One-size-fits-all marketing won’t take you far in a world where buyers crave personalized experiences.
Simply translating content into different languages is a job only half done. Instead of generic translations, you have to completely rethink your marketing campaigns to fit the cultural context of every region.
That’s where marketing localization can help.
Think about what makes people tick in each market. Then, rebuild your marketing strategy around these insights. When done right, localized marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all.
Let’s learn how to build a marketing localization strategy and win people over in every market.
What is marketing localization
Marketing localization is the strategic effort to adapt your marketing campaigns to resonate more authentically with people in different target markets. Rather than simply translating your marketing materials, this process revamps your messaging and content to feel native to every local market.
A marketing localization strategy aims for:
- Linguistic accuracy
- Cultural alignment
- Visual relevance
- And more
Let’s understand why it’s important to modify your marketing efforts for new markets—and how to do it right.
The business value of marketing localization
In simple words, marketing localization builds and strengthens your relationship with regional audiences.
When people see marketing efforts that reflect their language, culture, and environment, they’re more likely to feel understood and trust your brand.
Research also suggests that buyers psychologically feel closer to local brands than global ones. This feeling of trust and proximity—created through marketing localization—can increase sales and establish loyalty among your regional audiences.
Beyond impacting your sales, localization in marketing can also give you an edge over the local competition.
In markets where competitors rely on one-size-fits-all tactics, you can use your market research insights to tailor your approach for different audiences.
The result? You become a brand that truly gets the buyers and creates a key differentiator.
Ultimately, marketing localization can also improve your overall ROI. Instead of spending resources on multiple channels with a trial-and-error approach, you can focus on channels producing the best returns. That’s targeted and cost-efficient.
🤔 To standardize or to localize: That is the question
Standardization is uniformity, and localization is diversity. When brands go global and expand to new markets, they have to make a critical decision between standardizing their identity or localizing for every market.
Learn more about what’s the best marketing choice for you in our detailed guide.
How to create your localized marketing strategy
Ready to get started with marketing localization? Here are the five best practices to focus on when chalking out your strategy.
1. Conduct hyper-local market research
Before everything else, you have to understand what truly matters to people in a specific market.
Don’t go with stereotypes or a generic list of buyer preferences. You want to research the target market to learn more about the culture, behavior, language, and more.
To make this happen, start with secondary research.
Here are a few ways to collect data about your target audience in any market:
- Google Trends: Use this free tool to discover people’s interests based on their online search behavior. You can find how often people in an area search for specific terms and compare the data for multiple keywords.
- Social listening: See what type of content resonates the most with your target buyers in a local market. Use any social listening tool to identify the most popular public posts across social platforms and understand their sentiment toward your competitors.
- Review platforms: Go to local review platforms (like the equivalent of Yelp) and read customer reviews for similar products and services as yours. This will give you a good perspective of their pain point and where current solutions fall short.
After this legwork, you can focus on more grassroots market research.
Connect with potential customers through online community forums, public spaces, and other methods. You can also partner with non-competing local businesses to reach more people.
Distribute surveys, conduct video interviews, or set up focus groups to discover crucial insights from your audience.
2. Understand the cultural factors that influence choices
Cultural influences guide decisions in ways people don’t even notice.
By shaping your localized marketing strategy around these unspoken cultural factors, you can build natural trust with your buyers.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating a calendar of local events and traditions.
Focus on anything that affects buying patterns throughout the year. Then, you can plan specific marketing campaigns for every small and big occasion following this local calendar. Here’s how:
- Identify holidays, festivals, and celebrations driving seasonal purchases
- Take a look at academic calendars to see their impact on family spending
- Find sports and entertainment events that are a part of local spending cycles
- Understand weather patterns and seasonal changes that influence specific purchases
For example, Singles’ Day in China is one of the biggest shopping events, lasting for several weeks.
On the other hand, academic calendars drive Back-to-School sales in the United States during July and September. However, schools open on March 1 in South Korea, increasing demand for school supplies.
While a local calendar can be the nucleus of your marketing efforts, here are some other cultural factors to shape your strategy:
Value systems
Each society follows its unique set of values that ultimately influence consumer behavior. Understanding these core values will help you make your messaging more authentic and relatable to local buyers.
For example, Japanese buyers prefer marketing that emphasizes collective well-being rather than individual pleasure. In contrast, people in the United States typically respond better to messages of personal success and standing out.
Social structures
Family dynamics play a defining role in the decision-making and buying process. When you know who’s making the purchase decisions in a local market, you can target the decision-makers rather than only the end users.
For example, shopping is a social activity in Latin American markets, and peer approval matters a lot. Asian buyers consult with their family and elders before making a purchase.
Consumption habits
People’s routines and buying patterns are closely linked to well-established cultural habits.
