Social media marketing has never been more critical than it is in today’s digital landscape. With so many platforms to choose from (such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more), businesses can reach target audiences around the world. Social media has become an essential tool for successful marketing strategies.
But how do you even start to reach a global target audience with your company message? We’ve answered that question for you! Read on to learn the seven tips that will help your business reach new audiences around the world.
Table of Contents
Define Your Global Audience
Defining your global audience is the first step to developing a successful social media strategy. Whether you’re working offline or online, this is the first step in building your social media strategy. But how do you go about determining who your target audience is?
Define your international audience: you are developing a global marketing campaign to reach a specific audience with your message. The key is to determine who your target audience is and where they’re located.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help determine who the international target audience is:
- Are you planning on extending your services or products to other countries?
- Are you trying to get potential customers in these countries or regions?
- What regions or countries are you targeting?
- Where do the majority of your customers live?
- Where do most of your non-domestic customers live?
These questions can help you pinpoint the potential target audience you’d like to reach. However, additional factors should be considered when creating a global social media marketing strategy.
Understanding Cultural & Regional Differences
As you plan your social media marketing strategy, it’s also essential to understand the cultural and regional differences of your target audience(s). These differences can include how a person acts and interprets or responds to different situations. Their regional and cultural differences can affect how they respond to social media marketing messages.
Here are a couple of examples to consider:
Toyota: took great care to consider the cultural differences and motivations in their TV ad for the Camry in the US. Their ad and car were a huge success.
Pringles: had a marketing campaign in the UK about bacon crisps on products that were celebrating Ramadan. The outcome was many offended people, though that was certainly not the aim of the ad campaign.
Understanding the cultural and regional differences of your target market is essential. These differences are crucial to knowing if you want to successfully reach global markets.
Cultural differences determine people’s perceptions at every level. This includes hand gestures, colors, tone, images, and symbols; each has a unique meaning in different cultures. For instance, if a slogan is translated word-for-word into different languages, the original meaning can be lost. And then, there are regional dialects, tones, and more that make this process even more complex.
It’s crucial to understand your target market and their regional and cultural differences.
You’ll need to carry out extensive market research to understand your target audience, their customs, and preferences. The process involves creating personas that determine the general personalities and demographics of the target audience.
You create personas based on research, which includes data, surveys, digital engagements, and more. The research helps you understand who your target audience is, their language, preferences, and more.
Target audience information should include:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Hobbies
- Education level
- Income
- Profession
- Marital status
- Who they trust
- What they read/watch
- Social media platform preference
To create a global social media marketing strategy, it’s necessary to develop a persona for each region or country.
This information will inform you about the target audience’s culture and preferences, along with any regional differences that may exist. With this information, you will determine your target audience and how best to approach them with your messaging on social media.
Platform Selection
When you learned who your target audience is (above), the research should have also included information about their social media preferences. It would be best if you also considered the different social media platforms available. There are numerous other platforms outside of your country to consider.
For instance, if your target market is Chinese customers, you may want to use WeChat. On the other hand, if you want to reach a target market in Russia, you may want to use Odnoklassniki (OK). In India, the most popular social networks include YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.
Content Strategy
When creating a global social media marketing strategy, creating the right content strategy is critical. The content is what will be used in social media posts.
A social media content strategy is a plan that includes all the content to use in reaching your target audience and company goals across social media platforms. It’s best to document your content strategy so it’s easy for you and your team to reference during your marketing campaign.
The plan includes information on all tasks associated with creating, publishing, and tracking social media posts. Having the strategy documented ensures everyone on your team is “on the same page.”
As you create a global content strategy, it’s essential to consider the importance of culturally sensitive content. If you’re reaching a global audience, it will be necessary to create content in different languages. But remember, it’s not about creating one slogan and translating this verbatim across all social media platforms in other languages. That doesn’t work, as we noted earlier. To succeed, your content must fit into each target audience’s cultural and regional preferences.
Here, it’s necessary to review the different personas created for each country or region. Your marketing message must fit each country’s/region’s cultural and language preferences. The content must be culturally sensitive to succeed in each market.
Localize Your Approach
Ensuring your message is culturally sensitive is crucial, and the way to do this is through localizing your social media content and strategies to each target audience. But what is social media localization?
Social media localization is about adapting your social media strategy and content to specific countries and regions. Localization deals with your target audience’s cultural nuances and preferences when creating content.
Localizing social media content is the best way to connect and engage with regional audiences and connect with people around the world. The higher the engagement levels are with your brand the stronger your connection is with the target audience. The key is to create content that resonates with local audiences to gain more impressions and engagement.
This also means scheduling social media posts at a time when more people in the region are engaging with social media. This is the best way to reach out to more people simultaneously.
We found some examples that give you an idea about how content can be localized.
Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” Social Media Campaign
This campaign uses original content from users to promote the company’s iPhones. Apple sends a message with a hashtag, “shotoniphone.” Their customers, social media followers, and influencers share photos, videos, blog posts, and more that show them using the iPhone.
This is a simple campaign that is naturally localized and allows iPhone users around the world to connect and engage with the brand.
Proctor & Gamble Connect via TikTok
Proctor & Gamble (P&G) developed a localized global social media campaign that would help people around the world connect through dancing. The company sent out a video that encouraged social media users on TikTok to make short dance videos and share them on the platform with the hashtag #DistanceDance.
