Executing a global content strategy with a DXP

When customers make purchases today, they do so knowing that there is a wealth of information at their fingertips. The sheer number of digital devices, media platforms and social networks available means that customers have access to volumes of content they can use to help make their buying decisions easier.

In fact, customers today tend to do more research before buying anything, whether they want to be educated or entertained. Consequently, content needs to be strategically managed from creation to distribution for true effectiveness, and many enterprise companies need to do this on a global scale.

To serve a global audience, brands also need to have adequate systems in place for translation and localization of the content they produce. But, with the difficulties associated with creating content to meet the needs of one region, how can brands do it globally? The answer is with a digital experience platform (DXP).

A content strategy is a process for the planning, creation, delivery, maintenance and management of content. For a global content strategy, it also includes executing at scale, and for a worldwide audience.

But, that’s not all, content on the global stage needs a plan for the translation, localization and management of this content. Also, brands need to decide how this content will be distributed and managed across multiple sites for each region.

A global content strategy can be complicated, but for many multinational companies, it is a necessity. While content may resonate well with a brand’s central region, the same content might not have the desired effect elsewhere. Companies strive to have a unified message that indicates the general message that the brand wants to convey, but it is also essential to consider the customer experience.

Customers who speak different languages, or are part of a different culture, may not resonate with the brand message in the same way. With a global content strategy, brands can account for these differences and develop plans to work with them.

Before executing a global content strategy, there are a few factors which need to be considered. Ask yourself and your team these questions.

Brands need to ask specific questions before developing their content strategy. Such as, where is their audience located? What languages do they speak? What cultural things are important to them? What is viewed as acceptable in one country but won’t resonate with audiences in another?

Customers want to engage and interact with a brand using their preferred language. So, understanding how to produce content for different audiences can improve the overall customer experience for those in other countries or those that don’t speak the company’s primary language. Even though a brand may serve an ideal customer, there are little nuances which will vary for each of them. These nuances can make or break your content if they aren’t addressed.

For example, in one culture, the benefits of a particular product could be the main driver of sales. In another, that same product may need to be presented as evoking a specific emotion. Other factors such as seasons, cultural holidays and more, play a part in how a global audience receives content, and brands need to be aware of these differences.

Next, brands need to consider the makeup and distribution of their global teams. Content localization efforts can’t just be limited to translating one successful piece of content and then distributing it globally. Multiple people are often involved in the process of getting content ready for a global audience, and brands need the appropriate workflows and communication channels set up to assist them.

Finally, companies need to decide how their content will be managed. Creating and managing content for multiple platforms and regions can be a challenging thing to execute. Brands need access to the right tools that can help them manage their content, distribute to various channels and still coordinate with everyone on the team.

Some brands or products may have the exact same content across different countries or locales, and the only need is to translate. In some cases, a significant percentage of the content is shared - but not all, and in some other cases, you may not share much content across your websites, but you want to reuse some of the content (such as boilerplates or campaign content), or have variations of content for different audiences (the case of personalization). All these requirements are important as they will determine the types of tools and features you will need.

A digital experience platform doesn’t only store content and distributes it to multiple locations; it also plays a vital role in the overall customer experience and helps content creators to manage these experiences effectively. These are some of the features of a DXP that aid your content strategy.

Read More: What is a DXP?

Customers today desire an omnichannel experience from their favorite brands. They want to be able to access content on one device and then maintain the same experience even when they switch to another. They want the content to be relevant and have the appropriate context for their needs. On a global scale, this becomes even more important. Brands need a global omnichannel marketing strategy and a way to produce content at scale to meet all of these requirements.

With a DXP, brands can distribute content to multiple channels through headless architecture. Not only the channels important today but emerging channels that haven’t been created yet. A DXP can provide the means to reach these channels as well as the user interface content teams require to customize and optimize content for each of these channels.

For brands with a global content strategy, it’s common to have multiple language-specific sites. These multisites can be challenging to manage without the right infrastructure in place. A DXP provides the tools that allow brands to keep their content efforts in sync across sites, create new sites as required and localize their content on each of them.

Customers engage with brands that can personalize content to meet their needs and make them feel unique. However, many brands can struggle with personalization. A DXP allows brands to personalize the customer experience for multiple individuals across multiple sites and channels and manage it all from a single platform.

Magnolia’s digital experience platform has the hybrid headless architecture that makes content delivery to multiple channels and platforms simple. But content management is only one aspect of the global content strategy.

Magnolia’s connector packs make it easy to integrate with any content source, customer data, marketing automation tools, analytics and more to leverage the true power of a digital experience platform. Also, features such as Translation and Live Copy provide what brands need to deliver value to customers who speak different languages.

First off, Magnolia makes it easy to connect all content and data sources in one single UI. Assets from your DAM, products or catalogs from your Ecommerce system, forms from your marketing automation tool can be brought into the Magnolia UI as if they were native Magnolia content. With tagging and taxonomy, content can be organized into easily findable and reusable pools that can be mixed and matched to create pages and other experiences, in a fully visual editor.

Content is then delivered depending on context: user, language, country, device, application. Capabilities such as automatic translations, Live Copy feature to manage multiple sites that share content without duplicating efforts, campaign manager to reuse components or fragments of content such as banners, and personalization provide the right tools for each use case.

In particular, Live Copy is a powerful tool to manage multiple sites that share content without duplicating efforts. Live Copy allows you to quickly create live copies of a master site. The copies maintain a live relationship with the master site, which means they inherit content and properties from their original source. When you update content on your master site, you can flexibly enable or disable these changes across the live copies.

As a result, you can perform updates much faster and eliminate the error-prone manual work of copying similar pages to multiple locations across your websites.

Check it out and learn more in our video walkthrough below: