Whether your business already caters to a global clientele or you’re thinking about entering new markets, you should create a strategy for communicating with these various user groups all over the world.
When extending your communications strategy to service global markets, you may need to strike a balance between the consistency of your brand’s messaging and local linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic preferences.
It may also entail selecting a segmented and distinct communications approach while taking into account your budgetary restrictions, availability of local knowledge, and team capacity.
While communicating with international audiences might bring a number of difficulties, it can also open up enormous growth and ROI potential. Even while you should stick to your brand identity and key messages, you should also correctly localise messaging campaigns for various geographic areas. When engaging with international audiences, there are several things to keep in mind, such as cultural conventions, timezones, and languages.
Let’s look at the main aspects you need to take into account while messaging to audiences abroad.
Consistency
Maintaining a distinct identity and brand voice across borders is a challenge that multinational corporations encounter when communicating with foreign audiences. Making your brand valuable and relevant globally requires having a consistent global brand voice.
Consumers can quickly recognise and comprehend your messaging when your brand is consistent. As you design your notifications for various media, keep the essential elements of your brand in mind while also correctly localising your message.
As a general guideline, keep returning to the fundamentally emotional truths that underlie your messaging. Even when the language and subject matter of your messages change, you should always be able to return to the fundamental human truths they contain.
For instance, Apple’s brand positioning is very consistent across markets. It’s not simply that their items have an intuitive appearance and design; they also directly address the emotions of customers in their marketing. The company’s well-known “Think Different” marketing campaign from the 1990s refers to the notion that society’s “craziest” individuals, like Einstein, Gandhi, and MLK, are those that advance civilization. Innovation, inventiveness, and forward-thinking are brand attributes that can appeal to practically any consumer base anywhere in the world. Make sure your messages reflect these essential brand attributes, which will resonate with customers worldwide.
Cultural Expectations and Norms
Your message may have been successfully translated for a different country, but it doesn’t guarantee that the new audience will understand it the same way.
The preferred communication method for consumers differs greatly between countries. Take the German market, for instance. According to consumer sentiment research, Germans are extremely sensitive to privacy issues and are frequently turned off by businesses that know too much about them. You might want to avoid sending too many transactional communications to a German consumer base because they might be perceived as intrusive and low-value. You might decide to send less specific communications in this market that exclude a user’s name, location, or other private information. In this industry, choosing overly personalised messaging might easily backfire.
Timing
Regarding when they want to read your messages, consumers may have various preferences depending on their location. When are individuals most active in the nation where your most recent campaign is being introduced?
Take into account the various work schedules in the areas you are targeting. Studies reveal, for instance, that Spanish workers conclude their workdays about 8 p.m. in the summer because they take a midday break, giving them the region’s earliest work evenings. You might think about sending notifications to Spanish customers in the summertime either during their “siesta” (nap) in the middle of the day or after 8 o’clock, when they get home from work.
Northern Europeans frequently start their workweek earlier than their Spanish colleagues. Customers in this area might not respond well to messages sent after 8 o’clock due to their early work schedule.
Price Burden
Think about the relative financial burden that consumers in various places suffer as a result of the channels you are using to communicate with them and the goods and services you are promoting. The topic of product pricing in international markets is complicated, however you might wish to take the differences in purchasing power between the countries you’re selling to into account.
Consider looking at statistics like “The Big Mac Index,” which calculates the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) across countries using the price of a Big Mac, a common good around the world.
You might also want to consider whether the area you’re messaging in has mobile data pricing restrictions. The cost of data varies significantly around the world as a result of elements like a nation’s current infrastructure, customers’ reliance on mobile data, consumption patterns, and average consumer income.
In India, a gigabyte of data costs just nine cents, but in Malawi, it costs $27.41.
Do most consumers’ monthly expenses for phone data make up a sizable amount of such costs? If so, exercise caution when sending a large number of messages over SMS and push methods.
Think about how network data fees affect the data usage patterns of various audiences. Sending fewer messages overall or notifications with rich media can be one way to change your strategy.
With Mok.one, localise your messaging strategy.
Mok.one is made to assist you in managing alerts and user communication across all channels, including email, in-app chat, bulk SMS, and push notifications for mobile devices and the web. Our platform is simple to use, fast to set up, and makes it simple to automate and adapt your message strategy for various geographic locations. To help you tailor your messaging for various geographies, we provide language translation assistance, segmentation and location targeting options, as well as A/B testing.
If you don’t already have one, you can sign up for Mok.one for no cost and start notifying your users of updates right away. Don’t believe us? Sign up and find out for yourself!