This social media campaign ended up with 1.9 million videos created by users, with more than 8 billion views. P&G was able to get their company name and brand in front of TikTok users around the world! And this was done with a simple, localized dance challenge.
Nike’s NYC “Own the Floor” Campaign
Nike is a recognized global brand; however, they still need to localize their social media content for successful engagement. Their “Own the Floor” New York City campaign was very successful. It pointed out what it means to live in this famous city.
The campaign worked because it used local talent in classic New York City locations. The target audience (those who live in NYC) felt immediately connected to the locations and the brand.
Content localization is more than just translating one slogan into several languages. Content localization for your global social media marketing campaign also includes showing cultural sensitivity toward different cultures and regions. It also involves consistent posting and scheduling posts correctly.
Consistency and Scheduling
Choosing the proper posting schedule and staying consistent can be challenging; however, these elements are crucial for global social media marketing campaigns.
Why is consistent posting so important? The goal is to engage your audience and help them recognize your brand. To accomplish this, you must be consistent with posting. This requires creating a posting schedule that fits you and your target audience. Being consistent also shows your target audience that you care by sharing relevant, authentic information with them regularly. Doing so increases engagement.
Finding the right balance in the number of posts per day can be challenging initially. Finding what works for you and your target audience takes a little experimentation. But once you’ve determined the right number of daily posts, keep this schedule going.
As you develop a consistent posting schedule, it’s also necessary to consider time zones and cultural nuances for each target audience you want to reach. Managing several social media channels across global audiences takes some effort.
How to Schedule Social Media Posts Across Global Audiences
The first step is determining the best post time for each target audience. You can conduct surveys, polls, and quizzes to gain insights into each target audience’s cultural nuances and learn which time zones they’re in. Knowing your audience allows you to customize your posts’ timing to meet their needs and expectations.
Once you have this information, you must choose the time zones you want to target and how many you can realistically manage. Each time zone will have its own preferences and expectations, so posting in every time zone may not be crucial.
Choose the time zones where you have the most followers or the most significant target market(s). Once you’ve set up a posting schedule, keep it consistent to meet the expectations and needs of your target audience(s).
Analytics and Monitoring
You’re not done creating amazing content and posting at the correct times! To gain any benefit from your efforts, it’s necessary to check your posts’ analytics and monitor your social media channels.
Social media analytics are data and metrics that can help measure your content’s social media performance. Is your content successful or not? The only way to tell is by measuring your social media analytics.
Social media data can help you:
- Spot trends (which social media platforms get the best response, and more)
- Check the target audience’s brand sentiment (are they happy, do they engage with your brand, etc.)
- Perceived value perception (shows your customer’s opinion of your brand’s products and services)
- And more
Monitoring your global social media marketing campaigns with analytical tools is essential. This is the only way to determine whether or not your social media posts are successful or not.
You can measure social media effectiveness with the following:
- Buffer
- Oktopost
- Hootsuite
- Agorapulse
- Google Analytics
- And others
It may take some experimenting to find what resonates with each target audience. This is the testing and iterating part of the social media process. Social media analytics is an ongoing process, and it’s necessary to continuously test and update your strategy based on the insights gained from the analytics.
When you experiment with different types of content and posting times, you can identify what works best for your audience and adjust your strategies to meet their expectations and needs.
7. Collaborate and Network
Another way to engage regional target audiences is through collaboration and networking with local influencers and partners. Social media collaboration is when you team with other brands or influencers to create and share content with your respective media audiences.
Social media collaborations can benefit global social media marketing campaigns and put your brand in front of a new audience. Doing so increases engagement, and brand awareness, and creates valuable partnerships and sales. The key is to choose local brands or influencers in your target audiences’ countries and regions.
How do you partner with relevant influencers and partners? You can do this by following our tips:
1. Search for relevant influences in your target audience’s region or country.
2. Agree on a primary goal that analytics can measure and track.
3. Develop a framework for working with each other, such as setting clear deadlines, expectations, and definitive objectives.
4. Choose the right social media collaboration tools for your partnership.
5. Share or create a social media style guide for you both to follow. Remember, the focus must meet the expectations and preferences of each target audience. Cross-promoting one another’s content with your target audiences is also essential.
6. Determine the content and posting schedules
7. Disclose your partnership with your target audience(s). Some countries have laws that require you to disclose partnerships. So, check the laws in each region and country you’ll post in.
Follow these tips to ensure your collaboration and networking partnerships succeed. Finding local influencers and partners in the countries or regions you want to target is also important.
Conclusion
An effective global socialization marketing campaign includes each of these tips. It’s essential to learn who your target audience is, along with their cultural preferences and nuances. Once you know your target audience, you must learn which social media platforms they use. Then, you need to determine your content strategy and localize the content for each target audience.
Once you’ve done all that work, creating a consistent posting schedule that matches your target audience’s time zone and posting preferences is essential. Then, you’re ready to use analytics to measure and test your posting efforts’ success (or failure). One way to improve your posting analytics is to reach out and collaborate with a local influencer or partner. Collaborating in this way ensures your message is authentic and fits your target audience’s preferences and expectations.
When you follow these tips, you’re sure to have a successful global social media marketing campaign!
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