But this is easier said than done. Many marketers ask themselves: How can we create personalised content on a global scale? Should we just translate one message into hundreds of languages?

The short answer is no. Translation is not enough. Instead, localisation 鈥� defined as the adaptation of content to a specific market 鈥� is the process that should lie at the core of every global marketing campaign if the content is to be diverse enough to address different values, lifestyles and ethnicities.

Why translation alone isn’t enough for global marketing

Many marketers still treat translation as an afterthought, simply converting words without considering how those words land in a new cultural context. Global audiences are both multilingual and multicultural, and localisation takes the next step, ensuring your message resonates authentically with different values, lifestyles and expectations.

Culture shapes how people interpret messaging, and translation alone can’t bridge that gap. For example, some cultures communicate through subtext or a shared understanding, while others like to be more direct. Even between countries that share similar cultures and languages, like in the Nordic region, you can find notable cultural differences. Read more about this topic in

Localisation goes beyond speaking the right language and helps you understand your audience鈥檚 mindset so that your message doesn鈥檛 just get heard, but actually sticks.

Advantages of localisation in global marketing

By prioritising localisation from the get-go, marketers ensure the following:

• Cultural authenticity: When localisation is considered from day one, you can create content that feels genuinely native to each market.
• Consistent brand voice: Early planning ensures that your brand personality, although tweaked linguistically and culturally, still resonates in a consistent way across all markets.
• Faster market entry: Campaigns can launch simultaneously across markets rather than in staggered rollouts, waiting for translations to go live.
• Time and cost efficiency: Starting with localisation in mind means you won鈥檛 need to go back and redesign campaigns that don鈥檛 translate well across cultures.
• Growth: Localisation can expand your brand reach and awareness, as well as offer a SEO boost.
• Connections: You can more effectively build personal connections with users and consumers because it gives your brand the human touch and shows respect for local cultures and values.
• Increased profits: If you do it right, localisation can form part of a successful organic growth strategy. If you don鈥檛, it could come at a significant cost to your business.

Choose the right localisation strategy for your global marketing content

Of course, not every message needs the same level of localisation. That鈥檚 where a tailored strategy comes into play.

To find a localisation strategy that best fits your goals and expectations, you first need to assess the level of impact of your different content pieces. Is it brand-critical content, such as a slogan, or is it lower-impact content, such as reviews for an online platform?

Understanding that different types of content may require different strategies can save you time and help your language service provider allocate efforts properly. The graphic below can serve as an initial guide to think about where you might want to start, but you can always get in touch with us for more personalised advice.

Localisation services for global marketing, explained

Market-specific copywriting

We鈥檝e talked about personalisation, so we know how crucial it is. Sometimes, the best way to ensure that this content can truly match a particular target audience is to create region- or country-specific campaigns to convey messages that are culturally and contextually appropriate.

Transcreation

Literal translations can sometimes cause misunderstandings and lead to considerable loss of meaning. Content should be transcreated instead, taking tone and style into account, having consideration for the design, the surrounding images and the broader context.

Full human translation

This is what you might call the traditional approach to content localisation. A human translator takes a text in one language and translates it into another, adding colloquial expressions and idioms, where appropriate, so the text reads like it was written in the target language. However, this doesn鈥檛 take into account cultural references and norms, and the meaning of images and symbols.

Machine translation post-editing

Some content, such as slang and idiomatic language, is not compatible with machine translation because of how culturally specific and ultimately human it is. However, when localising low-impact content, machine translation can be used in conjunction with human post-editing for a good and affordable option.

Multilingual SEO

There is more to SEO than simply translating keywords! Keyword localisation acknowledges the fact that the keywords that are popular in one region can be completely different in another. SEO needs to be tailored to each particular market.

The language solutions partnership process

While adding another stakeholder to your workflow may seem daunting, partnering with a language solutions provider that prioritises clear communication, seamless integration and mutual trust mitigates risks while delivering significant benefits to your marketing team.

