Ready to expand your reach and connect with a global audience?
A well-crafted international content strategy can unlock new markets, boost brand awareness, and drive international growth. By tailoring your content to specific audiences, you can ensure your message resonates and delivers results.
We know that localizing your content can significantly impact your search engine visibility. According to our research, local keyword research generates 40% more search volume than simply translating content.
In this guide, we’ll explore the key elements of a successful global content strategy, from defining your target audience to measuring your results.
What Is a Global Content Strategy?
A global content strategy is a borderless approach to content marketing. It involves planning, creating, and distributing content across multiple languages, cultures, and markets. This type of content marketing is ideal for companies looking to break into new markets or scale brand awareness.
Content globalization can take many forms — from traditional blog posts to eye-catching social and multimedia content. But here’s the key: A truly effective global content approach goes beyond simply translating content into different languages and hitting publish. It’s about understanding and incorporating local cultures and preferences so your content resonates with each unique audience.
Why Is a Global Content Strategy Important?
A global content strategy is important because it can help you drive lead generation and expand your brand’s reach beyond your home country.
Other key benefits of global content marketing include:
- Reaching new markets: Global content opens the door to new markets, allowing you to connect with fresh audiences from different countries and regions.
- Enhancing brand image: Widening your content scope can also help you build your brand and increase awareness to potential customers through the content formats they love most.
- Increasing customer engagement: Well-crafted, tailored content that resonates with audiences in different regions can lead to stronger customer connections, ultimately improving customer experience.
- Improving SEO: A well-developed content plan backed by global keyword research can boost your content’s visibility and attract organic traffic.
A thorough global content strategy can unlock new opportunities, expand your brand’s reach, and drive sustainable growth. Let’s explore a step-by-step approach to developing a winning strategy.
How To Develop Your Global Content Strategy in 7 Steps
The difference between a mediocre and a standout global content strategy lies in the planning phase. Below, we’ll dive into seven key steps to set up and execute a winning strategy for your global content.
Step 1: Audience Research
Understanding your audience is the foundation for creating content customers want. Start by identifying the countries or regions you want to reach, considering factors like market potential, cultural fit, and business goals.
Once you know where your audience is, you can begin crafting buyer personas: descriptive profiles of your target audience segments that drill into the nitty-gritty details of demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points.
Surveys and interviews are great ways to gather firsthand insights from your target audience. Social listening, or monitoring social media conversations about your industry in the regions or countries you want to target, can also help you better understand customer needs and problems.
Research cultural differences, customs, and sensitivities to make your buyer personas as relevant as possible. Additionally, spend time understanding how searchers in specific regions search for topics. Do they primarily use their local language, a hybrid of English and their local language, or fully English? Language preferences will help guide your translation strategy.
Step 2: Conduct Keyword Research
After you’ve completed your audience research, spend time analyzing your competitors and conducting keyword research to shape your roadmap.
Here are some key steps to consider:
- Analyze content types: Look at the types of content your competitors use (blogs, videos, infographics, etc.) to see what resonates most with your audience. Consider what they’re ranking for and how much traffic they’re generating.
- Identify relevant keywords: Using keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, you can uncover relevant keywords and local variations specific to the region or country.
- Conduct a content audit: Review your existing content and pinpoint topics that can be repurposed or updated.
Leveraging your content repository is a great way to scale your global approach and lean on successful content pieces that have performed well in other markets.
With a deep understanding of your audience and the competitive landscape, you can create a comprehensive content plan that will drive results.
Step 3: Plan Your Roadmap
After identifying your audience and gathering relevant, high-value keywords you want to target, it’s time to prioritize those topics into a content roadmap. We recommend conducting a KOB analysis — or Keyword Opposition to Benefit Analysis.
This process takes the keywords you’ve found and analyzes traffic value and total opportunity against the actual time to execute and difficulty. This enables you to prioritize the topics that will have the biggest impact and drive traffic to your site quicker than cherry-picking a topic and hoping for the best.
