How to Build an Effective Localized Marketing Strategy

Localized marketing has become increasingly important in the age of international commerce.

It allows even the smallest companies to engage with consumers across the globe. This approach involves adapting branding, products, and services for a specific local market and creating customized marketing campaigns that suit that market's language, cultural nuances, and regional preferences.

Before the emergence of localized marketing, companies only engaged with customers in their home country or region. 

Companies that embrace this concept can more easily access new markets, build consumer goodwill, and boost sales with minimal additional costs or work. The rise of Generative AI has made this type of global outreach even more manageable through translation tools and face-swapping tools.

What is Localized Marketing?

Localized marketing is the process of adapting a company's marketing strategy and tactics to meet the specific needs, preferences, and cultural nuances of a particular geographic market or customer segment.

Rather than using a one-size-fits-all global marketing approach, localized marketing recognizes that consumers in different locations may have distinct buying habits, values, and expectations shaped by their local culture, economy, and lifestyle.

Importance of Localizing Marketing Efforts

In today's globalized and hyper-competitive business landscape, localizing marketing efforts is more critical than ever for brands seeking to connect with diverse audiences across different geographic markets.

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Here are some of the unique advantages to localization:

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Customer Relevance - By tailoring marketing to the specific cultural, linguistic, and behavioral preferences of each local market, brands can make their offerings more relevant and appealing to customers in that region. Localized marketing helps brands avoid cultural faux pas and demonstrate a genuine understanding of local needs and values.

Improved Engagement - Localized marketing content tends to generate higher engagement than generic global content. When customers feel like a brand is speaking directly to them in a way that resonates with their local context, they are more likely to pay attention, interact with the brand, and develop an affinity for its products or services.

Competitive Differentiation - In crowded international markets, localized marketing can help brands stand out from competitors who may be taking a more homogeneous global approach. By leveraging local insights and adapting to local market nuances, brands can differentiate themselves and carve out a unique positioning in each geography they serve.

Enhanced Customer Experience - Localized marketing enables brands to provide a more seamless and satisfying customer experience across touchpoints. From product packaging to customer service interactions, incorporating local language and cultural norms can make customers feel more understood, valued, and at ease when engaging with a brand.

Increased Sales and ROI - Ultimately, the goal of localized marketing is to drive business growth and profitability in each target market. By improving customer relevance, engagement, and experience through localization, brands can increase their chances of converting leads into customers and building long-term loyalty. Localized marketing can also help optimize marketing spend by focusing resources on the channels and tactics that are most effective in each locality.

Compliance with Local Regulations - Marketing and advertising regulations can vary widely from country to country. Localized marketing helps ensure that a brand's messaging and practices are compliant with local laws and guidelines, mitigating legal and reputational risks.

Crafting a Targeted Audience Persona

To successfully launch a localized marketing campaign, companies must first craft targeted audience personas representing their target customers in this new geographic region. To get started, companies must first identify their target audience, including key demographic details like age, gender, location, and income. Next, research your audience using proven market research techniques like surveys, interviews, and third-party resources.

Once you've created an outline of your ideal customer, it's time to identify common patterns and characteristics that this audience shares. Examples include customer preferences, spending motivations, and pain points. Internal marketing teams will then use these generalized personas to answer the following critical questions before launching their first advertising campaign:

• Key Preferences: Understand your audience's preferred communication channels, content formats, language, and tone before crafting advertisements.
• Behaviors: How does your audience engage with online content? What does their decision-making process look like, and what factors influence their likelihood of purchasing?
• Cultural Nuances: How does their regional culture inform their purchasing decisions? Is your target audience from a culture that prizes direct vs. indirect communication, non-verbal cues, or celebrity endorsements?

Catering Content & Videos Using Marketing Localization

Before expanding your company's reach to a new country or geographic market, it's important to understand how cultural nuances and language impact buyer behavior. For example, how can you effectively communicate with your customers in a new country? 

Every regional market will have language, expressions, and idioms you'll need to change for each campaign. Companies must assess regional marketing campaigns to ensure that the tone and approach align with regional norms. Enterprises should also carefully check translations to ensure that words or phrases do not have an offensive or vulgar meaning in the target language.