Just think about coffee. In Italy, people often stand and take a quick espresso, while in the United States, it’s taken to-go.
Understand these contexts and habits to position your product more naturally within existing habits. You want to fit your product into a set routine to remove adoption barriers and avoid any disruptions.
3. Find the local channels that actually work
You’ve prepared the groundwork for your marketing localization efforts. Now, it’s time to get your boots on the ground and start working.
For starters, you want to find places where your local community of buyers is actively available. Think of online and offline channels to meet buyers where they are and make your brand discoverable.
Here’s how to find these channels:
- Study your competitors: Don’t reinvent the wheel. See where successful competitors focus their efforts and have the most engagement. It’s better to invest time and money in sourcing this competitive intel rather than going for a costly trial-and-error approach.
- Find market preferences: Dig deeper into each local market to learn how people communicate. Facebook and TikTok are popular in the US and Canada, VK works in Russia, LINE is big in Japan, and WeChat is the go-to platform in China. Find these regional apps where your buyers hang out the most.
- Work with local partners: You can’t ace a new market without any local support and expertise. Partner with local marketing agencies and influencers to get faster entry to popular channels. Tap into their networks to build credibility quickly and penetrate the market.
At this stage, you don’t want to rely on guesswork or your gut.
That’s why it’s best to do some hands-on research. Run small test experiments to assess each platform’s effectiveness and track performance metrics that matter to your marketing strategy.
4. Make your content authentically local
Picture this: You’re in Kenya, and you see a billboard with perfectly translated text in Swahili.
But something feels off. Probably, it’s the American-looking models that you can’t relate to. Even though the text is in the local language, the overall appeal feels foreign.
In short: Authentic localization goes beyond translation.
You have to recreate and tailor your marketing materials for each region so they feel more authentic.
Truly local content starts with language. Make sure your content is properly translated to the target language. Go beyond just literal translations to rethink and rebuild your message to create a stronger impact.
Adjust your humor and wit to match local sensibilities. And try to swap your original idioms or phrases with local equivalents to leave a similar impression.
As a best practice, consider working with local writers who understand these nuances.
💪🏻 Content localization made easy
Find our best advice to localize content for different markets and create an airtight strategy with our free template.
You should also pay attention to visuals because imagery speaks before text does. Recreate images to reflect cultural norms, local preferences, and diversity. Be careful of colors, symbols, and gestures that could have a different meaning in a local market.
Once your localized materials are ready, take feedback from locals to see how your content resonates with them.
Types of content you can localize
Your localization efforts should extend across your entire marketing ecosystem. Here are some types of content you can localize:
Website
Modify your website copy to align with buyers’ pain points, aspirations, and motivations in a specific market. This would also mean adjusting the calls to action for each market to target actual decision-makers. And beyond translating the copy, you can add local payment methods.
Here’s the difference between Nescafe’s website for Greece and Spain:
Social media
In every target market, you want to prioritize platforms where people actually spend time. Create unique content and design assets to engage buyers in different regions.
McDonald’s varying social media content across many markets is the perfect example here. The company’s Instagram pages for each region have different content to cater to local preferences.
Video content
Videos require more than just translated subtitles. Changing the music to a culturally relevant soundtrack is an easier way to localize videos. You can also modify the storytelling styles for different cultures. If your budget allows, create multiple videos where each targets a particular market.
5. Pick the right localization platform
When you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and kick-start the localization process, start by choosing a good platform to bring everyone on the same page.
Instead of managing all your translation efforts in a spreadsheet, create a single source of truth for all things marketing localization. This centralized platform will allow you to collaborate, manage, and review assets efficiently.
Besides, a modern and lightweight localization platform like Lokalise will not force you to stick to a certain predefined workflow. It’s flexible and customizable to serve your processes and team.
The right tool should help you automate routine tasks and provide you with everything you should have to take control of the localization project. Plus, you’ll have more time to focus on the creative part and increase value for your end users.
⚒️ Create an agile localization workflow
Don’t leave localization as an afterthought. Think about localizing your marketing efforts from the get-go by embracing an agile localization workflow.
5 marketing localization challenges to prepare for
Localization can be costly. You’ll inevitably make mistakes, hit a brick wall, and fail to attract the right audience.
We rounded up the most commonly faced challenges in marketing localization to help you plan and prevent these roadblocks.
Challenge #1: Making the right type of compromise
One of the biggest challenges in marketing localization is finding the right balance between preserving the original messaging and adapting it for a new audience.
You can’t simply translate your content and call it a day. You have to pay equal attention to the impact it creates on your audience.
Translators have to make tough decisions on how much to stay true to the original text while ensuring that the translated version feels natural and compelling.
