?? Why Local Marketers Don't Use Global Assets

Are local marketing teams missing an opportunity to leverage global creative assets?

"The average Fortune 500 company could be wasting at least $25M a year on unused creative assets." - Performance Marketing World

"The vast majority (90%) of global campaign toolkits are never activated by local markets." - Marketing Week

I saw these stats in major marketing publications this week. While these numbers might seem surprising, this actually isn't news to any of us who have actually worked on a large global marketing team.

Let me count the many reasons why local marketers don't use all global assets conceivably available to them in everyday work settings.

1. It's often faster to develop new local marketing assets from scratch.

There are times in which a local team can simply move faster if they create a new asset themselves, especially in a local language. It depends on many factors, and what the assets will be used for. Marketers are usually in a hurry to get campaigns out the door. No marketer is ever going to turn down the chance to use an asset when it's perfectly ready to go and well-suited for their needs.

But often, the assets local marketers gain access to from other markets simply can't easily or quickly be leveraged. They require customization, adaptation, and often translation before they can be used for a local marketer's needs. It's often simply quicker to develop a new asset versus trying to leverage one that was built for some other market.

2. Local teams might not have budget to put global assets to use.

Most local marketing teams have finite budgets. Who's going to pay for them to adapt global assets for local purpose? They usually can't spend their own budget on this type of thing. Unless they have "free" resources that can be leveraged to adapt them, such as an in-house localization team, they usually don't have the money to pay for these assets to be converted into something they could use.

In fact, even when local marketing teams are lucky enough to have in-house localization teams, those teams still have finite budgets and resources too. The marketers and localization specialists have to work hand in hand, to make sure that every project is aligned to a business goal, and will actually deliver a solid return on investment. The vast majority of "global" assets will never pass that test, and so, won't deserve the budget or time required to adapt those assets.

3. Truly global creative assets are few and far between.

Oh, those well-meaning marketers in a company's HQ country. How often they assume, wrongly and naively, that what they are doing is "global." In reality, even though they think otherwise, marketers in the company's domestic market nearly always end up creating assets designed for just one local audience - the audience of their home country.

Marketers in HQ countries overestimate the leverage that local marketers will get from their work. It's extremely frustrating for local teams, because they are handed a bunch of stuff that has limited value and use in their markets, under an assumption that it will resonate locally. The only markets in which this actually has any value is in markets that speak the same language, due to "halo effect." But even then, there are nuances and differences to be aware of. The challenge local marketers face of trying to adapt "global" assets is far worse for markets where the language is different.

Now... with all of this said, there are some companies out there that do a great job creating truly global assets, for certain global campaigns. They tend to be large, multi-national B2C brands. But even those struggle to do this well.

4. "Global" marketing campaigns might not perform well locally.

Assets are created for specific marketing campaigns. Most of the creative assets handed off to local teams are not actually global in nature, but rather, local assets designed for a local campaign, for a local market. The local market most "global" assets support usually maps to the company's HQ or largest market, which is usually its domestic market. Companies with an HQ in the United States are notoriously guilty of doing this, because in America, we are in a very large country, where one language gets you a lot of bang for your buck.

If you're in a company with an HQ country of, say, Ireland or Sweden, and selling into the rest of Europe, you tend to think a little differently about the value of creating a campaign for your local home country. You don't assume it will have global impact just because it helps you reach your domestic market, because that likely isn't your largest market.

American marketers working for American companies tend to think "USA-first," and every other market is an afterthought. This is because, for Americans, their largest market is the one they know best, and the one they make the most money from. It's proximity bias on top of recency bias on top of familiarity bias. These biases amplify each other, but it results in Americans calling something "global" that actually isn't, just because it's "large in scope of impact."

5. Most global assets simply aren't needed by local teams.

Because most global assets are not truly global, but rather, local assets designed to support a campaign for a company's largest audience, not only will they not resonate locally even after they've been adapted in many cases. But an even bigger reason local teams might not use those assets is simply because they don't need them!

The goals of local marketing teams are different from those of a "global" team or one that focuses on the US market, for example. They are at different stages of market entry. The local team is usually smaller. A local market that has just one marketer supporting a small sales team doesn't think the same way about their market as the one supporting a huge market where the company already has a large brand presence.

Therefore, the strategy for marketing in a local market is by nature going to be different. It's often scrappier and has more local focus. Marketers in the US market are, by default, going to approach problems differently due to the sheer size of their market, but also, every local market has a different set of challenges. Indeed, the entire value proposition of what the company is selling in a local market might be different from the value prop in the largest or home country market. These realities mean that many "global" assets just are't going to help a local marketer. That's a super common reason a local marketer won't use them. They don't actually need them!

