A lot of marketing thinking has recently shifted from talking about marketing funnels to marketing flywheels. This offers opportunities for how and when companies enter international markets with global content or products. In fact, some organizations may already use this concept — a global marketing flywheel — to drive their localization decisions without even being aware of it.
Is the marketing funnel outdated?
The concept of a funnel has always been deceptively simple. Traditionally, marketing efforts have been focused on turning prospects into customers by moving them through stages — raising awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and ultimately purchase. These stages formed the top, middle and bottom of the funnel, with activities and metrics built around pushing prospects down the funnel.
Building on this concept, the global marketing playbook that companies have typically followed calls for focusing first on the top and later on the middle of the funnel, to initiate international growth by entering new markets. The focus then shifts toward the bottom-of-funnel activities, when the goal is to grow and win market share from local competitors.
The funnel has been around for a long time and has informed many international sales and marketing strategies. This concept works perfectly well until it does not. The reality is that buying is, increasingly, not a linear process. In addition, buyers have access to so much information before they even trigger their buying process, and they increasingly rely on word of mouth, effectively ignoring much of the traditional marketing that companies produce.
But more importantly, this approach fails to build on the potential of happy, already-acquired customers to attract new and repeat sales, and to drive referrals. Instead, winning a new customer is becoming more difficult when using the framework of pushing them from the top to the bottom of the funnel.
So while funnels continue to be useful when designing linear processes, their linear nature makes them less useful when considering the overall marketing approach.
In the global marketing context, this means a failure to build on the existing customer base and general goodwill built in the current, or home, markets when launching abroad. Getting the next language or market right is not always easier, but it should be. At best, this leads to incremental growth that just about beats the churn-rate companies normally experience, but is no way to achieve exponential growth.
In fact, this model is even more relevant in the current “post-Covid” world, which is marked by accelerated “digitalization of everything”, as an opportunity to increase revenues but also to reduce costs, and the pressing need to keep and delight existing clients.
The funnel vs. the flywheel
This is where the flywheel comes in. This takes inspiration from engineering, where a flywheel is a highly efficient device used to store and conserve energy. It needs the initial torque to get moving and then it creates and stores more energy with every turn, increasing its output. A marketing strategy can work in the same way. Instead of starting from scratch after each client acquisition, or after a given campaign has been completed, it can harness the energy of the previous cycle to power the next acquisition or campaign, with less energy needed. This is the way to build self-sustaining marketing operations that keep spinning with ever-decreasing friction.
Amazon was perhaps the first company to embrace and perfect this flywheel concept in the way they combined their own ecommerce platform with third-party sellers across markets. This helped increase traffic, the selection of products offered, and ultimately the overall customer experience, while decreasing costs and, by extension, prices. This then formed a virtuous cycle that kept on reinforcing itself.
In the marketing field, this concept found a lot of traction with respected marketers such as Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and SparkToro, or Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot. In fact, much of HubSpot’s operations have been reengineered based on the flywheel model (attract-engage-delight) with corresponding changes to their sales, marketing, customer services, and product development. This has made HubSpot one of the best success stories of how the flywheel concept can be customized and adopted by high-growth organizations.
So while marketing as a discipline has not been exactly known for its immunity to buzzwords and a constant stream of seemingly new concepts, “flywheel” is one that has proved its worth and has real-life applications that work.
The global marketing flywheel
Here's a closer look at how the Global Marketing Flywheel works and the specific activities you can pursue at every step.
Figure 1: The Global Marketing Flywheel: every new language, localized piece of content or international customer won make it spin faster
1. Leverage from existing markets
It is a rare company that goes from 0 to 50 or 100 languages in one release. At the same time, since the web is a global phenomenon, everyone can reach out to customers anywhere in the world from day one. That also means companies have an existing goodwill in-country, from their home market or other locales where they already operate, that they can leverage even before they formally enter a new market.
For instance, an existing website domain authority, built on the content and links that refer to assets in other languages over the years, has a global relevance that can be leveraged in a new market. This can be intelligently explored via multiple-domain search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that help build a massive search engine presence that is hard to beat with a single domain or language footprint. Ongoing technical SEO optimization also helps.
Similarly, companies have existing global social media followings that they can branch off and segment to communicate with their audiences in a local language. They can do this even before establishing their local social media channels, which otherwise takes time to build and grow from scratch. For instance, organizations can post on their global social media accounts in local languages specifically only to followers that have a given language as their default, or who are based in selected target markets. This reinforces the global social media presence and later on can be used to cross-promote local channels, and vice versa.
Using this approach, every new language adds to the strength of the global domain and other assets, and supports all existing and subsequent languages, creating a self-reinforcing circle that should be leveraged. This will also include taking relevant testimonials from recognized brands, or leveraging existing reviews, from other markets when entering a new one. Among other things, this consideration also impacts how organizations structure their global marketing teams, striking the right balance between the global efficiencies and the local relevance, so they can capitalize on these opportunities.
2. Boost local brand affinity
Brand is the oil that makes every part of the flywheel go much faster. It allows companies to achieve more with considerably less at every stage. For instance, across markets and online platforms, high click-through rates correlate strongly with low costs-per-click. In other words, brands that are recognized and invoke positive connotations enjoy more clicks, resulting in a lower cost of paid or organic acquisition.
In this step, organizations work to build up demand for their brand and increase in-country brand awareness. This is something to which all the other parts of the flywheel contribute, and something which necessarily requires time and patience. Local PR and media relations are some of the specific activities that can help foster local brand awareness, along with building some form of in-country presence or partnership network. Building and nurturing a local community is helped by having brand ambassadors, locally trusted and respected people or figureheads that can work with the community to represent and promote your brand in-market.
