Marketers today have a tall order.
It is challenging for them to develop messaging for brands in a constantly changing environment. Nevertheless, it can be downright impossible when they have to craft the message and ensure that all the organization branches are consistently delivering the same version.
The larger the company, the more challenging it can become.
However, there are ways to ease this situation’s pain and get everyone to convey the same brand message.
Why does consistent messaging matter?
According to a survey by Facebook, messaging consistency is one of the four main drivers of customer brand loyalty.
Furthermore, a study found that 65% of customers prefer content in their language, and 40% will not buy from a brand whose content is not in their mother tongue, thus making it tough to convey the same message through words.
Better to align messaging through images and videos so that a brand’s visual identity remains the same everywhere. After all, diluting a brand messaging can harm companies ability to generate revenue.
A study found that brand dilution could cost companies $10 million annually.
It was caused by confusing messaging that negatively led to a poor customer experience. More than 66% of survey respondents lacked confidence that the whole company was consistent concerning the brand messaging.
While consistent messaging does not account for all of that growth, it certainly does contribute. However, creating, delivering, and monitoring a consistent, fresh, and unique message across hundreds or thousands of franchise locations does not happen overnight.
Many of the world’s top multi-location brands still struggle with local marketing and brand consistency.
When a brand delivers a unified message across the franchised network, they are not ‘selling a particular service or product. Rather, the messaging consistency acts as a clear and thoughtful reminder.
For example, when consumers see the “America Runs on Dunkin” slogan, they automatically think about their favorite Dunkin’ product. It is so well-coordinated that it simply happens. When consumers repeatedly hear the same message, they subconsciously connect it with the brand’s excellent customer experience they know and love.
6 best practices for delivering consistent global messaging
Taking a brand worldwide can be a way to reach new markets, expand operations, and increase sales. Nonetheless, this is only obtainable if marketers maintain brand consistency and deliver the same customer experience and messaging in all markets.
Maintaining the global messaging of a brand in more than one language simultaneously requires a sensitive strategy and the right tools. Employees must ensure they can communicate and sell effectively without compromising who they are or their product or service. To do this successfully, companies should tailor their content for each region while staying true to their brand messaging.
To help companies navigate the fine line between delivering culturally sensitive and relevant messages and maintaining global brand consistency, we’re sharing our guide on delivering consistent global messaging in these six best practice tips.
Have a unified vision
Every brand’s stakeholders must have a unified vision to achieve a worldwide brand. This includes all levels of the company: senior leadership, brand managers, marketers, designers, copywriters, and translators. The brand strategy needs to be known and understood by everyone working on it.
Ensuring marketers articulate a brand identity in written form—like brand guidelines that help everyone consistently interpret the brand’s message worldwide. Include concepts like brand values, promise, mission, assets, and how the product is relevant to consumers. The more context provided, the more accurate a message, regardless of the target market.
Define the brand message
The first step to delivering consistent local messaging is identifying what makes a brand special.
Is the company attempting to be amusing and playful, or is the brand more traditional and serious?
Additionally, search for ways to reflect how a company brand solves customers’ pain points in its marketing messaging. For instance, does the company have the survey data to pinpoint a target consumer’s wants, desires, and needs?
Invest in localization
First things first:
Translation and localization are not the same. In the most basic sense, translation is the word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase conversion of one language into another.
Alternatively, localization strategically adapts content and other brand elements for specific regions or countries. It considers cultural data, demographics, consumer behavior, and local sensitivities or preferences.
Even language variants like American English and British English differ – pants in American English are trousers in British English. Pants in the UK and Australia mean underwear.
Finding the right balance of consistent brand messaging while catering to local audiences is the essence of effective marketing localization. Translation will not cut it alone.
Create rules for regional teams
Document the brand messaging ‘rules’ and share them with the field. It is crucial to outline the brand’s unique nuances, including how to use punctuation, spelling, syntax, and more. For example, in the USA, the date format is often mm:dd:yyyy, while in Europe, it is dd:mm:yyyy.
However, making this document accessible, actionable, and centralized is equally vital since a company’s local affiliates are not spending all their time pondering over grammar and writing style.
Identify your omnichannel marketing channels
Enterprise teams should identify and characterize the most important local marketing and sales channels. With this information, teams can build more effective and tailored omnichannel marketing strategies. Specific executions across all marketing channels — social media, print advertising, partner and distributor sites — should inherently ‘feel’ different to the customer.
For example, the social media platform TikTok is highly used in the USA but not so much within China, TikTok’s country of origin.
Naturally, marketers must consider which marketing channels reach their global audience. If they were targeting the USA and China, using TikTok may not be the ideal channel for their global brand message. Weibo would be better for China but not used in the USA.
Whatever channel is utilized, each execution should still communicate the same unique promises and values for which the brand is known. Creating a consistent brand experience for new and existing customers, at all digital channels and at all times ensures consistency.
Use the same digital assets across every region
A crucial step in delivering consistent global messaging is ensuring digital content, namely images, videos, and documents, are uniform across all regions, even if the localized messaging is not.
Using the same digital content will is one solution to deliver consistent global messaging across hundreds of products in varying markets, industries, and multiple sales and distribution channels – leading to an increase in revenue by 10-20%.
Employees and regional marketers must be able to search, organize, edit, and share images and other digital assets from one central source – with other valuable features to make images easily searchable and retrievable.
In addition, they must be able to distribute assets directly to digital channels effortlessly. Using a digital asset management platform is one solution where digital content can be managed globally to deliver consistent messaging.
Consistency is key to delivering consistent global messaging
The goal of delivering consistent global messaging is simple: a consistent brand experience.
It starts by identifying the brand visions, factoring in local sensitivities, and then delivering that message using uniform branded digital assets across regional markets in the omnichannel.
Brands then must create marketing campaigns and content they demand and deliver it to them in a format, channel, and device consumers prefer.
Using a DAM ties it all together. It gives companies the benefits shared drives (commonly used by enterprises today) fail to deliver.
It helps employees control all their digital content from one hub. With everyone having access to that same hub, it has never been easier for marketing content to be delivered on all channels, achieving consistent global messaging at all times.
Want to learn more about KeyShot and how we helped companies deliver consistent global messaging to their customers?
Book a demo, and a Digizuite expert will walk you through the software and discuss your brand messaging needs.
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