Content as your Go To Market

This content is based on my talk at Textmaster x Mention event on October 18th, 2019. It covers the role of content and how to leverage it when you look at international expansion.

What? Content!

Nowadays, it is all about growth or hypergrowth and one of the solutions to reach it is through international expansion.

This can be done simply from your head office or with local teams (internally or not) but whatever you chose, content will be the spearhead of your strategy.

In the last decade, content became hype thanks to all the efforts of HubSpot and its concept of Inbound Marketing.

Content is proof of your market understanding, of its audience, their needs and ultimately your expertise.

Content is proof of your market understanding, of its audience, their needs and ultimately your expertise. Content is the first conduit to build trust but can also be the evidence of your lack of understanding or consideration of the market.

You need proper planning and resource allocation to do it right.

What content?

Before looking to do content marketing on a more international level you need to understand why you were successful in your current market. Success can be due to:

• Your product: you are answering specific local needs (i.e. unique legal constraint)
• Your services: you offer proximity and availability (i.e. high need of support)
• Your market: you have little competition or an audience with the right level of maturity in your territory

So what’s the next step? Understanding your audience abroad. An audience is not only an age group, a gender, a revenue bracket, or a social status. For me, it is mainly a series of topics and interests (i.e. marketing? content marketing? content curation? tips? templates? best practices?)

Listening — to your audience.

Some important channels to start with would be forums, websites, news outlets, social media. Essentially any online space you believe will give you insight into building and identifying the topic clusters associated with this new audience. Pay attention to those pushing and pulling the conversation. Ask yourself — who are the influential people hovering over these topics? And what are their sources of information?

Sift through conversations happening online to uncover the key topics that will help define your new local audience

Once you identify broader topics, you will be able to dig deeper and start monitoring micro-topics that are under the same cluster of these larger keywords. This is where you’ll find those golden nuggets of social insight that will aid in your content development. From there, you will understand how are they connected and be able to build your narrative.

Keep in mind not to fall into the trap of globalization. Today’s news and topics are very much still local. From the same event, you will see many different angles to tackle the information. Let’s take Brexit. The French will be interested in the custom rules and travel regulations while the English will be mostly discussing the upcoming elections and the latest trick of BoJo. That is why you need to dig deeper. Both are interested in Brexit but you will have to adapt your narrative to attract them towards your company’s product and services.

Listening — to your competitors

Yes, this is an actual piece of advice. And yes, you might find it obvious and useless… but there is more to it. What if you could monitor not only what your competitors say, but better understand their social media advertising strategy? Spark your attention? Simply go to your competitor’s page and head to the bottom right corner “Page Transparency” section.

Monitor what your competitors say and what they do in terms of social media advertising

Here you have access to all their adverts in every country and every language! From there you can analyze the formats, keywords/topics they use for these territories.

Listening — to your team, network, customers.

When working on your campaigns, involve your sales team, partners, or even customers. They can prove very insightful and complement your monitoring. A few weeks ago, we launched a campaign dedicated to Higher Education (universities, schools). To build it we worked with local partners and our local sales team. This proved very insightful to build content that answered the different territories’ expectations. To support the main piece of content we focused our narrative on the clearing process (what happens to a student not able to enroll) in the UK and campus safety in the US. This impacted press releases and promotional campaigns.

Content or contents?

Localizing is important as you might have understood so far, but it takes time and effort. To mitigate risk, I recommend focusing your localization effort.

First, as seen before, localization and adaptation help you talk about relevant topics with the knowledge to back it up. Adaption helps you add nuances to your content, providing those subtle and relatable differences through language that display an increased urgency and proximity to act and engage. But doing this can be highly time-consuming. To mitigate risk, I recommend honing your localization effort.

Here is a rule for you:

Expand your main piece of content to cater to different expectations but in only 1 language that your team master. You can always create limited versions for the different countries to only focus on the topics that matter the most to them. when it comes to promotion, put your effort into having them in multiple languages. They tend to be more personal and less content-heavy so faster to do and with a higher impact.

The magic formula is for me: Pillar Content in English, promotional effort and supporting pieces (optionally) in the local language.

Global Pillar Content supported by Local Promotional efforts is the right balance.

Maturity > Culture

In my experience, when working on expanding your business, it was always more about the maturity of the different market/audience than the cultural differences. Obviously you would like to be able to have the right content for the right audience in the right language all while leveraging local culture… but let’s be realistic. Not only delivering content takes time but you also don’t want to add complexity to an already highly complex working environment with automation, tools, teams… So stick to the Minimum Viable Product. And be satisfied.

Being content.

By now, you understand your market, have developed your content strategy and started spreading the word through your chosen channels. Alright. Time to measure the performance of your actions. Syke! For those that think you can track content performance once it’s been published, you’re a little late to the content marketing game. Actually, you should have started measuring months ago! About 8 to 9 months to be exact.

To be successful you need to define what success is for you.

You need to define what will be your KPIs and ideally what you want to achieve with these numbers. Never forget that as marketers you are expected to be ROI oriented and everything we talked about thus far, takes time, effort and ultimately money.

Usually, people stick to the classic: generated traffic, new leads from these markets, CPA from the adverts… but what matters to me is looking at the more abstracts KPIs that tend to reflect more the long term performance.

Let’s take the volume of conversations or mentions you get for your brand or company. I believe that it is a key indicator to assess your long term impact on the market.

If you are a reader of Simon Sinek’s “Start with why”, you understand that to get a long term impact, you must get rid of the noise generated by manipulation. When you launch a new product in a country, you will obviously create a campaign, put a lot of promotional effort into it, work on your pricing… being aggressive in your go-to-market. This will bring bias to your analysis and might give you the wrong impression.

If you look at the nature of your traffic (sources) evolution or/and the volume of conversations, you will have a clearer picture.

You will then have to dig deeper and look at performance for your different channels. This matters even more, since the usage of the platform differs from one country to another. Using Facebook for business is a habit in the US but still underused (and atypical) in France, and penetration rates differ vastly from one country to another (think Linkedin in Germany or Facebook in China).

And of course, test, measure, adapt!

…Beyond content

Beware of how you will evaluate your success or failure. If you work with a local team, never underestimate the effort required to help them understand your product and sales process. Unfortunately, we tend to expect quick results (within 3 months or 6 months) when it often takes 6 months to onboard someone in your head office. Why the discrepancy?

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.