If you work as a marketer in a global company, this conundrum is all too familiar. On the one hand, your content must be unified: Everywhere in the world, the messaging must be consistent, and people must recognize the brand. On the other hand, rigid consistency across cultures can backfire or undercut your business goals.
When it comes to global content, one size does not fit all.
Rebecca Lieb gets it. She works as a strategic advisor and research analyst on digital marketing for many of the world’s leading brands. In her Content Marketing World talk, Global Content Marketing Strategy – Creating Content for Diverse Global Markets, she emphasized the need to approach global content from two directions at once: top-down and bottom-up.
While Rebecca’s top-down-bottom-up metaphor fits perfectly with the hierarchical nature of most org charts, we get more insight from her other bidirectional metaphor: a global content process as the body’s circulatory system:
- Marketing headquarters pumps content, messaging, and brand guidelines to local offices the way the heart pumps blood.
- The system works only when the heart uses what the extremities deliver back to inform new phases of content and new initiatives.
How does your global enterprise create a healthy content circulatory system?
Evangelize your content everywhere
To foster the kind of two-way communication required by a global content circulatory system, you need a content evangelist.
The evangelist may not have a title comparable to chief content officer. That person might be head of digital, head of marketing, or head of social media. What matters is that someone plays an evangelizing role, which includes two parts: conveying the importance of the centrally developed content and processes to people at all local offices AND listening to local concerns.
“Someone has to constantly go out there and beat the drum,” Rebecca says. “You have to evangelize and test department-specific initiatives to drive bottom-up support.”
Here’s a cautionary tale. Rebecca worked with one global tech company that didn’t evangelize, didn’t socialize. Its communication was not a circulatory system. It went one way. There was no give and take.
Their creative department built a new DAM, a digital asset management repository for content around the world. Everybody in the company suddenly got this email that said, basically, ‘Henceforth and furthermore this is the process: Put all your content here.’ Guess what happened? Everybody said, ‘Up yours! Nobody asked me about this! This doesn’t meet my department’s requirements. So just no.’
The content evangelist takes local requirements into account and considers the WIIFM (what’s in it for me?) factor. “One of the best ways to evangelize content is to show the other person, the other team, the other department why this is going to work for them. People want their jobs to be easier,” Rebecca says.
In addition, you must appoint people in the field to oversee things on regional or local levels to scale the training and evangelizing. Otherwise, she says, local teams “complain bitterly and often that they’re just handed content and expected to use it.”
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