As we enter the final months of 2022, it seems the only constant is change.
The world around us continues to career from disruption to a crisis, such as geo-political conflict and pandemics creating supply chain issues that inevitably impact sales and marketing downstream. Add to this the inflation and cost of living challenges that customers and consumers face and this will inherently affect their buying appetite and risk-taking mentality in both consumer and B2B markets as profit margins are squeezed.
As marketing budgets may tighten over the next year or so due to this uncertainty, what are the key global marketing trends you’ll need to focus on to drive your business forward in 2023?
Lead with your Brand
Branding may be too often conflated with logos and graphic design, but as customers have more choices than ever before due to globalisation, positioning your brand purpose and creating a genuine connection is the route forward in 2023.
This means ensuring you have an authentic mission and consistent style and tone for all of your communications, so that your customers feel comfortable in making their buying decisions and that their values align with yours. Whether it’s leaning into sustainability metrics in an engineering business or ensuring that you have a clear customer-centric message that empathises with their needs, fears and desires, customers can afford to be choosy so working hard to create a better contextual relationship with your buyers across the globe may be a better option than “selling at” them.
From a translation point of view, this means delivering consistent communications in all regions, localised and adapted to fit the cultural norms of the audience you’re selling to and leaning into the sometimes subtle and nuanced differences between cultures to achieve it.
Leverage Your Customers
If the first trend on the list was about creating trust in your company, what you do and how you do it, this second trend elevates that by asking your prospects to not just trust what you say about your own company but instead trust other people that have bought from you.
As most consumer and B2B markets mature alongside an inbuilt reticence to buy and warranted cynicism from your audience (especially where your brand trust is in its infancy) it helps to feature genuine and authentic reviews, testimonials, case studies and user-generated content in your marketing efforts.
This is another chance to translate marketing materials that have been created by or alongside your customers, from case studies to reviews or even subtitling videos professionally and accurately so they can be consumed by a global audience. This gives you another opportunity to connect in an honest, transparent way to new markets.
Focus on the Full Customer Experience
If customers are harder to come by, more difficult to reach and you’re having to work harder to close them in the sales process in 2023, it makes sense to focus on the full customer experience in your marketing. This means a collaborative approach with sales to ascertain how marketing can support the whole process from initial engagement through the sale.
This is where the marketing function must develop from the more traditional understanding of lead generation and communication/advertising into a fully-fledged and integrated function within the business. This gives you even more opportunities to develop and translate marketing literature that guides the customer into the sale and increases the conversion rate rather than having to constantly be out hunting, you’re farming the leads with more efficacy. This could mean additional technical documentation in B2B markets or more detailed slide decks – but mapping the customer journey with sales and then aligning all of your global assets alongside this is a great start.
Cultivate an Answers-Based Content Marketing Strategy
As a compliment to the above trend of enhancing the whole customer experience, it makes sense to embark on an answers-based content marketing strategy.
The reasons for this are twofold. As you enter new markets, with low brand equity, customers will inevitably have a lot of questions to ask about you, your product, your market and myriad other surroundings, supplementary and complimentary subjects. This enhances the customer experience by showing you understand their needs and having simple, stock answers in local languages to help them make the right purchase decision.
In addition, this confers SEO benefits too as Google’s search engine pages are increasingly featuring questions in the main results pages as recognition of the search user’s psychology.
Zero-click searches accounted for more than half of all Google search queries. This means that when users search for something in Google, the majority didn’t click on anything after their search to find what they needed.
Just a cursory glance at “translation services” shows this panel high up on the search results page:
And as the user clicks to reveal answers, more questions appear to support the quest for knowledge.
You can research these questions with many SEO tools, like SEMRush, but working with sales to understand the questions they’re asked most frequently alongside this market research and then providing detailed and comprehensive answers to these questions in all languages means you’re also more likely to be found on Google too.
Looking Ahead
2023 is looking to be an exciting challenge for marketers across the globe and we’re here to help you translate your marketing content for new audiences. This doesn’t just have to be campaigns and communication content, but the brand, mission, purpose, user-generated content and answers, plus additional customer experience content too. Our team has native-speaking marketing experts that also specialise in technical and manufacturing industries too to bring that nuanced and professional translation to deliver accurate translations every time.
Get in touch to discuss your project today.
