The Oban Blog

Localisation in international digital marketing

In this piece Greig Holbrook, Director of Oban International, reflects on the view held by some – real digital marketing localisation just isn’t necessary.

Some people see the scale of the English speaking world and the fact that English is commonly recognised as a universal business language as evidence that local SMART strategies aren’t necessary. SMART global insights are based on understanding the local users’ intent first, market by market making no assumptions on their digital behaviours.

Let’s take the US for example – whilst some behaviours relate to the original US or English they will always be adapted locally. Some digital behaviour is very much home grown and not related to US behaviour at all, examples of this include local search engines and social media platforms like Yandex in Russia or Naver in Korea. In fact whilst cultures do affect and influence each other digitally in myriad ways, markets will always be distinct and heavily affected by culture, even within a single country.

We take a look at the example of France. We know that the French search differently depending on what region of the country they live in: a child in Nantes might search for ‘pain au chocolat’ wherea one in Bordeaux will search for ‘chocolatine’. Assuming that your campaign will achieve its objectives by purely focussing on the former search term will have a significant impact on your success across France.

Language is only one element of our cultural individuality, but if you have ever entered a sentence into an automated translation engine you already know that it can be a significant one.

Click here to read the full article on PerformanceIn.