Localized Branding Guide: Reaching Global Markets (What it is, Why it s important, & How to create one.)

Transcription

1 Localized Branding Guide: Reaching Global Markets (What it is, Why it s important, & How to create one.)

2 Branding 10:30 10:30 TO TODO: DO: While every company already has their own brand, without a proper guideline to help define it and uphold its consistency among employees and external agencies, it can be difficult to maintain a brand that is strong and recognizable in today's saturated marketing landscape. Namely, communicating with a lot of different voices can compromise brand equity and confuse the target audience by expressing numerous personalities and subject your messages to different interpretations. That's where a branding guide comes in handy. And if you want to stay on top of things within a given region or appeal to a specific target audience, a localized branding guide is essential for your business. In a global market, tailoring a branding guide to fit a local market will keep a company's brand consistent in any culture. That is why it is important to create a localized branding guide for the different global markets a company will serve. This article explores the significance of branding guides to businesses as well as the need for businesses to adopt brand localization if they are looking to penetrate the global market. 01

3 What is a Branding Guide; Why is it Important? When it comes to creating a winning brand, it is imperative that at all levels, the management, employees, and external agencies speak the same language when communicating to the current and prospective customers. You can achieve this by having a branding guide. A branding guide is a manual that aims to safeguard the strength of your brand by defining its identity and explaining how to use its elements, both internally and externally. It plays an integral role in creating the connection between your product, corporate identity, and the brand promise. This ensures that all the elements are coherently connected and resonate with both existing and potential customers. Why Do you Need A Branding Guide 1. Build a Strong Brand Identity A branding guide helps you maintain a strong and consistent branding. This helps you clarify what your usiness stands for, enabling your business to communicate your goal, personality, as well as promises. 2. Promote Brand Recognition A branding guide creates a consistency that ensures your brand is instantly recognizable to customers. You don't have to introduce who you are or what you do. 3. Deliver Clear Messaging A branding guide ensures consistent communication of your brand message across all marketing platforms, and customer touch points. 02

4 4. Create the Right Perception A business is normally perceived according to what it does. A branding guide is essential to ensure that you do everything according to the perception you want to create for your business. 5. Save Resources A branding guide helps minimize errors made by external agencies when using your brand elements. This will also save you time and money that would otherwise go into correcting the mistakes. 6. Knowledge Brands are mostly ideas, emotions, and unconscious presumptions based on how your business communicates to its audience. Changes may take place in your business, but your brand will remain, thanks to a branding guide. Namely, the information contained in the branding guide provides you with the knowledge to endure any change. The Importance of a Branding Guide in Creating Content When it comes to marketing content, consistency is essential. Moreover, content should be a team-wide undertaking. In light of this, it is imperative that you have the right tools to help you create content that will promote the growth of your brand and not kill it. Namely, consistency and brand messaging will be negatively affected if there are no proper guidelines in place. That's where a branding guide comes in. With a well-done branding guide, you will be able to: 03

5 Uphold consistency in your brand tone, voice, and messaging Guide your team on the best way to write for your target audience Maintain a kind of quality thatresonates with your customers Create more effective content What is Brand Localization; Why is it Important? Businesses that have a presence in multiple global markets have a vast range of opportunities at their disposal. However, if you are looking to capitalize on those opportunities, you have to put a considerable effort in developing messages that resonate with the audience in respective regions and cultures. That is essentially what localization is all about. Broadly defined, localization is the practice of modifying a product's functional properties and features with the aim of accommodating the language, cultural, legal, and political differences of a foreign market. Brand localization should transcend linguistic translation. This is because literal translations normally lose nuance and customer demographics are vastly different from one market to another. Namely, a tone, voice or visual feature that appeals to customers in your home market may not necessarily be effective in another market. 04

6 Therefore, it is imperative that your product and content sounds authentic in the locales you are targeting. While translation is a significant component of localization, there are several other factors that you need to take into consideration. They include the target audience's lifestyle, culture, values, among other concerns. While at it, be sure to maintain the consistency of the global brand image. Why Do you Need Localized Content to Penetrate Global Markets? Irrespective of the kind of business you run, an integral factor of success is the satisfaction of your customers. If you want your customers to remain loyal to you for years to come, you must ensure that they are always happy. Renege on their satisfaction and watch them leave you for your next-door competitor. Simply operating in multiple global markets is not enough to make your customers contented and grow your business you must embrace localization. Localization is very powerful. It can help give you a competitive edge, grow your market, avert liability, and create a formidable brand globally. This is what makes localized content an indispensable tool if you are looking to penetrate global markets. Namely, localized content is an essential ingredient in attracting customers and nurturing business relationships in the global business arena. 05

