is an ongoing process. There is always more English-speaking content. It is a constant job to continually translate and adapt these pieces of content for each language market that they are targeting.

Many businesses that do well locally often have a difficult time translating that success on the global level. One brand that is a resounding success story of this switch is Airbnb. How did this company that started in 2007 with two roommates renting out an air mattress in their San Francisco apartment become a multinational business with over 2 million stays a night in 190 countries?

So what is the secret to becoming a global brand? According to Salvatore Giammarresi, Airbnb’s Head of Localization, in a broad sense, it is a two-step process.

1. Internationalization – creating an instantly identifiable product or service without any location-specific elements
   
   
2. Localization – taking the location-neutral product or service and fastidiously customizing to each market that it serves

So how did Airbnb put these principles into practice?
First, they focused on multi-market consistency. For example, if you were a client in the US booking an Airbnb in Japan, you could expect brand consistency no matter where you were.

To implement this, it was extremely important for them to focus on localization. However, they quickly realized that localization meant that they needed to fully understand the customs and actions of their users in each market. This could be from anything to how do people pay for things, by credit card, cash, etc…? They also built on this by building communities in each of their markets. For example, with their “neighborhood” service, they were able to provide “insider information” to visitors with user-generated content. In addition, they also provided services such as “eat with locals” and “experiences” where you would be led by a local as your tour guide. By tapping into the local community, Airbnb was able to build a true sense of community as well as self-empowerment to drive their brand globally.

Additionally, according to Giamaressi, “Only 9 out of 100 newcomers use, speak, or write in English.” Realizing this, Airbnb currently is accessible in 62 languages. However, rather than using direct translation tools, they employed on-site professionals to engage the local community as well as machine learning to speed up the automated processes.

Lastly, Airbnb didn’t rest on its previous laurels and success. Rather they have always been quick to evolve with the times. For example, the company’s original message was “Travel like a human”. However, as they continued to grow and mature, this message changed several times and included “Belonging”, “live there”, and “experiencing.” In addition, to pivot with the current COVID pandemic where international travel has been severely restricted, their new logo changed to “You don’t have to go far to find a world of wonder”. Needless to say, they are always staying on the leading edge by rebranding and refocusing their company’s goals based on what the market throws at them.

Previously, the global market was solely the domain of multinational corporations. However, thanks to the internet, the world has become much smaller and even small businesses can have a global reach. In fact, according to Oberlo, 90% of the global economy is represented by small and medium businesses!

However, as a small or medium-sized business, how can you tap into the global market? Quite simply, you have to create a shift to running global marketing campaigns that peaks the interest of audiences from multiple regions.

So what are the benefits of global marketing?
According to Statista, 59% of the world has an internet connection. That is 4.66 billion people! Needless to say, there is a large audience out there. With the internet, reaching them doesn’t have to be expensive. With such a wide and diverse customer base, you have a much bigger pool of opinions and data to help refine your products and services. This can help you come up with new ideas that you may never have thought about before. In addition, having a “global” brand helps give an image of professionalism to your company that you can’t get any other way. Lastly, and most obviously, a global audience means that you have a greater chance to increase sales and revenue.

So, if you decided going global is for you and your company, here are 5 tips you can follow to make sure your global marketing campaign is a resounding success. However, they all can be broken down into the idea of starting “small” before going “big”. More specifically:

1. Focus on regions where you have the best audiences. You can easily determine this by analyzing your website’s traffic and finding the countries and cities where you get the most hits. From here, you can create a shortlist of locations to focus your marketing efforts.
   
   
2. Research competitors in each of your locales. By doing so, you can quickly understand if a local market is already oversaturated or if there is a missing space that your company’s products or services can fill. Remember, you don’t need to launch all your products or services in every market.
   
   
3. For companies that offer physical products, it is important to develop region-based distribution strategies and partnerships. This includes researching things such as estimated shipping costs, customs, local delivery services, etc…
   
   
4. Localized your branding and campaigns. This doesn’t only mean translating your website, ads, etc… This also means adapting your company imaging to best capture the norms and sensibilities of your target audience. A great example of this is Nike’s “Nothing Beats a Londoner” campaign. They focused heavily on the unique London character going so far as to use local influencers and shoot in authentic London suburbs.
   
   
5. Always stay up-to-date on cultural and language differences. For example, launching a bright and happy campaign in a local market during a national Memorial Day is a very bad idea.

In conclusion, you don’t have to be a large multinational corporation to tap into the global market. Rather, with the right localization strategies, you too can take advantage of the worldwide marketplace!

Taking your company to the global stage is a lot of work and can be a big risk. You probably wonder, what are the strategies that you can use to appeal to new global markets? To truly assert industry leader status, working in a local market is no longer enough, you have to go global.Deloitte’s 2020 Media and Entertainment Industry Outlook shows the most noticeable example of this in the streaming market.