After the KOB, you can slate the topics into your roadmap. We recommend building a roadmap for at least six months in the future — this can change as company priorities shift, but planning several months out ensures the team has a clear path ahead.
Start with topics that have a lower difficulty but a high impact — think more traditional SEO articles versus high-fidelity interactive content like calculators. This is especially important as your team gets their bearings writing for a new audience and in new languages.
We also recommend diversifying the types of content you execute month over month. Plan to weave in one or two topics for each stage of the buyer’s funnel each month. This allows you to test which content types are the most successful and adjust your roadmap as needed.
When it comes to planning a roadmap for a global audience, keep these factors in mind:
- Local holidays and events: As you’re planning your roadmap, consider global and regional holidays and cultural events. Use Google Trends to anticipate changes in public interest and capitalize on timeliness. Look at local or national election cycles to avoid publishing content when the focus might be on a national election to avoid getting lost in the news cycle.
- Content formats: Based on your competitor analysis, you might find that your audience prefers a mix of content formats like blog posts, videos, and localized social media. Consider what topics might suit these different content types and allocate the necessary resources as you plan your roadmap.
- Content compliance: It’s also a good idea to brush up on local data privacy and advertising standards for the countries or regions you plan to target. Different countries have varying data privacy laws, like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California. Non-compliance can lead to hefty fines and a hit to your reputation.
With a well-structured content calendar in place, it’s time to turn your attention to localization.
Step 4: Localize Content
You have your topics and your roadmap; now you can actually create your content, which is where content localization comes into play. Creating localized content goes beyond translation to account for cultural nuances and contexts.
Here are some common approaches to localizing content:
- Translation: There are two common methods for translating content: direct translation and transcreation. Direct translation changes text from one language to another, ensuring accuracy and cultural appropriateness. Transcreation takes it a step further by mixing in creative adaptation to help the translated copy better resonate with your target audience.
- Cultural adaptation: Beyond the text itself, use images that are culturally relevant to your audience and consider cultural color preferences and symbolism as you’re designing color schemes. For your copy, ensure humor and cultural references are going to land with your audience.
- Currency and measurement units: Display prices and costs in local currency, convert measurements to local units, and adjust date and time formats to local standards.
- Language and dialect: Study regional dialects and linguistic nuances to uncover regional differences. Consider formal versus informal language and how to use each style appropriately.
Nailing language and dialect can be tricky, which is why it’s beneficial to utilize an editor or writer familiar with the country or region to avoid any missteps.
Step 5: Optimize for Global SEO
Localized content is great, but without employing international SEO optimization, your content will have a tougher time reaching your intended audience. Global SEO strategy helps your content visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), increasing your reach and boosting the ability to rank.
Global SEO strategy includes a wide range of approaches, but we’ll highlight a few shared by global SEO expert Brodie Clark:
- Strategic domain selection: A .com domain is an advantageous choice for expanding into the U.S. market, but a .de domain is a common top-level domain in Germany. Do your research when selecting your domain to enhance credibility and align with user expectations.
- Effective use of hreflang tags: Hreflang tags are HTML attributes that help search engines understand a webpage’s language and intended region. The cc-lc format (for example, en-us for English in the U.S. or en-gb for English in the U.K.) ensures search engines understand the intended audience for a specific page version. By defining both the language (cc) and locale (lc), you avoid misinterpretation and deliver the right content to the right audience.
- Avoiding automatic redirection: Automatically redirecting users based on their geographic location can lead to a poor user experience and potential SEO issues. Instead, allow users to choose their preferred regional site version.
- Long-term domain strategy: Expanding domains is a long game. Building domain authority and link signals across different regions requires sustained effort and strategic planning.
- Tailored link building: Developing a link building strategy that focuses on acquiring high-quality links from relevant and authoritative sites in target regions is essential for improving search visibility and authority.
