Marketing across different regions, countries, states, and cultures can be tricky if you don't know how to go about it. Soon, you will learn all about how to target your audience, specifically across different cultures and regions.
Celebrating Company Culture through Content
Culture is the way of life of the people. For marketers, this is the opportunity to introduce yourself to people through your content. It is an organic way to give a human face to your brand and cultivate a more genuine relationship with not only the people who need your product or service, but potential employees and collaborators.
Forming your brand identity takes an abundance of practice, research, and adapting to new ways. In practice, you can celebrate your company culture through content by offering a behind-the-scenes look at the people, places, and values that make your brand what it is. From blog posts to videos, businesses can showcase company culture in every medium and every touchpoint. Below are some examples of how companies are using their organizational culture in their marketing efforts.
Spotify: Showcasing Employees
Spotify does an incredible job of divulging across cultures through employee spotlights, interviews, and other team-centric content. These techniques are a great way to peel back the curtain and show people the true faces behind your brand, while also making employees feel valued and seen. Showcasing employees is very useful in letting people express why they enjoy working for their company, while also showing potential candidates why they might enjoy it too. As most of the employee features are very simple, they tend to be quite fun and give insight into the employee, along with Spotify as a whole.
Expedia: Holiday Celebrations
The holidays you as an individual celebrate, along with how you celebrate them, say a lot about your company culture. From ridiculous costume content for Halloween, trivia night for International Women's month, or a water balloon fight to celebrate your company's 50th anniversary, showing your consumers how you party and celebrate can be a great way to entice people to join the fun! Expedia goes about this by doing a blog roundup of how their people celebrate Lunar New Year, a popular holiday in Asian countries. Employees are given the opportunity to share their personal traditions, offer celebration ideas, and suggest foods to eat if you want to celebrate it yourself. Ultimately, this creates a cross-culture community and allows your employees to celebrate together.
Video Amp: Contests
Video Amp competes and offers content quite often to give people insight into who they are as a brand, what they care about, and how their team interacts. People absolutely love seeing this side of your brand's personality. A core part of Video Amp's culture includes integrating health, fitness, and well-being. To emphasize how important this is to the brand, Video Amp published a blog and video documenting the epic fitness challenge they held for their team - with a grand prize trip to Kauai, Hawaii.
Marketing Across the World: Australia
Australia is always a tempting target for expansion beyond the two big English-language countries, the U.K. and U.S. Just because Australia shares the same language as these countries, doesn't mean you can just copy-paste in identical content for this market. Australia has its own unique culture and quirks, and any successful campaign must account for these key differences.
For example, the Land Down Under is at the forefront of the global trend towards increased usage of smartphone and tablet devices. Australian users topped 600 million total smartphone and tablet sessions, nearly doubling the number of desktop sessions. 74% of Australians say they rely on their phone as much as their PC when searching for news, advice, or information. If you are marketing to users in Australia, you will want to ensure that your campaigns target this heavy usage of mobile devices. Although Australia shares the same English language, it is a much smaller country with its own unique strategies and techniques. Market to your audience!
Variety of Cultures and What to do Next
Marketing differs across cultures for various reasons, and some of these differences are striking. The primary takeaway for businesses is that they need to understand the true nature of demand across groups rather than fall back on simple assumptions about ethnic preferences. For example, making simple cultural/demographic assumptions often results in companies underestimating the broader appeal of their products outside of conventional ethnic group boundaries. Cultural preferences are learned or chosen over time and not inevitably determined by the ethnic identity of a person's family of origin. Preferences for food, music, sports, food and fashion can be highly individual and not necessarily anchored in one's cultural roots. Different cultures are variably receptive to marketing messages that are direct or indirect, explicit or implicit, and rational or emotional.
Focus on knowing your audience - who needs your product, what form to deliver it to them, and how to do it in a way that strengthens the brand. The main goal of marketing across cultures is allowing the opportunity for your audience to feel like the product or service you are offering is made for them and unique! Cross-cultural marketing involves advertising to people in specific cultures as well as appealing to personal interests across cultures.
Overall, marketing across cultures can do wonders for your business, whether it be showcasing employees or sharing holiday celebrations. Sharing your story with another culture can be so insightful and help others feel welcomed into your culture. Let us know in the comments how you market across cultures or where you have seen companies take action like the ones discussed above!
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