Six Challenges of Digital Content Transformation

welocalize November 6, 2019

The global digital content creation market was valued at approximately $10.69 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to grow more than 16.82% over 2018-25. Increasingly, digital content is something that most global businesses – specifically, marketing and localization departments – deal with daily.

A major factor in this growth has been the swelling of marketing budgets of enterprise organizations. But with such rapid growth comes a number of significant challenges, both logistical and qualitative, that must be solved if this success is to continue.

 

The global digital content creation market was valued at approximately $10.69 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to grow more than 16.82% over 2018-25. A major factor in this growth is the growing marketing budgets of enterprise organizations. Click To Tweet

 

With that in mind, here are the six most common challenges we encounter when developing digital content destined for global audiences.

 

Collaboration and Internal Constraints

The rapid growth of digital marketing content has meant brands rapidly creating and onboarding new teams, working alongside those handling more traditional content (such as technical documentation).

This involves significant collaboration between established and new teams and agencies, and gaining knowledge on new content types. This can cause constraints, and sometimes conflict, with internal teams and stakeholders having different skills, attitudes, processes, and technologies.

Scale

As brands and companies strive for global growth, increased customer numbers and locations cause friction in managing digital content and assets.

An e-commerce provider may be experiencing rapid global growth – which is great for business, but can the website and payment process keep up? Will increased demand slow down the site?

The same consideration applies for launching sites and digital marketing campaigns in multiple countries and languages. Launching all locales at once may take too long, so staggering (and prioritizing) is a better approach.

Managing Customer Experience

Every digital touchpoint must accurately represent the message and brand to the target audience. Managing digital marketing campaigns for multiple markets can get complex, especially if there are different internal teams driving country campaigns.

Brands gain competitive advantage with customer experiences and not products.  This also has implications when handling highly regulated content, such as patient communications, content or IP-related documentation.

Measuring Performance

The nature of digital content means you can easily measure and understand campaign performance. Digital marketing provides a well spring of big data and with smart analytics, brands can continually crunch the data to improve business outcomes.

What’s the cost per click in multiple markets? How can web content be optimized for new markets and mobile access? Can you use Google Analytics to track multiple domains? The possibilities are endless. The challenge is how to best leverage technology to gather and interpret the data, to improve campaigns and make smarter marketing decisions.

Translation to Transformation

Getting digital content ready for global audiences is not just about linguistic translation – it’s all about transformation. Any digital content – from product descriptions and online ads through to SEO and meta descriptions must be culturally accurate, optimized, and often transcreated – adapting the message and not just the words. This requires more engagement and internal collaboration at the initial planning stages of a campaign to allow discussion on cultural adaptability.

New Regulations and Data Protection

New regulations, such as GDPR and EU MDR, and a media focus on how online data is handled has opened up a new raft of discussions (and challenges) for global businesses and marketers. Digital content provides excellent (relatively low cost) opportunities to engage customers in multiple markets but care must be taken to protect and respect.

Keeping on top of emerging regulations and truly understanding the implications as it applies to their business is a priority for anyone responsible for managing and handling marketing and customer data, in every market.