Multicultural content marketing and emerging markets, Risks and Opportunities - AdTech London Presentation September 2013

Slide1:

First of all I would like to thanks Mr Nitish Singh and the whole Localization institute / Brand2Global team for inviting me. This is an honor. I am also glad to be able to expose my point of view about what is or should be great multicultural content marketing to the localization professionals community. I believe some of what we are discussing here is changing what we know as marketing and advertising forever.

So today we’re talking about multicultural content marketing in emerging markets.

You might ask: Why aren't we just talking about multilingual content marketing? It's the same thing – right?  NO. It's a small difference in words, but it's a big difference in the way you think about a brand's global communication and marketing strategies.

Multicultural content marketing is not just about localizing your website. It's about designing, creating and adapting content to communicate effectively with specific, targeted cultures and beliefs.

Slide 2:

We talk about emerging markets all the time, but what are they? Basically, economies in the process of rapid growth and industrialization.

And who are they? A few days ago I was interviewing a marketing manager for Hotels.com, for a white paper I’m preparing on Christmas in emerging markets. He said: “In EMEA, three markets stand out: Russia, Turkey and the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Globally, we would include Asia Pacific and Latin America, particularly Brazil, India and China.”

The point is: the BRICS are obviously important, but they’re not the only emerging markets with huge potential for companies to expand. In Europe, Turkey’s economy expanded by 9.2% in 2010, and 8.5 percent in 2011, and its population of 78 million is rapidly becoming middle class.

And in Africa, that kind of growth rate is surprisingly common….

Slide3:

Did you know that Africa is equal to the combined land mass of the US, Europe, China, India, Mexico and Japan?

…Africa's economy is growing faster than any other continent, according to a report by the African Development Bank (AfDB), which says that one-third of Africa's countries have GDP growth rates of more than 6%. Over the past decade, the number of middle-class consumers in Africa has expanded by more than 60% to 313 million, according to the African Development Bank. The share of the population living below the poverty line in Africa has fallen from 51% in 2005 to 39% in 2012 and this is accelerating. South Africa alone has 71,000 $ millionaires – more than Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates

The big change is that this report said the growth was largely driven by the private sector, thanks to improved economic governance and a better business climate generally. This is another great sign.

Slide4:

And did you know that, of the 10 fastest growing economies between 2001 and 2012, six of those were in Africa?

Nigeria is one of these economic lions. It’s the second biggest economy in Africa behind South Africa, and according to Citigroup it’s forecast to have the continent’s highest average GDP growth rate between now and 2050. Nigeria is now the second market for Champagne after France!

This is far from the common vision we have about Africa right?

Nigeria has paid off its debt and launched satellites into outer space – partly to expand a rapidly growing mobile telecommunications market…

Slide5:

…Because the mobile telecommunications market in Africa isn’t just about talk and text.

80 percent of Kenyans now bank with a cell phone, and surveys indicate that half of Kenyans connect to the Internet every day. A lot of that is by mobile, because landlines are expensive and broadband internet access is non-existent outside major cities. The mobile network is faster and cheaper to put in place.

Mobile is the desktop in emerging markets.

Incidentally, Kenya is another one to watch. Its growth rate last year was 5.1%, and the government’s Vision 2030 economic plan for development envisions 200,000 tech professionals living and working in Techno City near Nairobi by 2025.

38% of Kenyans still live in poverty, yes. But the pace of change is incredibly fast.

Slide 6:

If mobile banking is popular in Africa, mobile payment is the big opportunity in Asia.

According to a Gartner report, Asia-Pacific will account for US$74 billion of mobile payments in 2013, up 38 percent since 2012. This is driven by developed markets including Singapore and South Korea as well as developing markets such as India. In comparison, North America’s mobile payment total of US$37 billion seems fairly small, even though it is up 53% from 2012.

Global mobile payment transactions will generate $235.4 billion this year, growing 44 percent over last year's US$163.1 billion. 

Africa and Asia combined are projected to have 163 million mobile payment users by 2016, far outpacing other regions including North America, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

In UAE 108% of the population have a smartphone – the highest rate in the world! – and the number of mobile searches in this region doubled last year.