7 Why is Content Localization Important? With content localization, your business will benefit in various ways, as outlined below: 1. Improved Customer Satisfaction By using localized content, you will be showing your customers that they mean so much to your business that you have no problem goingthe extra mile for them. With localization, you can embrace the culture of the target audience and deliver a personalized experience. As a result, you will gain trust and increase engagement of your customers. 2. Expand Your Business Content localization is an excellent way to expand your business, in that you can introduce your brand to new markets. With localization, you give your brand more exposure, consequently reaching a wider audience for your commodities. Namely, exposure raises demand, thereby boosting sales. 3. Achieve Competitive Advantage Besides expanding your business, content localization will also help your business become highly competitive in the local market. In fact, Nelson Mandela was right when he said: "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language that goes to his heart." Your brand will go to the customers' hearts if they feel you made the effort to reach out to them. Consequently, you will be way ahead of businesses that just offers them a one-size fits all product. 06

8 4. Avoid Liabilities and Cultural Taboos Many companies have made embarrassing and costly mistakes in the course of marketing their brands in various global markets. You don't want to find yourself in such situation because some countries and cultures can be very unforgiving. With proper content localization, you will be safe. For instance, proper localization will ensure that your translated brand name does not refer to male genitalia in the local dialect. Likewise, there could be colours, symbols, or other business practices that could turn out to be offensive in the local culture. In fact, proper content localization serves as a form of insurance. Imagine the amount of resources you will have to otherwise put in rolling back commodities that either doesn't appeal to the local customers or are utterly offensive to them. 5. Enhance Marketing Efficiency Narrowing global campaigns to a couple of local markets could help you in enhancing marketing efficiency. With location targeting, the investment becomes much more cost-efficient. 6. Delivers Good Value Localization plays a significant role in saving time and money. Its costs are just a fraction of product development costs. If you've already spent a significant amount of money in developing a product from scratch, spending just a small fraction of that money on adapting the product to local markets is a great investment. Namely, it potentially results in additional revenue. Furthermore, you can significantly reduce the cost of localization if you incorporate it into the product-development process at an early stage. 07

9 Branding Guide and Content Localization Remember, we stated that if your company operates in multiple global markets, trying to apply a one-size-fits-all kind of communication, which does not resonate with the local customer needs and way of life is an effort in futility. That's why you have to embrace localization and be sure to get it right. Furthermore, even with localization, you have to ensure that your brand identity and integrity remains consistent. For that reason, it is imperative that you also localize your branding guide. In fact, a localized branding guide is an indispensable tool when it comes to creating your global brand and voice in a local market. It ensures consistency within your brand irrespective of the locale you are targeting. Don't worry if you have no idea of how to localize your branding guide. You can work with a reputable brand localization company such as inwhatlanguage to create a localized branding guide. Such a brand localization company will also help you implement a localization strategy that identifies the cultural variations among target markets in a bid to boost your brand value. 08

10 Final Thoughts Communicating to your customers in many different tones, voices, and images can spell doom on your brand equity and subject your brand messaging to different interpretations that may not be healthy for your business. That's why you must invest in a branding guide. A branding guide will not only help you uphold brand consistency, but also build a strong brand identity, promote brand recognition, create the right perception for your business, and save you a lot of time and money. In the same breath, if you are looking to establish a formidable presence in multiple global markets, you have to ensure that your products and services adapt to the target cultures. Localization will help you achieve that. With localization, you will achieve improved customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, enhanced marketing efficiency, reduced risks and liabilities, among other great benefits. To ensure that you maintain brand consistency even in the various local markets, it is imperative that you also localize your branding guide. Just get a reputable brand localization company like inwhatlanguage to help you create a localized branding guide. 09

11 Are You Ready To Access More Customers In New Markets? Start and grow your global success story with UNIFY The Translation Management Cloud. inwhatlanguage has the expertise, strategy and cutting-edge technology to get you on your way to being global and sounding local. See how we can help you compete in the global marketplace.