When it comes to companies’ global marketing strategies, one size doesn’t fit all. Even the largest brands can’t achieve global growth making some changes to better serve each location. Outside of the obvious step of translating materials into local languages, many other decisions affecting buying experiences can be personalized based on locale.

That's where localization comes in. Customers across the world prefer different products, different shopping experiences, and different forms of communication. Localization personalizes these aspects and more to help companies engage their customers in a personalized way around the world.

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What is localization & why is it important?

What is localization?

Localization is a process by which businesses make their products and services available to different global markets. This includes translating marketing materials into different languages to enhance global reach, but also picking images, content, communication methods, and brand elements that work best in specific areas.

Brands use localized marketing strategies to reach hyper-specific groups of customers with messaging that uniquely resonates with them, stirring up more interest for their offerings. When building localized strategies, companies contextualize a variety of offerings and marketing communications:

• Product and service offerings: offering products based on the needs and tastes of each location
• Buying experiences: using different store formats and pricing based on the buyer personas of major consumer types in that area
• Brand messaging: adjusting key messaging, puns, idioms, figurative language, imagery and more to better reach local target audiences
• Brand assets and creatives: changing images to be more relevant to the locale; giving representation to the people of different racial, ethnic, gender, and other types of identities living there
• Marketing collateral: translating and analytically optimizing websites, landing pages, downloadable assets, media, SEO and paid ads, CTAs and more
• Data management: following each country’s individual security, privacy and data-handling laws

In an increasingly globalized market, more brands than ever are using localization strategies like these to succeed in new markets and optimize sales in pre-established ones. 

Why is localization important?

With today’s consumers demanding personalization in exchange for brand loyalty, localization empowers brands to offer hyper-specific ads, offers, products, and more that directly address local customers’ preferences. This can help brands connect more deeply with customers across geographies, improving the long-term value of customer relationships in those areas.

Succeeding in new markets takes careful strategizing and technologies tailored to a brand's needs. Braze helps companies execute their localization strategy, improving customer engagement across markets with the help of localization-specific tool integrations. With Braze, marketers can undertake localization campaigns with lower risk and higher potential for success.

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3 steps to build a better localization plan

One great aspect of localization is its ability to continuously improve as more data is collected, more strategies are tested, and your brand expands into more markets. Whether or not you have a martech-powered localization strategy currently in place, follow these three simple steps to analyze and optimize relevant processes.

1. Analyzing current business goals & processes

Start by considering questions around overall business goals for localization to clarify what’s most important to key decision makers and your organization as a whole:

• What role does localization currently play in your overall business strategy?
• What markets are you localizing for?
• What parts of the business are you localizing? How do your products and services differ across markets?
• How are you currently doing localization? Are you using in-house resources, working with an agency, using technology, or all of the above?
• What are examples in which your localization strategies have worked? Where are they falling short?
• What are your localization goals for the next 12 to 24 months? Do you want to expand into new markets to drive revenue growth? Or would you rather focus on optimizing the localization process for cost savings?

By examining your current business strategy & priorities, you will have a good starting point to work off of when discussing future localization plans.

2. Identifying gaps & solutions

Once your priorities are aligned with business goals and you understand how your current localization strategies are working, answer more marketing-specific localization questions develop narrow niches for improvement:

• How does the mix of different marketing channels you use change across markets (i.e., SMS in the US versus WhatsApp abroad)? Where does each channel work best? In which locations are certain channels performing worse?
• What marketing collateral is being localized today? How is that being done? What's the quality of the localized material?
• Do you localize creative and messaging in addition to copy translation?
• How is copy translation done today? What is the translation process? Do you want an in-house translator, or do you need external support?

Once you identify the parts of your program that could use improvement, brainstorm solutions for each problem.

3. Enacting new localization strategies & tech

Finally, fill the gaps in your strategy and processes with new strategies and martech.

As Braze consultants, we help global brands optimize their localization processes using best-in-breed technology. To start the optimization process, consider questions like:

• Which aspects of copy translation are most important to you (i.e., speed, quality, accuracy, or cost)?
• What is your preferred balance between human translation and machine translation?
• What is your target turnaround time for copy translation?
• What is your email/digital message development process? How are messages architected today (i.e., full HTML emails versus modularized content blocks)?
• What technologies are involved in your translation process? What integrations exist today?

Once we know exactly what you’re looking for, we help you build a custom plan within Braze and its localization integrations to fit your goals, priorities, and practical needs.

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How Braze can help

With several specific features for improving localization and five popular integration partners, Braze lands a cut above competitors for better localized strategic processes. For example, worldwide photography brand 500px achieved a 257% revenue increase in Germany and a 145% revenue increase in France after using Braze for better language localization. In addition, Braze has a variety of localization partners that seamlessly connect with Braze, allowing marketing content to be reliably translated into new languages and sent back into Braze for campaign execution and tracking.

Braze Alloys Localization Partners

Braze partners with five localization platforms to generate marketing content in local languages. 

• Smartling
• Lokalise
• Crowdin
• Phrase‍
• Transifex 

Stitch can help you determine which platform is right for you based on your specific needs.‍

Internal Braze localization features

Braze offers several key features to help international businesses manage and localize internal data and systems.‍

Multi-Language Settings

Braze’s multi-language settings feature allows you to target users in different languages and locations with different messages all within a single email message.

Braze Instances

For compliance purposes, you can choose whether your Braze data is stored in the U.S. or Europe. You can even decide to have multiple instances of Braze based on geographies. For example, a company may have one Europe-hosted instance to cover EU data subjects, while a US-hosted instance covers everyone else.

Braze Workspaces

Workspaces allow you to segment user data, marketing assets, and regional teams to protect your data with proper access controls. You can build workspaces dedicated to each major region, like having separate US, Mexico, and Canada workspaces, so that teams only have access to the data their region needs.

Tags & Teams

Tags & Teams allow you to segment and organize users within and across workspaces based on their role within your organization. Admins can govern access to data and content based on geography or other team tags. For example, a Segment tagged with ‘Mexico’ can only be accessible by Braze users assigned to the ‘Mexico’ team.

Dashboard Languages

The Braze dashboard is available in multiple languages. Users can choose their preferred display language as a personal preference, so it does not affect other users logging into Braze. Supported languages within this feature include English, Japanese, French, and Korean.

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Succeed in new markets with efficient localization

Marketing localization is a powerful tool for building customer connections across geographies. Optimizing localization processes and strategies within the most efficient toolset represents significant cost savings and growth potential for global brands.

Using Braze, you can seamlessly integrates with popular translation tools like Smartling and Lokalize, helps make localization efforts more efficient and accurate. And with the help of a partner like Stitch, implementing Braze into your current martech stack is quick and easy, so you can get back to actively localizing ASAP.

Reach out to learn more about how Stitch can help to improve your localization processes.