You can see that the infrastructure for massive ecommerce is being put in place.

[Source: ZdNet.com based on Gartner report: http://www.zdnet.com/global-mobile-payment-transactions-to-surpass-235b-7000016297/]

Slide 7:

Along with the rapid growth in mobile transactions comes a rapid growth in ecommerce in emerging markets. According to emarketer:

Ø  Asia-Pacific already accounts for nearly a third of all B2C ecommerce sales in the world. Online sales in the Middle East and Africa will increase more quickly this year than in Asia-Pacific, but from a smaller base.

Ø  Other fast-growing regions include Latin America, where total spending will reach $45.98 billion this year and Central and Eastern Europe, where digital buyers will spend $48.56 billion. The difference is to reach eastern Europe you need over 10 languages while to reach the whole of Latin America you need two languages...

Ø  Ecommerce sales growth will be supported by an estimated 1.03 billion digital buyers around the world this year, 44.4% of whom will be in Asia-Pacific. China alone will boast 269.4 million digital buyers this year—a figure that includes internet users ages 14 and older who make at least one purchase via any digital channel during the calendar year. The US remains the country with the second-largest number of digital buyers, at 155.7 million this year.

Slide 8:

I am not here to tell you that everything is easy and perfect in emerging markets, but like every move, there are risks involved. This is why you need to carefully select the precise markets where you want to launch and do it gradually. Yes, expanding into unknown territories is a risky business. But multicultural content marketing should help you overcome those risks, because it involves listening to local people about what they’re interested in, and speaking to them in their own language about things they care about.

Be pragmatic and focused. Select a couple of markets with high potential for growth, and do the right steps to launch. Don’t bite off more than you can chew – translating a site into 20 languages makes no sense at all and we have seen this previously with CIENA’s presentation the website is dead.

Slide 9:

Tip 1: Pick the languages with the most potential for your business

Forget culture for now, let's think quickly about languages alone. It takes 12 languages to reach 80% of the world's population. And it's the languages of emerging markets that are coming online now. Today, the fastest growing languages online are Arabic, Russian and Mandarin.

English is spoken by 365 million people, but Spanish is used by over 400 million and Mandarin by over a billion. However currently, just under 30% of written content online is English, 24% is Mandarin, and less than 8% is Spanish. So there is huge potential for growth in these languages and markets.

Why is this important? Because nobody wants to buy in a language which isn’t their own! Do you shop online in a foreign language?

Slide 10:

Tip 2: Think local

Some companies think ONLY about language. They translate their website into 25 languages and wonder why sales don’t automatically boom. That’s a big risk – first because creating high-quality content takes time and effort, and unless you’re Coca-Cola you’ll never maintain that in 25 languages. Second, because in ignoring cultural factors you risk alienating an entire market and damaging your brand’s reputation

The key to multicultural content marketing is to start small with one or two languages, start local by listening to the market, and combine your global brand messages with these local insights.

We all know that Google’s recent algorithm changes reward creators of original, local, topical content and penalize those who copy or churn out masses of irrelevant material. In giving stories a fresh, local twist, you’ll be enhancing your reputation, not just with your target users, but with search engines, too.

Poor translations - and worse, auto-translations - are not just bad and inaccurate, they harm your brand by sending the message: “You’re not important to us”.

Stop thinking Search Engine Optimization, instead think Search Audience Optimization, this will help you to secure a long term growth on all digital channels instead of short term traffic pikes…

Slide 11:

Tip 3: Go mobile

As we saw just now in some of the impressive statistics, the potential for mobile ecommerce in emerging markets is massive. That’s not surprising when you consider that the internet infrastructure is not sufficient to give everyone high-speed broadband, so most internet access is via mobile phones and low-cost tablet computers. According to Nielsen as we speak, 36% of Brazilians owns a smartphone, 37% of Russians and 25% of Chinese. And in 2015, 85% of Africans will have access to a mobile device of some sort.

Brands who don't reach out to emerging economies with mobile-friendly content in the local language are missing an increasingly important marketplace.

