Building a Global Content Machine

Subscribe & Listen

Shownotes

In this episode of Sunny Side Up our guest is Megan Morreale. Megan discusses how contextual targeting capabilities have helped her work with clients in different regions and languages, and how trial error was necessary to perfect the localization process and how she learned about taking into account how global differences necessitate a different timeline for campaigns, as well as localization of content to make it culturally relevant.

About the Guest

Megan Morreale is Sr. Manager, Content Marketing at Reddit. Prior to this Megan was Taboola’s Director of Online Marketing. She managed a team of marketing experts that handle the global production of all content, social media channels, and paid campaigns. She regularly contributes to sites like Medium’s Entrepreneur’s Handbook and Better Humans, The Content Strategist, Content Marketing Institute, SEMRush, Vox Media, and Instapage; and has ghost-written pieces for executives on sites like CNBC.com and The Independent.

Connect with Megan Morreale

Key Takeaways

Localization is a critical part of global marketing efforts and requires a lot of organization and technical expertise
When creating global campaigns, it is necessary to take into account cultural differences and the need for a team to be aware of local languages and customs when creating content.
Localization is more than just translating content. You need to focus on transcreation, which is creating campaigns that are effective in each country.
It is necessary to have a system in place where marketing materials are pre-planned based on events that happen in different countries.

Quotes

“Localization is so much more than just translation. You’re wasting your time and money if you’re just translating content you’ve created for one market into another language”.

– Megan Morreale

Highlights from the Episode

What are you up to these days?

Megan’s focus is to support marketers who want to advertise in places other than just search and social platforms. She also works with niche magazines, blogs, e-commerce, mobile apps, and different types of digital properties, so her clients can access a more diverse set of platforms. The most critical part of her job is making consistent and relevant campaigns where she and her team operates.

What mistakes have you made along the way, what have you learned from them, and what can our audience learn from them?

Megan pinpoints three major learning milestones. The first was her timeline on how to figure out when to create campaigns that take into account global differences. An example could be how in the US, Mother’s Day happens two months after it does in Europe. The second lesson was not factor in the need to clarify certain phrases or metaphors that don’t make sense in another language. The third one was thinking that they could do all of this as a central team and then hand off the content to marketers in other regions to figure out how to localize on their own, realizing that they need to connect with countries that wanted to localize campaigns before creating them.

What advice do you have for our audience members building similar programs?

The one takeaway that Megan wishes for listeners to have in mind is to know that localization is much more than just translation. Translation all alone will work if the goal is to reach people who speak different languages in the same country. But the focus would be on transcreation: recreate the campaign to send the same message in each country.

What does your program look like today?

The process for global online marketing has five major steps: planning, creating, filing, localization, and tools. Planning starts when the budget requests are submitted, then time is spent identifying globally relevant themes and deciding what will warrant global attention. They also ask each of the local marketers for an online marketing wish list, creating a list of potential campaigns. They select relevant campaigns, plan their assets, and get everyone on the team aligned on the plan ahead of time. Then, assets are built, data is collected, and research is executed. Then the localization efforts are commenced about what has been collected.

At different stages in a company’s maturity, what are things people should be thinking about? What can they prepare themselves for? What things might pop up?

Megan also advises people to think that the expectation that starting to localize marketing assets will create a snowball effect. Her experience with Taboola made her realize that as the company grew and the marketing efforts matured, the processes that they built for localization became a foundation for creating custom campaigns for those markets, which was important for success in an emerging market.