Why your small business needs localised content to grow globally

Your small business doesn’t have to be active on your home market only. You can easily grow your customer base by expanding to several other countries as well. And it doesn’t have to be a costly adventure at all.

Before reaching out to consumers from a new market you’ll need to perform a thorough market research, define your target audience and analyse your competitors. Once you’re ready to tap into a new market, you’ll need to add one more key ingredient that leads to success: the localised content.

In other words, you’ll need to make sure that your images and text published on your website, social media or in your app appeal to your potential customers.

So why exactly is it so important to localise your content before setting off on a global adventure?

1. It helps to increase your website conversion rate

Would you spend more than a few seconds on a website that displays prices in a foreign currency and promotes winter boots in summer or beachwear in winter?

Would you feel tempted to click and scroll through a page that shows products adjusted to your needs and preferences, offering exactly what you’re looking for right now?

If you want to attract attention of your potential customers, you have to give them what they need and present it in the way they want to see it.

By localising your website content and showing your products and texts in the right context, with appealing design and in the language of your foreign consumers you’ll be more likely to increase your conversion rates.

Localised content will encourage your visitors to keep browsing through your offer, It will also prove that you understand the culture and preferences of your customers. And that’s the first step to building new relationships with your foreign consumers.

But to achieve it, you’ll need to make your website available in the language of your target consumers and adapt its layout, content, images or style to ensure you can cater to the local consumer preferences.

2. It increases engagement of your fans and followers

Your localised content displayed on social media channels will also help you to increase engagement of your fans and followers.

You can either create separate social media profiles for every market you want to enter or use geotargeting (for example on Facebook) to address specific audiences.

In this way you’ll make sure that your content is relevant to your target users, which will help to attract more followers and fans. Adding a local, culturally relevant touch (for example running promotions for the local holidays) can increase the engagement of your potential customers, as they’ll notice that you know their market and take their needs seriously.

Increased engagement means more comments and shares. Your followers are more likely to share and comment on your posts if your content is customised to them in terms of language, topic, design and style.

Attracting more followers also means that more people can hear about your products and services and convert into paying customers.

3. It speeds up your growth

Let’s face it: you can’t really expand your activity to another country or attract foreign customers without implementing some changes and developing new strategies.

Using localised content is one of the essential steps that will help you grow your business on a new market.

Even if you expand your activity to a neighbouring country with a similar culture and tradition, there will always be some differences you’ll need to take into account. From language, through business communication style, to payment methods and legal requirements – there are always some unique market characteristics that your business has to be prepared for.

Even if your target customers understand English, they prefer to communicate in their local language. The more obstacles your potential customers find in doing business with you (foreign language, inconvenient payment methods, long delivery time), the more likely they are to switch to local providers and forget about working with you.

That’s why focusing on localised content plays an important role in doing business abroad.

It will help you reach to your target customers, create meaningful relationships and finally speed up your expansion to the new market.

Are you planning to break into a new market? Do you have the right content strategy in place?

Dorota Pawlak

Dorota helps digital brands infuse their content with a local touch. She is a localization consultant, translator specialized in IT, prompt engineer, and a book author. Dorota teaches online courses on localization, writes for her blog and a Medium publication. She also runs a Small Biz AI, a Substack newsletter for freelancers and small business owners ready to discover handy AI tools.