You want your marketing campaign to resonate across the world with a big splash, but success requires you to think implementation first.
The goal might be to create a campaign for 30 or more markets, using 20 different languages, with a concept developed by talented professionals in a single home market. In early planning, the creative assets will often be driven by an acute product knowledge that is informed by the home culture.
Brilliant creative campaigns can build an undeniable excitement in the run up to launch, but all too often the detail of exactly how to deliver the strategy globally is forgotten. The task of implementation is then handed over to local markets, who may be equally talented, but who work on global campaigns at arm’s length.
Local teams are not likely to have a deep understanding of the home market’s culture, which means brilliant ideas can become unintelligible after they cross cultural or language divides. The teams on the ground in different territories may also struggle to be enthusiastic about the campaign concept. Add to this other, more functional communication management challenges, such as varying time zones, languages and cultural differences, to complete the picture of campaign chaos.
So what’s the solution? Putting implementation planning first will reduce costs and unnecessary pressure, while still ensuring that the campaign is delivered on time, with measurable results.
The same amount of time should be spent on planning implementation as on designing the creative assets. Any successful global marketing campaign will be underpinned by five key elements decided at the start.
1. Check and strengthen your team: Make sure the best people are in place to adapt the campaign and define the complete implementation process that assigns clear roles to those at global, regional and local levels with a single localisation process.
2. Nail the budget: Confirm the budget and decide ownership and allocation early in the process to enable marketing teams to deliver with confidence and consistency. This financial clarity means that regions will not need to guess campaign budgets, which can lead to wasteful creative production.
3. Involve all global teams early in the creative process: Think globally from the start. Make sure you work with international teams to define how creative collaboration and development will work best in each case and prepare a global plan that has the creative concept as a guide for every marketing team. This should preclude any significant reworking in a market and also ensure that the creative routes accommodate the needs of smaller markets.
4. Appoint an implementation captain: This is complex, but assign an “implementation captain” to ensure the most effective project management and communication, to steer the campaign plan through a structured briefing process. This will ensure that all parties understand goals and tasks with formalised sign-off steps and a clear method for resolving issues. The captain is a single point of contact to maintain consistency and the flow of knowledge between translators, validators, developers, client stakeholders and creative agencies.
5. Choose the right tools: This takes the unnecessary pain out of the campaign process. Two prerequisites are a single, secure and easy-to-use digital asset management system and an all-inclusive campaign management and collaboration platform for effective status and process control. It’s also worth evaluating other tools like translation memory and workflow, video subtitling and web-based CMS translation software.
Kevin Freedman is chief executive of Freedman International
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