Unlocking the Full Potential of International Marketing Campaigns: A Guide for Automotive Marketers

In the fast-paced world of automotive marketing, choosing the right name for a car model can be critical to its success. Take, for example, Mitsubishi’s SUV model from the 1980s. Inspired by the wilds of Patagonia, the branding executives chose the name “Pajero,” associating it with the rugged and agile Pampas cat. 

Little did they know that the seemingly ideal name was an unfortunate slang term referring to self-indulgence of a rather personal nature. Swiftly, the car was rebranded as the “Montero” in certain Spanish-speaking markets to avoid any negative connotations.

This incident serves as a powerful reminder that global branding and international marketing campaigns are far from simple tasks. Both require a bulletproof plan that covers everything from strategy and implementation to what makes localization technology critical to success. Follow this guide to start making your own plan.

The art of balancing standardization and local preferences

Consumers today have a wide array of choices in the evolving global automotive market, with emerging market players vying for attention across different cultures and languages. To increase brand visibility, conversion rates, and growth in different target markets, global marketing teams are continually challenged to strike a balance between standardization and local preferences.

On the one hand, every marketer is well aware that making your target audience notice you requires crafting culturally relevant campaigns tailored to their culture, lifestyle, and expectations. On the other hand, global standardization and consistency have always been mission-critical for building and maintaining a strong corporate identity that can be recognized in any corner of the world.

For marketing teams in the automotive industry, this can be a real conundrum: Blog posts, email templates, landing pages, and social media posts yield the best results when they appeal to the target audience on a local level, but the risk of losing brand identity is always there. That’s why marketers can only tackle this challenge by relying on a localization-friendly global marketing strategy.

Building a localization-friendly global marketing strategy

Strong global marketing strategies in the automotive industry consider localization from day one—instead of relegating it to an afterthought.

By swapping half-translated copy, generic images that don’t jive with the culture, and out-of-context approaches for custom-built localized campaigns, automotive marketers can ensure that the customer journey is as smooth and glitch-free as possible from the first contact to post-purchase interactions.

This requires making localization an integral part of the entire marketing cycle—from analysis, design, and content creation to execution and performance tracking.

Here are 5 crucial steps to creating a successful SaaS marketing strategy that’s both localization-friendly and highly effective across markets:

Set up a cross-functional team with localization capabilities in key markets

To streamline and optimize automotive localization efforts, it’s essential for marketers to establish a well-coordinated team comprising experts from various departments, including marketing strategists, localization managers, content creators, developers, designers, project managers, and more.

Additionally, appointing a dedicated localization manager who directly reports to the VP of marketing or CMO, while closely collaborating with local marketing teams in each region, can ensure seamless integration of localization into the company’s global marketing strategy.

Similarly, having local-market quality leads, whether in-house linguists, outsourced professionals, or in-country marketing teams, is crucial. They can play a vital role in identifying and addressing any issues or inconsistencies in the localized content before it goes live.

Finally, these teams serve as advocates for local activation efforts and facilitate communication with local press and influencers—building a bridge between global marketing strategies and the specific needs of local markets.

Share KPIs and metrics with other teams involved in localization

A cross-functional localization program in automotive marketing requires shared goals and data. By having a joint understanding of key marketing and localization-specific metrics, the team can make informed decisions to optimize localized content.

Just like the localization team should have access to key marketing metrics (e.g., web traffic, conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores) for each market and language they’re responsible for, localization-specific data should also be readily available to other teams within the organization.

For example, if the marketing team in Japan aims to enhance click-through rates (CTRs), the localization team can provide clear instructions to translators, emphasizing the importance of adapting CTAs to resonate with local users in the most compelling manner possible.

Create audience-specific content

If you have a lot of existing content in English, it might be tempting to just send it off for translation and call it a day. However, text that doesn’t consider cultural nuances, local preferences, and target audience habits won’t be immersive or effective. Audience-specific might mean rewriting some of the copy, creating video content, adapting email templates, etc.

Some assets, like SEO content, might need to be completely remade from scratch or highly localized to account for the absence of equivalent keywords, different search intents, varying format and content expectations even when the keyword does translate, unequal levels of buyer education across regions, local link-building requirements, and more.

Some other assets lend themselves better to regular translation—like product descriptions, to machine translation—like product reviews, or to an optimized combination of both—like whitepapers.

Prioritize assets for localization based on their return on investment

You don’t always have to go all-in with localization right from the start. Take the time to analyze every asset and investigate how much return on investment (ROI) each one can bring.

In many cases, it makes sense to begin by localizing your most successful and prominent content pieces and then expand gradually. If you want to localize in full, it can be useful to identify the type of content that won’t harm user experience if run through machine translation (MT).

For content that doesn’t get much traffic or isn’t as crucial, for example, you can use MT, at least initially. You can also decide if you’ll have a linguist edit the output. Since users typically scan through website or app content, looking for specific keywords and important information, MT can deliver a satisfactory result in many cases.

For example, users don’t normally expect product reviews on the app store—highly dynamic and quickly perishable content—to have the same level of linguistic quality as a testimonial that you’re featuring front and center on your homepage. Similarly, a CTA below your homepage fold should always be manually translated for maximum impact, while the footer of your product page can be harmlessly machine translated with minor touch-ups.

Let localization technology do the heavy lifting

Regardless of the exact localization setup you go for, automation should be part of any localization workflow, and you need the right platform and tools to support it. However, the company size, the type of content involved, and the required languages will all affect the degree of automation needed and the features you can’t do without.

In general, any marketing localization process should include the following as a minimum:

• A single point of truth for all your multilingual content: This is crucial to store all your localization assets, manage the content in multiple languages, reuse previously translated content, monitor progress and performance, share terminology and contextual data with translators, and generate reports for data-driven decisions.
• A centralized wiki: Documentation is key to ensure your team is on the same page regarding processes, procedures, brand and style guidelines, how to write localization-friendly content, etc.
• Integrations with third-party marketing software: Your chosen localization platform should offer native integrations—i.e., without any middleware—with the rest of your marketing tech stack. From your CRM and CMS to your ecommerce platform and marketing automation tools, system integration is what facilitates scalable marketing localization.
• Open communication channels: When members of different teams with a stake in the localization process can communicate effectively and quickly, bottlenecks are cleared instantly, and issues can be addressed faster. For example, marketers can provide feedback or clarification directly to translators, translators can ask designers to add space for UI elements with longer translations, etc.

Take localization to new heights with Phrase

Relying on robust localization technology is key to maximizing the impact of your international marketing campaigns. Global enterprises worldwide trust Phrase—a fully integrated suite of translation automation technology—to reach more people, make deeper connections, and drive global growth.

The Phrase Localization Suite seamlessly connects with your digital ecosystem, catering to your current needs while scaling effortlessly as your requirements evolve. Add fully flexible pricing, and it’s easy to see why marketing teams around the world choose Phrase to launch multilingual B2B campaigns with the best possible quality and consistency:

• Eliminate repetitive, manual work with smart automation.
• Keep all team members across time zones on the same page and all files in one place through a single, cloud-based localization platform.
• Combine traditional translation technology like CAT tools, translation memories, and term bases with AI-powered machine translation capabilities.
• Submit content for translation in familiar file formats: DOCX, PSD, SVG, HTML, etc.
• Attach screenshots to segments for translation and enable comments to provide context for linguists.
• Let linguists check their work in its native format with real-time changes in an in-context preview.
• Leverage out-of-the-box integrations with your preferred marketing automation platform, CMS, or CRM—HubSpot, Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, Contentstack, Sitecore, Kontent, etc.
• Rely on a holistic approach to data security and encryption through an information security management system.