Once your content is localized and optimized, it’s time to ensure it reaches your target audience.
Step 6: Publish Content
Beyond publishing the content to your website, there are a few ways to distribute it for the biggest impact.
An omnichannel approach will widen your reach and increase the likelihood that your content will reach your intended audience. Consider promoting your content on your social media channels, prioritizing the platforms your audience uses the most.
Email newsletters are another great way to build your audience and share your latest content. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a powerful tool to amplify your global content distribution efforts by bidding on localized keywords.
Another approach is local partnerships with bloggers and influencers in the region or country you’re targeting. This collaboration can tap into their engaged audience and amplify your reach. Remember to choose influencers who align with your brand values and whose audience matches your target market.
Step 7: Measure Performance
Your content’s live, and you’ve been diligently distributing it. Now you can begin to measure performance to see what content types and topics are performing best.
Common KPIs for measuring a global strategy include:
- Organic traffic: Track the number of visitors visiting your website from organic search results.
- Referral traffic: Monitor traffic from other websites and platforms.
- Bounce rate: Measure the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page.
- Time on site: Track the average time visitors spend on your site.
- Pageviews per session: Measure the number of pages a visitor views per session.
- Links: Measure the quality and quantity of links to your content.
- Lead generation: Track the number of leads generated from your content.
- Brand awareness: Track brand mentions and sentiment on social media and other online platforms.
Using your metrics, you can make data-driven decisions around what content and topics to double down on in your strategy and what topics aren’t offering a return on investment.
Beyond tracking metrics, A/B testing different content formats and approaches for regional audiences can help you uncover what lands best. This could include trying different headlines, testing out cultural references or storytelling techniques, or varying content length.
Scale Your Global Content Strategy With a Partner Who Knows the Ropes
Ready to jump-start your global content strategy? Siege Media has helped clients localize content in 250 languages and 525+ language combinations.
With more than a decade of experience driving organic growth for global enterprise clients, we understand the nuances of local search. We use a data-backed approach to identify the keywords people search for in a local market to ensure you steer the most relevant traffic to your site.
See how our content localization services can help take your business to the next level.
Global Content Marketing FAQ
Still have lingering global content strategy questions? We answer a few common questions below.
What Are the Four P’s of a Global Content Marketing Strategy?
The four P’s of global content marketing are plan, produce, promote, and perfect.
- Plan: Establish your strategy by identifying your target audience and their preferences. Then, develop a centralized content calendar and build out your localization strategy.
- Produce: Taking the research from your planning phase, execute high-quality, relevant content and translate it for different markets. Use a variety of content formats to test what resonates most with your audience.
- Promote: Implement SEO best practices to improve search engine ranking and distribute your content across multiple channels, such as social media, PPC, and influencer partnerships, to increase visibility.
- Perfect: Track key performance metrics to measure the success of your content, continuously testing and optimizing content.
What Is International Content Marketing?
International content marketing, or global content marketing, is a strategic approach to creating and distributing content that resonates with a global audience. It involves tailoring content to different cultures, languages, and regions to increase brand awareness, drive customer engagement, and generate leads.
How Do I Maintain Consistent Branding Across Different Regions?
Consistent branding helps your brand stay recognizable while also adapting to local preferences.
A few strategies for achieving this include:
- Develop global brand guidelines: Within your guidelines, establish a consistent visual language, including logos, color palettes, typography, and imagery. You should also develop a clear brand voice and tone that resonates with your target audience, keeping it as cohesive as possible across different countries and languages.
- Foster global communication for your teams: Brand consistency won’t happen if your teams are siloed. Instead, encourage collaboration between global content teams to share insights. Regular check-ins can be an opportunity to align on brand consistency and strategies.
- Use a centralized CMS: Using the same CMS can help ensure consistency across content, like how blog templates are set up. You can also require certain elements, like a specific number of internal links or image specifications, to ensure content looks similar across your brand.