Here鈥檚 a quick look into our process here at Sandberg:

• Strategic planning and onboarding

Our partnership begins with comprehensive onboarding outlining project requirements, costs, timelines and quality expectations. Strategic planning meetings assess longer-term needs, including expansion plans and peak work periods.

• Gathering project materials

Key client information is shared with project managers and linguists, including brand guidelines, style guides and terminology glossaries. Together, we’ll craft a detailed brief, containing specific brand and content information, with templates provided to streamline the process.

• Linguistic work with technology

Your content passes through multiple review stages by different linguists, ensuring accuracy and ISO standard compliance. Modern language technology, including translation memories and term bases, guarantees consistency. This may include AI and machine translation, followed by human review.

• Independent review

Project managers or validators conduct final content reviews before delivery, ensuring alignment with reference materials. Your dedicated point(s) of contact handle issues promptly, with quick response times to maintain project momentum.

• Communication and feedback

Open communication extends beyond individual projects through structured feedback stages, enabling continuous improvement. We鈥檒l arrange annual business reviews to ensure there are clear communication channels for sharing ideas and feedback.

As you can see, the process is well-organised and can easily be tailored to your specific needs. For a more detailed explanation, read our article: /maximise-global-marketing/.

Make localisation a business priority

In an increasingly connected world where consumers expect authentic, culturally relevant experiences, localisation is a business imperative. Brands that invest in comprehensive localisation strategies from the outset can transform them into something that resonates deeply with diverse audiences across the globe.

The shift from translation to localisation represents more than just a change in terminology; it’s a fundamental reimagining of how brands connect with their customers. By embracing cultural authenticity, maintaining a consistent brand voice and leveraging the right mix of localisation services, from market-specific copywriting to multilingual SEO, companies can turn what might otherwise be seen as an afterthought or annoying extra cost into a powerful driver of growth and engagement.

Success in global marketing no longer favours those who speak the loudest, but rather those who speak meaningfully to each individual market. The brands that recognise this truth and build localisation into their processes from day one are the ones that thrive in our multicultural, interconnected marketplace.

At the moment, consumers have endless choices, and the brands that win are those that make every customer feel like the message was crafted specifically for them.

Ready to stand out from the crowd and start truly connecting with global audiences?

Explore our marketing solutions here.

Part of this article was initially published in 2019 by Gonzalo Fernandez, a former Sandberg team member, and has since been edited and revised with up-to-date information and new analysis.

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Visibility is only one aspect of boosting your online presence, however. Finding the right balance for content that ranks highly on search engines but is also engaging, visually appealing and business-focused is a team effort, involving SEO experts, digital marketers, content specialists and managers.

If your website鈥檚 only in one language, then your work is more or less done. But what if your website is in multiple languages for different markets, or if you鈥檙e targeting English speakers from different countries? If that鈥檚 the case, then you can add a localisation specialist to the list of professionals above.

In this article, we鈥檒l look at how to localise your search engine strategy if you鈥檙e planning to expand your business, using examples from the English-speaking world and the Nordic region.

Regional variations within the same language

The amount of SEO effort you need to put into your website depends primarily on the volume of content you create, although it depends on your business strategy too. It鈥檚 one thing selling products or services for English-speaking people in the US, but a whole different beast if your target market includes the UK too.

Let鈥檚 take the example of fictional online clothing retailer 鈥淵ourStyle鈥�. It鈥檚 important to rank highly for the word pants听in the US and trousers in the UK (the word pants听in the UK typically refers to underwear). Like SEO, localisation is also about understanding the user鈥檚 intent 鈥� in this case purely from a language perspective.

To check whether you鈥檝e made the right wording choice, it鈥檚 always useful to double-check on a search engine. A good way to do this is with a VPN, which allows you to simulate an internet connection in any country. The image below shows a search for pants on the US version of Google:

You can confirm trousers听is indeed the word you need to target the British market just by looking at the results Google offers. In both examples, Google offers images of the right product and links to retailers that searchers can click through to make a purchase.

SEO across multiple languages

Let鈥檚 return to YourStyle, our fictional clothing retailer. They鈥檙e looking to expand to new markets after a successful launch in the UK. Market research finds that consumers in the Nordic countries have significant spending power and represent the next big opportunity for YourStyle.

A common strategic mistake when entering the Nordic market is to assume that English will do 鈥� after all many Nordic people speak excellent English. The reality is that growing your business in this region requires you to build up an online presence in the local languages: Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. If YourStyle really wants to truly penetrate this market, the old adage of speaking the language of your customers undoubtedly applies.

Here are some tips for properly localising your SEO strategy.

1. Think topics first, keywords second

There鈥檚 now broad consensus that individual keywords on your website aren鈥檛 what rank you highly: it鈥檚 about producing the best content with a dynamic range of terms and contexts on a specific topic. As SEO shifts towards this topic-based model, it鈥檚 important to define before defining your keywords.

In essence, the topic-cluster model 鈥� popularised by 鈥� is a way of organising content on your website so that search engines know you鈥檙e an authority on that specific subject. The model is built around a central pillar page (which acts as a 鈥渃ontent hub鈥� for a single topic) and multiple content pages on the same topic that link back to the pillar page and to each other.

If you鈥檝e already built your content with the topic-cluster methodology in your source language, then you鈥檙e off to a good start. The question then becomes one of which pages to localise. Many companies choose to translate only their pillar pages, which may seem like an obvious move as that鈥檚 where most conversions take place. But this doesn鈥檛 help your overall multilingual SEO strategy. The right approach is to translate all the pages in the cluster and replicate your SEO efforts in your source language in your target one.

2.听On-page keyword planning

Once you鈥檝e got a clear understanding of which topics you want to become an authority on, you can start planning and analysing on-page keywords. If you鈥檝e done your research properly, you will have chosen your keywords in your source language using the following criteria:

Search volume:听Search volume is a measure of the total number of searches made through a search engine expressed as the average monthly volume over the previous 12-month period. Search volume data is a crucial, fundamental element of your SEO strategy. If you鈥檙e localising your website from English into the Nordic languages, you can expect search volume to be lower: the combined population of the Nordic countries is around 24 million. On the contrary, if you鈥檙e localising in the other direction (into English), search volume can increase exponentially. But search volume alone says nothing if you don鈥檛 use it together with other metrics such as keyword difficulty.

Source: Google Keyword Planner

Keyword difficulty: Determining the difficulty of a specific keyword requires understanding the level of competition. What pages are currently at the top of the rankings? What kind of content are they offering? Can you offer something better? SEO experts usually take a look at SERP (search engine result pages) history to know if competition at the top is too tight or if there a window of opportunity.

It might seem logical that if you can鈥檛 offer better content than those top pages, then that keyword is probably too difficult for you. That might be the case for English 鈥� but not for your other locales. The top results in your different locales are unlikely to feature the same sites as they do in English. It鈥檚 worth bearing in mind that , so naturally there鈥檚 a great deal more competition for English keywords. Analysing the SERP history for translations of your keywords can open up opportunities to shoot to the top of the rankings more quickly.

Search intent: Your webpage might be perfectly optimised and still not rank as highly as you want it to. Sometimes it鈥檚 not just about getting the core parts of SEO right, but also about understanding users鈥� search intent, i.e. what exactly it is they鈥檙e trying to achieve with their search.

What does this mean in practice? Google is now capable of evaluating your website鈥檚 user experience and uses this data to tweak its rankings. Let鈥檚 imagine you have two pages 鈥� both perfectly optimised 鈥� but one offers a free trial while the other doesn鈥檛. It鈥檚 highly likely that the page with a free trial will rank more highly over time. , SEMrush addresses this topic in detail.

It鈥檚 vital to remember that search intent and user experience can be as culturally relative as language. In some countries, it鈥檚 not realistic to expect every customer to enter their credit card details to start a free trial. In the Nordic countries, a good strategy is to not overburden your pages with triggers and banners: a minimalistic approach that embraces negative space is likely to be more effective.

