Deliver globally relevant, flexible campaigns

Doing business in today’s global economy presents countless opportunities and challenges. Beyond language and cultural factors, other dimensions of complexity in global marketing include varying economic drivers, government regulations, emerging business models, and different levels of solution maturity. In addition, growing fragmentation, proliferation, and competition also add new dimensions of complexity to the marketing equation, while the accelerating pace of change increases pressure to be agile and responsive in-market.

Think globally, act locally

Centralized marketing groups often are mandated to drive consistency and efficiency worldwide through repeatable and highly leveraged campaigns and creative. Yet wide variation in regional markets makes it difficult to create programs that work for everyone. It requires a deeper understanding of key variables that drive local distinctiveness, such as differing levels of in-country marketing resources, changing priorities, and divergent market dynamics.

Focus on flexibility

Content is king in demand gen today. Corporate marketing is in the best position to supply it to regions, given their deep product expertise and access to assets across corporate communications functions that create content. Product marketing groups also have expertise to contribute, such as industry trends and forecasts, analyst perspectives, solution best practices, and case studies. These forms of content can be easily packaged for use in the regions. Modular building blocks that frame content in context of regional variations enable local flexibility while ensuring consistency when built from a common strategic framework. Develop modular building blocks that can all be leveraged to create localized demand generation activities, including:

• Ready-to-use content “chunks” versioned by audience (i.e., installed base vs. net-new, or by vertical) in various lengths
• A library of slides with speaker’s notes
• Selling scripts
• Image libraries

3 things you can do now

1. Interview regional marketing.

   Reach out to regions individually to understand demand generation imperatives for each locality.

2. Create an internal portal.

   Collect and share successful regional campaigns and useful content “chunks” on a global portal to propagate best practices.

3. Pick a pilot.

   Pilot a modular toolkit in one region, then port what works to others.

Take regional variance into account

Central marketing groups should build a framework of modular campaigns and content that allow flexibility for variations in solution maturity, media receptivity, and resource availability.

• Solution maturity: How markets adopt technology depends in part on cultural aspects and infrastructure realities that often vary widely country by country. For example, Nordic countries tend to be very advanced in their adoption of mobile video technology, while Eastern Bloc nations may be earlier in their progression, which demands a different approach to messaging and selling solutions to those markets.
• Media receptivity: Media usage and response rates differ across local markets, making cookie-cutter campaign design challenging. For instance, in one worldwide campaign, Korea wanted presentations and demos to use at country-specific marketing events, while Germany preferred collateral material that states a business case for ROI.
• Resource availability: Staffing, budgets, and domain expertise may vary widely across regions and countries, with some marketing centers containing deep resources for campaign execution, while others work with a skeleton crew.

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