A five-word catchphrase in English might require a complete rethinking in another language to carry the same weight or evoke the same emotion. This needs both technical skill and creative finesse. Even small changes in wording or tone can significantly affect how people perceive your message.
Challenge #2: The complexity of translating short copy
Many brands think short texts are quicker and easier to translate. In reality, those few words can be the most challenging.
This often involves answering key questions:
- Will the audience get this reference?
- Should the pun be altered or replaced entirely?
- Is the writing too direct for this market, and how can it be softened without losing its impact?
Martina Eco, creative translator and localization expert working at 3P Translations, shared how companies often underestimate how much research is involved here:
“You need to fully understand the brand identity and tone of voice, research the target audience, their language needs and behavior, the actual product or service being sold, and how it meets customer needs in different markets.”
Challenge #3: Making localized marketing assets feel native
Marketing content is often written without any consideration for future translations. This leaves translators with the task of making it feel natural in a different language.
The goal is to create a translation that reads as if it were written specifically for the target audience rather than a mere adaptation of the original.
Martina Russo, CEO at MovingWords, pointed out how important it is not to treat localization as an afterthought and to provide context to anyone who’s working on the project:
“You can’t just drop your content that took your marketing team weeks or months to come up with and expect your translation partners to develop it across languages without the same amount of context. If you want your campaigns to work well in other countries, you need to involve your localization team from the very early stages.”
This challenge highlights the paradox of great translation work—when it’s done well, no one notices. But when it’s not, the dissonance can disrupt the entire campaign.
Challenge #4: Complying with varying and evolving legal regulations
Marketing across different regions means navigating a complex web of regulations that change with each border you cross.
For example, privacy laws vary worldwide—GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and more. That means the standard practices in one market can trigger penalties in another.
Besides, industry-specific regulations add another layer of complexity. Brands in specific sectors like finance, healthcare, and even e-commerce have to follow a set of strict regulations to market their products/services without falling into trouble with the law.
What adds to your worries is the constantly evolving nature of these regulations. You have to be on your toes to adjust your marketing strategy based on any new developments.
Challenge #5: Adapting your brand for SEO
Search behavior varies dramatically across countries. This creates another challenge for your localized marketing strategy since you have to segregate your SEO efforts for each target market.
Put simply, you need a completely different strategy to ace SEO in each market. That’s because search behavior, language nuances, and search intent vary widely. So, someone in Chicago would search for “pop,” while people in Los Angeles would search for “soda.”
Search engines also consider proximity and relevance for local searches.
Marketing localization examples to inspire you
Let’s look at some successful examples where marketing localization worked wonders for brands.
1. Kinder Joy
Kinder Joy is a global confectionary brand known for its many varieties of candies. Started in Italy, the brand has made its way to many countries, including Poland, Ecuador, India, South Africa, and more.
Kinder Joy’s marketing localization strategy makes it feel native to all its markets.
For example, the brand creates videos and ads with emotion-driven storytelling for each market. Here’s an ad created for Turkish customers:
And here’s another one made for the Indian audience:
2. Red Bull
Red Bull is a household beverage brand worldwide. Known for its localized marketing, the brand caters to each market with region-specific activities.
For starters, the Red Bull website features different stories for every country.
Here’s the Spanish version of the website:
And here’s the German version of the website:
Besides, the brand also focuses on marketing and promotional activities relevant to each market. For example, you’ll find the Red Bull YouTube channel showcasing activities from many countries—each tailored to people’s cultural interests.
3. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform with a massive user base across 170 countries. The SaaS brand personalizes its marketing touchpoints with a strong emphasis on localization.
ActiveCampaign’s team uses Lokalise to create a single source of truth for all stakeholders involved in the localization setup. Lokalise allows them to integrate multiple platforms like Figma, WordPress, Zendesk, and more to implement localization across the board.
Here’s an example of localized content within the platform:
The team uses different content types and translation methods to strike the ideal tone and style for each asset. They also use and update glossaries to have company-specific terms in one place.
With Lokalise, ActiveCampaign’s team launches new marketing campaigns in record time. Niamh Scallan, Senior Localization Specialist at ActiveCampaign, shares:
“It could take just two days, and that includes going through Lokalise, our vendor, maybe a quick internal review, and then publishing.”
Bottom line: Marketing localization is your key to global success
When you invest time and effort into localizing your marketing strategy, you go beyond simply being a foreign brand in a market to actually connecting with the people.
Sure, it takes extra effort. But the payoff is long-lasting: stronger relationships, better brand recall, and higher returns from every campaign.
The tools you use for marketing localization can make a huge difference. How you work is equally important for the actual localized experiences you’ll deliver.
If you want to simplify and speed up your localization process, try Lokalise for free. There’s no risk to it, and we won’t ask you for your credit card info. You’ll be able to create personalized, impactful campaigns and launch your marketing plan in no time.