Enterprises that embrace localized marketing can engage with diverse groups of consumers worldwide, expanding their customer base and enabling them to increase profits without launching new products.

By adopting the cultural beliefs, slang, and values of your localized target audience, you can create content that establishes a genuine connection with your local audience, making advertisements more relatable and likely to lead to sales.

Generative AI is helping companies bridge the gap between cultures by rapidly translating content for different regions and cultures without needing a team of professional translators, graphic designers, or regional marketing specialists. Joe Hyrkin, CEO of the content marketing platform Issuu, says, "The optimization of new tools and services provides innovative ways to market worldwide and achieve greater growth."

Face Swapping for Localized Marketing

Companies are leveraging Generative AI for international marketing by using AKOOL's Face Swap tool to quickly swap out models' faces to create localized advertisements. Before the rise of Generative AI, companies had to film individual commercials for each international market. This was a pricey undertaking, especially for multinational firms in numerous countries and continents.

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However, AI tools like AKOOL's AI face swap app allow enterprises to film a single commercial and swap faces for each localized market, allowing organizations to create customized advertisements that resonate with local consumers and help generate sales. 

AKOOL is the industry's leading tool for commercial face swaps because our platform creates hyper-realistic videos and images with high resolution, excellent color, and none of the strange behavior that marked the AI videos of the past and created an uncanny feeling. 

AI Video Translation for Global Advertisements

In addition, AKOOL also helps organizations overcome many of the challenges associated with localized video advertisements through our AI translation tool. With this tool, companies can swap faces to include local models and  translate the text and audio in minutes.

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Enterprises use AKOOL's video translation tool to translate English advertisements into numerous foreign languages. Incredibly, the platform can also transform the facial movements in the video to match the new language and translate critical cultural nuances into the new language. With AKOOL, you can confidently translate into one of twenty-nine languages--assured that your translation is accurate, culturally sensitive, and regionally relevant.

When your content is well-translated and authentic, it resonates with local audiences and makes a lasting impression. This approach to localized content marketing is critical to creating brand loyalty and expanding your customer base in new markets.

Social Media Marketing Localization Tactics

While AKOOL's AI tools make marketing localization a breeze, companies can still utilize several key tactics to get the most bang for their buck. Before launching a campaign:

• Conduct target audience research to understand your core demographic, including their preferences, spending habits, and motivations.
• Adapt content, including language and background visuals, for your new target audience using their cultural norms.
• Use a well-regarded translation tool, like AKOOL's video translator, to create accurate translations of your advertisements.
• Optimize social media post timing and frequency to local time zones to garner the highest impact per post.
• Continuously monitor and analyze the results of your social media posts, tweaking your approach as necessary to maximize their impact.

Enterprises worldwide are already using AKOOL's face swap technology and video translation tool to rapidly transform advertisements for new markets by swapping the faces of models from Western subjects to local models and translating audio into new languages with the click of a button. 

Social media experts also encourage companies to partner with social media influencers in each local market by researching and identifying the most famous figures, ensuring that influencers are culturally relevant, effectively communicating with the target personas, and establishing relationships by commenting on their posts. (6)

Once organizations have developed relationships with local content creators, they can launch collaborative campaigns, use localized hashtags and keywords, and cultivate long-term relationships with the most successful influencers.

Finally, your marketing team should interact with customers across the globe and leverage user-generated content to expand their social media reach and reinforce authenticity.

AKOOL: Your Secret Weapon For Global Marketing

Start reaching new international customers and boosting global sales by embracing localized marketing as a key pillar in your company's go-to-market strategy. Enterprise marketing teams like yours can use AKOOL's video translator and face-swapping tool to create engaging, high-impact marketing campaigns that resonate with local audiences and create loyal customers.

Start with a well-rounded localized marketing strategy based on well-researched target audience personas. Use local models and effective translations to create authentic content that converts consumers into paying customers. 

Explore AKOOL's face swapping and video translation tool to discover how you can quickly and easily transform your marketing campaigns into localized international advertisements at a fraction of the cost of hiring a  marketing agency. Click the Contact Sales button at the top of this page to get started!