Going global is a major goal of large companies. The chance to sell your products to customers around the world is an opportunity to grow your revenue and bolster your company's brand as a major player in your industry.

It's one thing to design a successful local marketing campaign for your customers, who you know well. It's quite another to plan and manage a global marketing campaign that sells your new offerings, whether products or services.

Let’s explore the strategies you can utilize to build a global marketing strategy that brings results and raises your brand to new heights of success.

What Are the Key Elements of an International Marketing Strategy?

If you want to develop a successful global marketing strategy, you'll need to create and implement a few different elements. These include:

• Doing a lot of research

• Assembling a team made of the right people

• Using the right tools, such as software platforms

• Managing the project with the right approach

• Tracking the right KPIs or key performance indicators

• Localizing your marketing materials and assets

• Standardizing and automating your processes as the campaign continues

Let’s look at how to plan and manage a marketing campaign that operates on a global scale.

Research, research and more research

Before you start a marketing campaign, you should do your research. Researching your market is important for all kinds of marketing, but it won’t help much if you rely on insights from your previous audience members to apply equally to your next audience.

It's important to know that what works in one country may not work in another. So always plan to go back to the drawing board and learn from your mistakes.

Research can help you plan a marketing campaign. The more information you gather, the better your odds of achieving success.

Develop a “global” buyer persona

It may be more effective to develop global personas rather than smaller, regionalized ones for individual audience groups. Buyer personas can vary from country to country or even from area to area within individual countries. Cultural variations also affect how your brand is seen by locals and the kind of messaging you need to push to inspire purchases.

To be effective, your marketing team should develop global personas with both detail and nuance. Your team should try to segment different likely or prospective audiences, determine what will most appeal to them, and find areas of crossover. You can then highlight those crossover areas – such as shared wants or needs, shared thoughts about your brand, etc. – in your global marketing materials/assets.

Put together an international marketing team 

It is crucial to have the right blend of people for your marketing campaign to operate as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Therefore, you need forward-thinking and especially agile project managers on your team.

Because global marketing campaigns are so flexible, your team lead can't get hung up on specific strategies or goals that may not work for multiple target markets. Instead, the ideal project manager or lead and their team members should be:

• Willing to adapt to changing circumstances

• Diverse – this is important so your marketing campaign takes multiple points of view and frameworks into account

• Consistent and known for deliverables

Use a Project Management Approach

Consider using a project management approach when developing an international marketing campaign. A project management approach allows you to organize your program and set important deadlines right from the get-go, as well as control things like:

• Team member collaborations

• Dependencies across different agencies or departments

• Resource allocation and data management

Your team leader should think of global marketing as a massive project with many moving parts, because it is—don’t think of it as just another marketing campaign. Global marketing requires its own focus, multitasking capabilities, and cross-departmental collaboration compared to smaller, localized campaigns.

Establish the Right KPIs to Track

While you’re working to establish and track the right KPIs, don’t rely on generalized metrics to see whether your campaign is coming along strongly. Instead, work with regional teams and find the unique metrics that tie back to your overall marketing goals.

The same company's slow growth in one region or country could be a sign of rapid growth in another. This highlights how global marketing is more complex than localized marketing, and it may require a custom-tailored look at each region or cultural market you want to reach.

Localize Marketing Assets

Be sure to localize all of your marketing assets. This means more than just translating copy; it also means checking your marketing materials, such as CTAs/calls to action, photography, and videos.

Marketing to your target audience in their native language may help them become more receptive to your company's products or services. If you don’t localize your materials, your marketing campaign efforts, like your advertisements or social media posts, may not make the advertising splash you hope they will.

Localization takes some time, but it’s worth the effort in the end. Done properly, localization will allow your brand to reach a much wider audience and connect deeply with your target personas.

Standardize and Automate

To get the most from your global marketing strategy, you need to standardize and automate workflows and processes. Standardization and organization allow you to boost your return on investment/ROI massively, while also allowing your marketing materials to reach as many people as possible.

If you standardize and automate your global marketing campaign, you'll be able to truly impact an international audience. That will free up your team leads for other tasks on the horizon.

Our tool is the perfect partner for international business.

Planning and managing a successful international marketing strategy means doing tons of research, developing the right personas for your target audience, and using the perfect tools for the job. Our marketing campaign management platform makes any international campaign easy to plan and manage. Don’t wait until your campaign is already full steam ahead – contact us today and see how we can help your brand thrive in the global market.