6. Success data isn't widely socialized or shared.

Marketers in any local market don't just want the assets. They want the wins. A bigger problem than sharing the assets is socializing the details of how a campaign performed, why it performed well, and how those assets were actually leveraged. Local marketers can't tell if a campaign will have success in their market without this information. They need to know not only what the assets were, but how they were utilized, with which tactics, in which channels, and how precisely they performed.

Only when local marketers have this information can they even understand if those assets are going to be helpful in any way. My argument here is that the success metrics are far more important to share first, to determine if the assets are even worth sharing. It's a big misunderstanding to think that the assets are what will make a campaign successful in any other market. There is so much more to any campaign than just that! It's how they are utilized, and where, that ultimately makes a campaign successful.

7. The assets are not discoverable by local marketers internally.

Content discoverability is an issue for local marketers too, for sure. It's surprising how, when you're working at a company with double-digit growth rates for more than a decade, the amount of content assets can quickly proliferate until it becomes hard to find them!

For that reason, at HubSpot, my team and I masterminded and oversaw development of an internal tool that gave marketers visibility into which content assets existed, to ensure that if local marketers felt those assets could easily be leveraged, they would at least have the choice to do so, quickly and cost-effectively.

We built this custom software with our development partners and named it Mova. This tool enabled us to not only make web-based assets discoverable, but to automate the translation process. We built Mova to leverage a machine translation tool called DeepL to automate translation for 12 languages, after finding that it delivered best for marketing content compared to other tools.

(Mova means "language" in Ukrainian, which was spoken by our lead developers working on the project. With Mova enabling us to quickly "move" content into and out of languages, it felt like a fun name for an internal software tool. As a marketer, I love a fun product naming challenge and connecting a bit of meaning and word play in the mix, even if its "only" for an internal purpose-built tool.)

AI Tools Alone Cannot Solve Most Content Management Problems

Having worked in highly complex and nuanced content management challenges for the vast majority of my career, what troubled me a bit about the articles in Performance Marketing World and Marketing Week is that there were assertions that tools enabling "AI-driven asset matching" could somehow solve these problems of "waste" and "underuse" of supposedly "global" marketing assets (that were never global to begin with).

Here's why this oversimplification troubles me:

• Content management requires human judgment. It requires thoughtful decisions that demonstrate understanding of the content, the marketing strategy, and the business goals. That part of the work is pivotal, and needs to be done before you use AI tools on top of it, if you want to get true value.
• Content management is multi-layered and complex. Using AI is great, but you have to be thoughtful about where and how you apply AI within a greater process in order to leverage it well. By this I mean, when I hear about broad applications of AI tools for rather thorny content management problems, without a lot of detail behind how the content will be refined, restructured, or optimized for maximum AI use of that content, I begin to worry that the results will be far less than desired, and perhaps not even worth the effort. There's an opportunity cost. What if we spent that time and energy on auditing content instead, for example?
• AI tools have to be applied thoughtfully and specifically. In my opinion, when people get overly excited about AI for a huge topic like content management, they risk overlooking more fundamental challenges, ones that humans need to first think through. What content is missing? What content is duplicated? What content is no longer relevant? What content do we want to feed the AI tool to ensure AI can help us achieve our goal? These questions often get sidestepped in the haste to rush into using an AI tool.
• AI tools work best with content when the data that informs them is well curated. Unfortunately, auditing content is boring. It's detailed. It's tedious. It's work most humans do not enjoy doing. Funnily, this is where AI tools can help. There are prompts that anyone could write to help with this. "Identify all content that hasn't had views on it for the last 12 months, and rank it at the lowest level of priority." "Surface the top 20% of content assets and prioritize those with a corresponding update to the internal content search algorithm." I wish more people would use AI for content curation, prior to using AI for content discovery. This would be a game-changer.

Lastly, the biggest pet peeve I have with "global" content assets that do get utilized by local marketers? When that becomes wasteful due to local marketing teams not being funded properly for the growth they are tasked with producing. There is nothing worse than spending human time, or even machine translation API calls, on localizing and adapting content that no one will ever see... simply because a local marketing team didn't have the budget or human headcount to actually then promote the content or make use of it after it was adapted, to get prospective customers to see it, which is the entire point!

That is a giant misuse of company time and resources (not to mention data processing power, which you start to think about when the volumes get bigger!) It pains me to know that this goes on every day at global companies.

This is also part of why I wrote Take Your Company Global. Local teams often have to fight so hard to get budget. Yet, at some companies, local teams are driving the majority of growth, especially when domestic teams slow down and struggle.

