Rich media marketing is an almost irrefutable tool for modern marketers and businesses. From product videos, sales or training graphics, gaming, and even augmented reality, if you want your business’ messaging to have immediate impact on an end consumer, rich media is the way to do it.
Rich media is more interesting, entertaining, and, ultimately, more memorable. So, it’s hardly surprising that it has become a standardised way for businesses to communicate with customers.
It has been heavily driven by consumer behaviour online but, as with any online content, companies have to accept that their rich media is competing in a crowded market place. In fact, a recent Millward Brown survey found that we only spend 1/20 of a second deciding on whether or not to engage with a piece of digital content or not. Businesses have to find ways to capture their customer’s ever decreasing attention span quickly.
The best way to help any rich media create this cut through is to find ways of making it more relevant and personalised to the target audience. The key is localisation. Localisation is simply the process of making sure that content is ready for local consumption; beyond translation, it involves factoring in any cultural differences and sensitivities.
While it sounds straight forward, with rich media marketing there can be a number of pitfalls, all of which can be avoided with proper planning.
Understand the Market
Establishing your target markets and how the proposed rich media assets will be adapted is crucial to the localisation process. A better understanding of the markets can help feed into every aspect of a build process.
Rich media can be costly to produce. It is much easier to pre-plan for content to be adapted by local experts rather than try to retro fit globally created assets for individual markets. Engaging with in-market specialists before content is created can side step any potential cultural misunderstandings that may occur afterwards.
Once you know where and how the content will be used, you can create a provisional asset outlay and start to plan for adjustments. A good approach to this is to avoid any colloquialisms or cultural references as these do not tend to translate well. With a structure in place you can look at how the rich media content will perform as an asset and the challenges this can entail. Take video content as an example.
The Value of Video
Video content can be a great way for marketers to quickly convey product benefits and brand messaging. It can be used internally for training purposes. On a market level, video content that resonates can even be shared amongst potential customers; but again, you need to understand market requirements and capabilities.
If you are creating video, determine how you intend to adapt it for each market. Dubbing a standardised script into different languages is one option, but you will need access to the original video and audio files. Hard coded SRT files as subtitles is another option. Working with local language experts means you can get accurate and appropriate translations. This also avoids the issues that can be created by ‘dynamic subtitling’ – the automatic, and inaccurate translation software - built into some players.
The next step is to determine where your video content will sit. YouTube now has over 1 billion unique visitors a month. It’s an impressive figure, but if you are targeting China you will not only need to adapt the content for a Chinese audience but the video will need to be YouKu (China’s version of YouTube) compatible.
Ask your team if they have prepared for changes in character spacing; not just language adaption but with actual character differences. The Cyrillic alphabet, for example, can require more text space.
It’s the combination of planning and a native understanding of each market that is key to the localisation process for rich media marketing. Both sides of this ensure that a brand’s rich messaging is as impactful as possible.
Of course global organisations can choose a standardisation approach. This means creating assets with few very changes for each market. One of the benefits to this is it creates an internationally consistent content identity. However, it fails to truly capitalise on the strengths of rich media: to engage, and ultimately create a compelling call to action on a market-by-market basis.
By Emma Durant, Global Marketing Strategist at Lionbridge.
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