Rules for Advertising Abroad - Your Global Marketing Strategy

For many committed entrepreneurs, part of a successful business strategy includes tapping into international markets and expanding beyond national boundaries. Given that there are almost 200 countries in the world, possibilities for global marketing seem practically endless, and accessing an international market can potentially help a business grow by leaps and bounds.However, there are some key points to consider before putting your international marketing plan into action.

When developing global marketing materials, it is essential to make sure they conform with local and national advertising laws in the country where you plan to advertise. It is also important to ensure that your advertisements are linguistically correct, culturally appropriate, and acceptable from an ethical standpoint in all countries where you work, which often requires high-quality localization services. Additionally,advertising laws can be highly complex and variable from one country to the next, requiring a significant and often prohibitive amount of research and time to master, especially for businesses developing marketing materials for several countries at once, For this reason, consulting with a legal translation agency with extensive knowledge and expertise in the global marketing domain can help save valuable time and money, ensuring that your marketing strategy is legally, culturally, and linguistically appropriate.

Localization services to create accurate, appropriate marketing materials

Localization is similar to translation, but it encompasses more than simply taking a text in one language and accurately rendering it in another language. Localization experts may indeed translate content from one language to another, but they also take the content and make it appropriate for a given local or regional context. This could include tasks such as adapting graphics and images to target markets, modifying content to better fit interests, tastes, and needs of consumers in a given location, modifying design to effectively display translated text, converting currencies, dates, measures, addresses, and phone numbers to follow locally accepted conventions, and ensuring conformity with local regulations and advertising laws. Creating the most impactful advertisements in an international market often requires the services of highly skilled localization specialists who have an intimate knowledge of the culture and legal conventions of the location where you will be advertising.

Ensuring advertisements are ethical and appropriate to specific contexts

An important consideration in developing international marketing materials is ensuring that these materials are considered ethical by the target public, industry leaders, and government officials. For example, grooming and dress standards considered completely normal in one country may be considered unethical or even scandalous in another country, and dress should be adapted to conform to these variations in local norms. Additionally, certain jokes or behaviors that appear in advertisements in one country may be considered offensive or off-putting in another cultural context. Ensuring conformity with the highest ethical standards is essential in creating a successful global marketing strategy and growing a business across international borders.

Catering to the needs and interests of the target market

Beyond questions of ethicality, marketing materials need to be adapted to agree with the interests, needs, and tastes of the target market. This may consist of changing how a single product is presented in two different countries, or it may require adaptations to the actual products and services offered themselves. In some cases, a product or service in high demand in one country may not be appropriate for marketing in another country. In any case, one of the worst things a business can do is to simply translate its marketing materials word-for-word from one language to another without first researching market conditions in the country. Doing this will enable the company to understand what changes need to be made in order to make a product more attractive and enticing to the target market.

Following advertising laws

As was mentioned above, one of the most important considerations for businesses hoping to expand their operations internationally is ensuring compliance with advertising laws. These laws can be complex, requiring legal experts to develop a strategy for ensuring full compliance. This process can get even more complicated when a business is expanding into multiple international markets, each with its own set of advertising laws and standards. For example, in some countries, it is illegal to direct any form of advertisements to children under twelve, and advertisements are completely prohibited during children’s programs. In other countries, there are strict laws about advertisements that are judged to be misleading the public, spreading false information, or encouraging purchase of products that may have negative repercussions for the customer. It is essential to follow these laws with exactness in order to ensure success of marketing programs and avoid wasting money on developing advertisements that are not able to be aired or published due to legal issues.

Contracting legal translation services

In order to ensure compliance with advertising laws and ensure that marketing materials follow the highest ethical standards and are pertinent to local contexts and cultures, many businesses choose to hire a legal translation agency to provide high-quality localization work. In building a global marketing strategy, it is important to choose a well-known and highly respected agency that has a proven network of professional localization experts to make sure your translated and localized materials are as impactful as possible. With localization services, your advertisements will turn heads and build recognition for your brand in far-flung corners of the globe.