The bottom line? Focus on content management, as early as you can, and go into the necessary level of detail to ensure your company does it right. Don't lunge at tools or AI to solve all your problems. Do the boring work of content management that only a human can do, and don't side-step that work. Yes, I know it's tempting to skip that stuff. But you bury your head in the sand at your peril. The companies that "get" this will have a major advantage over the ones that don't!

Grace Notes

Summer was busy this year for me. It felt difficult to catch my breath! Then, it was suddenly over. Did it feel like this for you too?

Fortunately, fall is arriving now here in New England. It's my absolute favorite season, when I start feeling like all gears switch back into "engaged" mode in both work and life.

At work, everyone gets into hyper-focus mode as we all work to end the year strong.

And in life (affecting us, our customers and colleagues at work too), kids go back to school, people come back from their summer holidays, and a more familiar and normal cadence resumes.

I am a bit behind on sharing recent media features, so I'll catch up a bit in this edition.

My Latest Article for Marketers with Forbes

I am writing a lot more for marketing audiences lately. With marketers increasingly involved with so many different aspects of growth, it has never been more important than it is today to communicate with clarity about the metrics we use. Otherwise, we sell ourselves and our teams short when we try to describe the overall value of marketing at our companies.

I wrote this article for Forbes with this purpose, better communicating the value of marketing to non-marketers, in mind.

In the article, I share a simple model and framework that I developed at Zappi :

This framework is a flywheel. It's similar in nature to the one HubSpot and many other companies use (Attract, Engage, Delight), mapping to the top, middle, and bottom of the classic marketing funnel and envisioning it as a circle to show that the funnel does not end, but in fact, rejoins and drives velocity within your entire go-to-market motion.

However, this version calls out "land & expand" more specifically, because this is important for any business which has a strong expansion motion. I believe this trend is only going to continue, especially for MarTech companies, where consolidation in the market has led to fewer leaders, but more growth on the expansion revenue side.

While this framework relates to measurement, of course I had to make it rhyme to make it a bit more fun and easier to remember. Any marketer worth her salt has got to walk the walk every day on fusing metrics with creativity, after all!

Women in Localization Feature

I was delighted when I was contacted by Karen Tkaczyk , someone whose work I've admired from afar for decades, for an interview with Women in Localization, an amazing group with chapters all over the world.

The interview sheds a little light on my weird path into tech and my oddball background, as a globally-minded language nerd, coming from a very small town in rural Illinois.

But more importantly, it has some advice for people seeking to grow in their careers.

I'll share one highlight from the interview.

More than 20 years ago, I wrote down a quote in a little notebook I keep to this day for quotes that really resonate with me, and it was this one: "Comparison is the theft of joy." (Source is unknown, but often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt.)

I was fortunate growing up that my parents taught me the value of being yourself, and being true to who you are, every day. They encouraged me to simply be myself, and to lean into the things that I loved most and mattered to me as an individual.

Today, in business, we use the fancier word "authenticity" to say the same thing.

No matter what we call it, this value came across in the interview, in which I mentioned:

"Avoid comparisons with others. The only person I want to compare myself with is either a past version of myself or a future one I am growing and evolving into."?

I hope the advice I shared in this interview helps you or someone else you might mentor.

Other Ways to Connect with Me

Thank you for reading this newsletter! I hope you found it helpful.

Here are 3 other ways we can connect:

1. Get my latest book.

Don't forget to get your own copy of my latest book, Take Your Company Global.

It was kindly endorsed by my longtime CEO at HubSpot, Brian Halligan.

“Take Your Company Global is the definitive guide to building a global business in the digital age.” —Brian Halligan, Co-Founder and Executive Chairperson, HubSpot and Co-Author,?Inbound Marketing

Already have it? Liked it?

Please do me a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

This helps other people find it!

2. Download my guide.

Earlier this year, I wrote a 27-page career planning guide in the form of an eBook called Find Meaningful Work.

I originally wrote the guide in response to Big Tech layoffs, which were painful to so many, and from which many are still not yet feeling "recovered."

But the truth is, this guide is also very useful for anyone who is thinking about a career change, at any point in their career.

In the guide, I walk you through an exercise in which I ask you to figure out your values (longer term statements that help you steer your career in the right direction) and then determine your priorities for your next job (shorter-term areas of focus that matter to you in the here and now.)

I noticed some new downloads of it this week.

If you'd like to get it, you can find it here.

I hope it helps you!

3. Book me for a talk.

I often do author talks, conference keynotes, and podcast guest appearances.

Want to find out if I can help you? Comment below, message me on LinkedIn, or email me: nataly (at) borntobeglobal.com.

Looking for my books, blog, and other writing?

Those are all linked on my website, Born to Be Global, where you can contact me too.

Have a great week ahead, friends, and thanks again for reading!

Nataly