3.听Text expansion and contraction

There are some technical aspects to search engine optimisation. One example is the character limit for SEO attributes like title tags or meta descriptions 鈥� Google typically displays the first 50鈥�60 characters of a title tag and 155鈥�160 for the meta description.

Even if you鈥檝e done an excellent job with your keywords in English, one of the issues you need to consider when translating the text from English into other languages is text expansion and contraction. These are two common concepts in translation and refer to the phenomenon of text getting longer or shorter when translated into a different language. When text is translated from English into Nordic languages, it usually becomes a bit longer and could potentially exceed the recommended limits for these SEO attributes.

Below, we show how a and can expand and contract. These are our examples in English:

Title tag: The best e-commerce platform for small businesses (49 characters)

Meta description: We鈥檙e not just an e-commerce app 鈥� we鈥檙e the best e-commerce platform that has everything you need to sell online, on social media or face-to-face. (147 characters)

And here is the example translated into Swedish and Finnish:

Here the Swedish actually used slightly fewer characters than the English, whereas Finnish needed more.

Key points

Generally speaking, the key to a successful multilingual SEO strategy boils down to two things: content volume and language diversity.

• Ensure your SEO architecture in your source language is well structured before starting to localise it. Review Hubspot鈥檚 topic cluster theory to check whether you鈥檙e on the right track.
• When picking content for translation, try to choose pillar pages and pillar content from the same clusters to increase your chances of ranking highly in your target languages.
• Remember keyword difficulty varies by language, and thus the chances of you ranking at the very top of the search results.
• Optimise traditional SEO elements and localise your keywords with search volume and character length in mind.
• Partner with localisation specialists to make sure your keywords are translated with an understanding of how search intent works in the target culture.

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In recent years, the word transcreation has become a localisation buzzword, and is often used to define the process whereby copy is customised to transfer the intent and impact of the original message for the new target market.

It has been argued, however, that linguists were customising copy in this way long before the term transcreation became recognised. As a result, there seems to be mixed interpretations as to what distinguishes marketing translation from transcreation, and confusion both in terms of workflows and budgeting expectations. Some say that transcreation only applies to the adaptation of slogans, others apply it to any marketing copy that requires translation; sometimes a CAT tool is used, other times it鈥檚 worked on outside of a tool, in Excel.

Most of us will have been exposed to transcreation at work, such as in film titles, well-known brands鈥� jingles or slogans. The impact of a good or poor transcreation can be powerful. There have been several transcreation blunders over the years; famous examples include a number of automotive brands failing to realise the potential negative connotations of a model name when launching their product in another market. , General Motors, who were unaware that 鈥淣o Va鈥� means 鈥淚t won鈥檛 go鈥�, when launching their Chevy Nova in South America.

Another well-known transcreation mishap is , which was mistranslated into 鈥渄o nothing鈥� when marketed in other countries. That certainly wasn鈥檛 the message they wanted to put across in terms of using their services. This mistake led to a rebrand costing around 10 million US dollars!

Although we do seem to have a clear understanding of the ultimate goal of transcreation and the magnitude of its impact, it鈥檚 clear that we have a long way to go in terms of standardising the processes and workflows to enable us to achieve the desired outcome. TAUS recognised the gap in our industry for such information and have since released a document called 鈥溾��.

With this document, TAUS has highlighted the importance of producing resources that answer many relevant questions surrounding this topic, such as definitions of marketing translation, transcreation, multilingual copywriting and how to set them apart from one another, as well as examples of translation, transcreation and copywriting in action.

I鈥檓 certain that in the future we will have a clearer understanding of transcreation as a service, but until then it鈥檚 clear that we can鈥檛 take the word transcreation at face value; it鈥檚 much more than a combination of two words. Regardless of what you think this elusive term means, the next time you see it, don鈥檛 be afraid to ask questions to get to the core of its role in each specific context; only then can the creative team take the first steps towards delivering a project according to expectations.

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