Jacqueline Gonzales [featured image] is the Head of Global Marketing at Squarespace. In this piece, she shares her best pieces of advice for launching a campaign globally.
It’s estimated that we see between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. In today’s digital landscape we’re constantly bombarded by so many different brand messages from every direction. As a brand it has never been more critical to resonate and connect with your customer so you can cut through the clutter. For that reason, when launching a brand in a new market, it’s important to understand the cultural nuances that make up that place, and create content and opportunities to engage with the brand that are specifically tailored to the community you’re hoping to reach.
One of the things I most love about what I do is learning about the different people and places in markets where I’m introducing a brand. At Squarespace, we recently created our first bespoke campaign in Australia called “Make a name for yourself’. It is a rewarding journey and for brands about to embark on this chapter, here are four tips to help you take your campaign global.
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Start with local insights
All great campaigns start with a clever insight. However, coming up with an insight that resonates with your audience can be challenging. To ensure you’re not missing the mark, enlist the advice of resident local team members or agency partners. These people will quickly become part of your creative A-Team and will help architect themes that will speak directly to the audience you’re looking to reach. Ensure you ask them questions around local cultural sensitivities, what your audience demographic likes doing, seeing, and watching, and how they feel on particular subjects. This will help you intimately understand the culture to enable you to connect in a genuine way.
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Stay true to your brand mission
It’s important to make sure you never disconnect from your true brand mission. At Squarespace, we exist to help people with creative ideas stand out and succeed by providing them with a website building and ecommerce platform that helps them build a brand and transact with their customers via an impactful and beautiful online presence. Across all of our campaigns in multiple markets, creativity and entrepreneurship can mean different things and is attached to its own representations. For example in New York City it’s all about the hustle whereas in Australia we needed to consider tall poppy syndrome and the pride of the underdog. Though both would have different approaches, they ladder up to the same brand mission.
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Hero local talent
Once your creative team has set the campaign idea in stone, look at working with local directors, producers and artists to capture the essence of the new market’s culture in an authentic way. Consider hiring local talent who can be your experts in providing unspoken localised nuances, imagery and messages that are likely to resonate with your market. At Squarespace, we’re also focused on hiring talent to appear in campaigns that reflect the true makeup of the country and of the small businesses and entrepreneurs that we’re working to inspire and empower.
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Choose the right platforms
Although we predominantly live in a digital world, audiences in different countries consume their content through different mediums. A channel that works in one country may not work in another, so do your research before it hits the airwaves. It’s important to consider what platforms perform best in the country based on your target audience. Ensure you’re asking your local team the right questions to understand where and what your community reads, listens or watches their content.