With the pandemic keeping people at home, direct-to-consumer streaming has become the big go-to for the entertainment industry. Even big broadcasting companies and movie theater franchises are jumping on the bandwagon and starting their own streaming services. 69% of people globally have at least one online streaming subscription while only 65% have a traditional TV service.

So what can we learn from industry leaders such as Spotify and Netflix?
First and foremost, it is important to leverage localization to expand globally. This might sound counterintuitive, but it is important to thoroughly study your target markets to adapt to their tastes, nuances, and norms.

A great example of this is Spotify. With 108 million Premium subscribers and 232 million total active users, they are the world’s biggest paid streaming service. While music might be an international language, Spotify realized that 80% of the world doesn’t speak English which is reflected in their music tastes. In other words, to expand to the global market they needed to personalize the music listening experience.

Netflix is another great example of harnessing localization to go global. Currently, Netflix is in 190 countries worldwide and in 2019 had $7,716 million in total revenue with its international revenue exceeding its domestic revenue. However, it didn’t try to go everywhere at once. Rather, it focused on expanding into markets that were geographically close and had the least amount of differences culturally. In addition, they partnered with local companies to not only provide subtitles but dubbing services to make the watching experience as seamless as possible.

In conclusion, localization often refers to adapting text. However, it is important to not overlook visualization. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. In other words, pictures convey messages quicker and remain in your customer’s brains longer. By adapting and focusing on localization through visualization when expanding globally, you will only strengthen your brand and lead to more conversions.

The English language internet is huge. As a website, it is becoming more and more difficult to compete. All of the big keywords are being oversaturated with awesome content from big brand-name websites. So as a smaller online publisher, how can you get around this problem?

One of the best ways is to build a website in languages other than English where you don’t have as much competition! However, this brings with it a slew of other problems, especially when you are making a website in a language unfamiliar to your own. Fortunately, there are several steps you can follow when embarking on this journey.

First, you need to do your preliminary research. After deciding which countries and languages you want to target this includes:

• The level of interest in your chosen niche within both the chosen language and culture
• Content competition
• The spending power of your chosen market

Next, it is important to start a keyword traffic deep dive. While we know that keyword analytic tools are inaccurate, they do provide us a good basis with which to analyze potential keywords. You can compare keyword volume from countries and languages that you aren’t familiar with to those that you are familiar with.

Now you can begin gauging the global competition of your multilingual keywords. This process is universal across all languages. In other words, no matter what language you look at, the most important factor to consider is the authoritativeness of pages listed on the first page of Google. If three or more of the top 10 websites have low DR (Domain Rating), this means that a relatively new website under the helm of a skilled marketer has a great chance to rank high and become an authoritative resource for that particular keyword.

Lastly, it is important to access the spending power of your target languages and cultures. The best way to do this is with CPC (cost per click) for your chosen keyword. This figure not only gives a great insight into their spending power but also corresponds to their likelihood to make a purchase. If you are interested in seeing an in-depth map showing the average CPC around the world, make sure to check out the full article.

As seen in Part I, competing on the internet, especially in an oversaturated English market, is getting more and more difficult. However, how can you overcome this problem? Simply put, focus on the multilingual market expansion!

One of the most important steps to multi-market expansion is multilingual keyword research. However, if you are only translating keywords from your native language into your target language, you are missing a lot of important keywords. This is because direct translations do not take into account word clusters and how words work together. Therefore, translating keywords into a foreign language requires 2 steps:

• First focus on high-level keywords in your language that you can then translate. However, even then, it is still highly recommended to enlist the help of an international SEO expert in your target language to help you extract the missing nuances.
  
  
• Next, it is extremely important to focus on the insights from your analytics. This helps you better understand the exact phrasing your audience is using as the way people search online very often does not match formal writing.

One of the most intimidating parts of creating a multilingual website, especially in languages that you don’t know, is not knowing if the quality of articles that we publish is good. In any language market that you are looking to get into, there is already probably plenty of articles on a majority of the major keywords. Therefore, simply directly translating articles from your native language to your target language will look quite clumsy. If all SEO metrics are the same, readability becomes a huge factor in distinguishing good and great content. Therefore, it is recommended to utilize a native language editor to add an extra bit of quality control.

When building your multimarket website, multilingual link building is going to be a big part of it. Depending on the overall volume of traffic for your chosen language, you will have a proportional amount of link building. For less common languages, this means that you can’t use the same “shotgun” style approach to link building. Rather, you will need to personalize your outreach methods. The best way to do this is in a conversational manner. However, this can be extremely difficult in languages you are not fluent in. Therefore, it is highly recommended to have someone comfortable in the informal style of your target language on your link-building team.

In conclusion, the biggest problem that people have with the multi-market expansion is the lack of quality control. However, with the right localization team and infrastructure, you can take advantage of working in a less competitive market.