Insights

How Localized Content Helps You Build Long-term Customer Relationships

Discover how to create personalized journeys that convert with localized customer experiences.

Article
3 MIN READ
Nov 10, 2022

Felipe Silberstein
Head of Platform Strategy

Summary

Did you know that loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase from you again? So, if you could master the art of building long-term customer relationships, you’d always be sure of consistent revenue growth. The first step to get there is to develop a localized content strategy — adapting and transforming your content so that it resonates with and creates a welcoming experience for every customer.

Today most businesses are targeting new customers outside their core geographies, so they don't miss out on the majority of the world’s internet traffic. To create authentic experiences and grow long-term relationships in newer markets, your content must match a customer's cultural expectations. At its core, a localized content strategy mirrors a cultural experience that cultivates a deeper connection between your brand and global customers, improving their likelihood of buying your products.

Let’s look at how localized content can create a long-lasting impact on your customers, regardless of where they live in the world.

Reimagining global customer journeys

If you step into a new neighborhood, you can see things are done differently. These differences become more evident across regions and countries. With a digital experience built on a localized content foundation, we can celebrate these differences by supporting global customer journeys — purchasing habits and unique behaviors, all while conforming to local regulations.

Our UX, UI, and Content teams are at the heart of this transformation. We start with creating localized information architectures (IA) for your digital platform. Organizing your site and page structure based on what local customers search for most helps improve SEO and navigation. It also helps you comply with regional laws by omitting non-compliant content and supporting legally required content. For example, businesses that operate in Canada are required to have sites in English and French. This means any product labels must also be in both English and French languages. Similarly, for a company that operates in Canada and the US, not all products in the US catalog may be approved for sale in Canada, and vice versa.

Every page in the site structure also needs the visual elements that represent your foothold in the local market — regional images and colors that help an individual envision themselves as your customers. Showing prices in local currencies and having the flexibility to play around with your brand’s visual identity to connect with the market can make a customer feel at home. Using localized date formats and measurement units are subtle actions often noticed by customers subconsciously. Finally, the localized experience is fully achieved when content is available in the regional languages.

Imagine inviting your customers to an online party specially organized for their digital twin. You speak to them in their language and regional context, and guide them from the awareness stage to the purchase stage with localized information that anticipates their needs throughout their customer journey. Now, you grow and nurture your customer's post-purchase loyalty and advocacy by continuing the conversation, maintaining that initial welcoming, localized communication style, and providing personalized content, loyalty rewards, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, and more.

Customizing and enabling these successful steps in a customer’s journey can help you make a lasting impact on country-specific markets. But how can you save time and ensure consistency of your brand’s communication globally?

A centralized space for localized content

A centralized platform allows you to repurpose your original content to create all the localized experiences described above, drastically reducing time-to-market. It also helps your customers discover all your content on a single website and application without skepticism. You don’t want to confuse your customers with two different android apps for Canada and the US.

To make all this possible, a headless CMS like Contentful comes in handy.

Contentful allows ISO codes for countries to enable country-specific pages. We build an atomic design system with a range of components used across these web pages to deliver both content and commerce experiences.

Once the pages are organized into their regional site structures, they’re delivered across channels and devices through a headless front-end experience. Keeping global customers in mind, you can add language translations for similar pages in multiple countries or brand-new content for unique country-specific pages.

Another added benefit of centralized delivery is the ability to streamline content authoring. This process makes it more convenient for content authors to push global updates for all countries so that your brand gives every customer a uniform, connected experience. If your business undergoes rebranding, your new logo can be updated online for every global customer at the same time.

Success stories: creating captivating content

We’ve accepted many interesting challenges to help our clients win their customers through content localization.

For Moderna, we delivered content experiences for seven different countries. Using Contentful, we repurposed the design system to actualize unique information architectures, visual elements, units of measurement, and currency, reciting their brand's story as a local storyteller in all seven countries.

When Tigo, one of the largest telecommunications companies in LATAM, needed to offer varying services across different countries, we helped them create nine discovery sites using dynamic content localization. By providing branding guidelines, atomic design system training, and onboarding documentation, we set them up to create impactful content immediately and for the future.

Coca-Cola Embonor’s experience allowed us to dig deeper into localization to help deliver personalized content. We first helped this leading seller of Coca-Cola products in Chile and Bolivia move from legacy to a MACH ecosystem, delivering B2B and B2C composable commerce platforms. We then provided personalized content, banners, featured products, and promotions specific to different regions within Chile and Bolivia. This MACH award-winning project is an excellent example of content and commerce localization — the next step to building long-term customer relationships.

It’s safe to say our localized content strategy serves customers on every continent. If you’re looking to expand your business and diversify your loyal customer base, we’re here to help. Contact us or reach out to us at hello@applydigital.com.

Co-written by Rashika Srivastava