Developing mobile-friendly websites and apps for ecommerce won’t only help you in emerging markets. The United States’ mobile penetration is 90%.

Remember that mobile search is local. So you must have local content in order for your products to show up on mobile searches. 4G is there and this will make this even more important trust me.

If you do not take this in consideration, do not worry, others will!

Slide 12:

Tip 4: Put passion and care in the content you create

What does passion have to do with content marketing?

Thoughtless advertising campaigns are sometimes felt by consumers and even by some of us marketers as pollution – noise pollution and visual pollution. But content created with care and passion is not felt by the consumer as pollution. Why? Because carefully created content is useful, it helps answers a question and helps a user make a decision. Great content is created by passionate writers, filmmakers, designers, photographers who really care about what they want to say. Care and passion is what makes content stand out from the rest of the advertising noise pollution.

This is why great content gets shared on social networks, and why it converts, right?

Content marketing is not a trend but a massive shift from the way we used to do advertising. Advertising is no longer summarized to a message you keep pushing and repeating as loud as you can everywhere…. anytime. This is too aggressive for many of us. Passion and great stories have one extraordinary quality that marketers have dreamed of for a long time: they spread naturally! Why now? Because we are living in an hyper connected world where sharing information has become a way to communicate and help friends, family, co-workers…

Slide 13:

Tip 5: Listen to data and create the corresponding multicultural content

Big Data is changing the way we understand the world. We all now have a vast amount of data at our fingertips – and that data has become our crystal ball. Clever content marketing strategists not only look at this crystal ball, they analyse what the data is telling them and then act upon it.

Where are your customers located? What language is their browser set to? What devices do they use? How reliant are they upon mobiles? What keywords do they tend to type into search engines? To each question you need an answer, and you need those answers to help guide you in creating relevant content.

Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, was quoted in a recent Capgemini Consulting Report as saying: “Consumer data will be the biggest differentiator in the next two to three years. Whoever unlocks the reams of data and uses it strategically will win.” Yes, I agree that data is important. But only if data is then linked to a solid multicultural content strategy.

Slide 14:

Tip 6: Listen and personalize

The fifth point is related to both big data and passion, and it's about listening to people and your customers and personalising content for them specifically. Listening in the digital world is done with programs like Omniture and Google Analytics.

Here’s an example of good use of website analytics data from the marketing manager of Hotels.com: “We rolled out an improved localisation of our Russian site which used the correct grammatical case for city names and the conversion rate jumped. So through adjusting better to local language usage in Russia, we increased out annual growth rate by a significant percentage. Conversion rate tripled so imagine what this means in terms of overall financial results…” This is massive game changer. It can change the face of your business in a market, in a region or globally.

So – Big Data helps you listen. It helps you understand what people love, what they want to search for, read about and learn about. But don't get caught up in just numbers. To listen properly you need to have people on the ground who can understand local cultures and then can advise you on local passions, frames of reference, browsing habits and other cultural differences.

Only then can you start creating multicultural content that's relevant to people.

Personalization is the use of DATA to display the right content to the right people at the right time, in a way that shows you're listening and responding to their passions.

Slide 15:

Tip #7: Think and act Multi device

67% online shopping is a multi device activity

77% people watching TV hold another device

57% of the time when we are using a smartphone we are using another device

There are so many devices out there – laptops, tablets, Chromebooks, mobiles of all shapes and sizes... Think how many devices you have used today.  It is an incredible transformation of how we consume content and how we interact with brands.

Our children are born in a tactile and multi-device world, and this is normal for them.

So we have to think and act like them – and that means engaging people on all types of devices and platforms.

In Russia, Yandex is the dominant search engine, not Google. In South Korea, it's Naver. In China they search on Baidu and tweet on Weibo rather than Twitter. So don't fall into the trap of thinking that Google is the only search engine worth bothering about, that Facebook and Twitter the only social media platforms you need a presence on.

Think multi-platform and create content that fits with that.

Slide16:

Tip 8: Be Credible and Be Different

Apply your tone of voice, be different, be local

Be different from the brand crowd by creating quality culturally adapted content. DO not just blindly translate, pick a couple languages and do it right!

What do locals like or not like about your competitors' content? Think about this all the time and you will create better content.

How can you be different from them? How can you create content that is relevant, high-quality, useful and fun?

Dare to be different, make sure those differences are based on analysing and understanding each local culture you are targeting. This will make you credible and this is the first step in being successful when launching in a new market.

Slide 17:

Tip 9: Continually CREATE Content

It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. You need to create fresh content at a sustainable pace in order to grow your visitor numbers, your communities on social media, and your conversion rates.

Continually creating original content will also improve your search rankings. As we all know, search engines prioritize new, original content – they always seem hungry for more, and so are consumers.

The risk is that you translate your website and leave it to remain static while you wait for a miracle. In fact, you have to continually create NEW content for your audience, so make sure you have the strategy and resources to do that.

This is the entire communication and collaboration logic that needs to evolve in many companies. One of our customers is a large B2B form, they provide measurement tool for the oil and gaz industry: WIKA instruments. The senior management had difficulties in believing that creating bunch of good content online will have a direct effect on sales. Sales was something to be done face to face, on the fields. This is now the third year we do work for WIKA.

Keyword conversion (2012 vs. 2011) up 1962%

• Total visitors (2012 vs. 2011) up 32%

• Conversion rate for RFQs (2012 vs. 2011) up 46%

• Total visitors (2013 vs. 2012) up 48%

• Social media audience engagement (2013 vs. 2012) up

230%

“You absolutely need relevant and timely content to become a thought leader in any B2B industry, but becoming a thought leader is just a means to an end—and that end is customer loyalty,”

McClain stresses. “Customers need insights and help navigating issues and solutions, and now that WIKA can provide content around their needs, customers and potential customers have reasons-to-believe that WIKA can serve them best.”

Slide 18:

Tip 9: Tell stories

The best way to create fresh content that will engage readers in your chosen markets is through Storytelling.

In the White Paper I mentioned earlier – which I’m releasing this week – a co-author Karen Webber from Axonn interviewed Robert Rose from CMI about Coca-Cola’s 2020 content strategy. He said that Coca-Cola is a great example of a traditional brand – the biggest advertising buyer in the world–  really shifting to put content at the very center of its marketing strategy. Content 2020 is a content manifesto that is revolutionizing Coca Cola marketing strategy. The 100^th Christmas of Coca-Cola in the Philippines video was viewed more than 1.6 million times.

The lessons we as marketers can learn from Coca-Cola have to do with great planning and theming for creative storytelling. Coca-Cola doesn’t just throw content against the wall and see what sticks. There are planning sessions and editorial theming that go into the content creation process at every step.

I believe that digital marketers would do well to take inspiration from Coca-Cola's creativity and innovation and infuse a small bit of it into their strategy. When launching into emerging markets Is it more valuable for a brand to try to get out ten more blog posts of the top 5 reasons why x, y or z should buy? Or, should a brand really put planning, creativity and thought into how they can differentiate themselves using the power of content and great stories?”

So share true stories about who makes your products and how. Behind-the-scenes glimpses make readers feel they are backstage at an exciting event, and the human element allows ordinary people to identify with a brand. Accompany your stories with powerful imagery, whether photos or videos, and preferably sound, too. Engaging the senses – and the brain – helps users internalise your brand's core values.

Don't worry about creating 'viral' content, which causes a flash of traffic that quickly dies. Instead, aim for high-quality stories that will spread steadily through social networks and deliver long-lasting results.

Slide 19:

In review here are the 10 principles I believe you should apply to all your communications, digital or not. This list is of course not exhaustive, however you have here what I believe are the main principles of well planned content marketing strategy.

Slide 20:

EVG want to help you:

Ø  Grow your brand visibility

Ø  Grow your online Reputation

Ø  Grow your site stickiness and attractively

Ø  Ultimately grow you conversion rate and therefore your overall revenues.

Thanks for listening to me, please let me know if you have any questions.