The ultimate goal is for the brand name to become the search term, rather than having to win in the content search game. This is an achievement that needs constant monitoring on the local market level, as the growing — and highly controversial — practice of companies bidding for their competitors’ brand names with branded keywords in their paid advertising shows.
3. Optimize for local conversions
In broad terms, this is the ongoing effort to maximize the value of inbound traffic so that visitors proceed to achieve defined goals, with indicators and milestones in the conversion path. This can be conversion on a landing page, subscription to a trial or a freemium model, opting into marketing communications, a blog subscription, online inquiry, or request for information.
In the global marketing context, this optimization goes beyond providing localized website content and covers redesigning the site so that visitors enjoy a native market-like experience. This includes offering a range of communications options specific to each locale—online, email, local phone, live chat or a chatbot available in a given language, automatic meeting booking in visitors’ time zones, locally preferred payment options, local privacy rules compliance and common return policies, to name just a few.
The flywheel model is all about ongoing experimentation and iterations, and localization is one of the ways to increase conversions across geographies. Readdle, the growing developer of popular productivity apps for iOS, is a great example of a company using an intelligent approach to testing market potential by incremental localization of content, first in the App Store, followed by minimum localization and finally “all-in” localization for a selected market. Figure 2 shows how their conversion rates from a free trial to a paying customer rapidly increased following localization of one of their products.
Figure 2: PDF Expert for Mac saw a major uptake in conversions of users from free trial to paid version following localization Source: readdle.com
This metric is even more important in the current economic uncertainty as software companies from Asana to Zoom see a greater adoption of free trials or freemium models across the board. This increases new user registrations and overall user base, but turning these into paid subscriptions is absolutely critical. This is why organizations focus on local conversions and their optimization with local-language content or localized products more than ever before.
4. Publish market-relevant content
Providing valuable, educational content that addresses the needs of prospects or customers is a winning formula for engaging and attracting customers. But it is hard when the competitive space gets increasingly saturated, and it is getting more difficult to stand out. However, this may not be the case for every market and there is an opportunity for organizations to create new channels in a range of other languages where the competition for attention may be less fierce.
This applies to local-language blogs, offers, multimedia and other assets. Companies have the full list of options here, from translating content created originally for the home market, transcreating it while adding some local flavor, to opting for complete in-country copywriting with original content written in the given market language and with the target market specifics and insights in mind. In most cases, this last approach, with local market stories and context, generates the highest engagement, even if typically being the most expensive.
5. Grow locally through amplifiers
Amplifying local-language communications is crucial, especially in the early stages of market development, when the local audience will be initially smaller. In addition to the obvious use of dedicated market-specific popular social media accounts and platforms, there are other tactics, including potential engagement of local influencers. Another approach, suggested by Rand Fishkin, calls for creating specific content that will appeal to potential amplifiers, such as journalists, industry or mainstream media, and other potential ambassadors and influencers. This can be useful for local marketing, as is providing for creation of user-generated content in individual target locales.
One frequently overlooked component for amplifying content is customer marketing, with content and tactics designed to grow audiences among existing customers. Similarly, advocacy marketing is a useful tactic which aims to enable customers to create buzz around your brand and products; another way to support referrals from happy customers.
Another recent tactic revolves around user reviews, for instance on app stores. These come in different languages and contain potentially a wealth of information about the actual experience users in different geographies have with a given product, whether localized or not. Companies that can pick up reviews across languages and have the ability to respond in the native language of users can amplify positive use experiences, or improve their products based on those less-than-positive reviews. Sadly, many developers still leave say non-English reviews or comments unanswered.
Ratings, again collected in individual markets, are another great way to grow product adoption, since there is normally a direct correlation between ratings and total downloads, and a one-star increase in ratings may result in conversion increases in hundreds of percent.
In-app prompts to rate a product, in particular, introduced in iOS 11, lead to a ratings inflation across geographies, since giving a rating is now so much easier without having to go to an app store to provide a written feedback. They also probably helped to skew the overall feedback developers receiv, with average rankings rising substantially since their introduction.
This is because giving a 5-star rating is easy, and developers often deploy smart tactics and behavioral science to display in-app prompts in moments when users are most likely to give a high rating. This means that more valuable feedback can be extracted by mining multilingual feedback received, and active listening on social media across locales, in order to get the actual sentiment for a given geography.
App stores and marketplaces in general are a global phenomenon, and increasingly competitive, so companies need to look for reviews and ratings they receive regardless of the specific market or language. That’s because negative experience that customers may have in one market can ultimately impact on global ratings and so hit overall growth.
6. Create local customer experience
The right degree of localization is the key aspect of providing a strong local customer experience, but it is just one element of the overall mix. Other elements include providing localized support, personalization, and integrations with complementary products or services that are popular in a given market.
In this context, the focus on delighting customers in order to drive future growth also means that companies may choose to provide localized products or experiences earlier. They may also decide to go deeper in the level of localization provided than might have been the case in the past.
In the current economic climate, localization can also be perceived as a measurable tactic designed to decrease annual churn rates or to increase client retention. The fact that users can experience a localized product hands-on in a free trial or a freemium model before actual purchase increases the likelihood of conversion to a paid customer.
Companies also continue exploring new ways of getting in-country inputs about products. For instance Evernote, the popular productivity app, built their success on the Japanese market by sending a team to Tokyo to interview Japanese users after they saw a growing interest in their English-language product there. This helped them understand the specific local needs and usage behaviors, which they then used when preparing the localized version.
They also used these insights in customizing their App Store presence in Japan, which went beyond the usual ASO (App Store Optimization) tactics and explicitly explored the ways the app is being used in Japan. This has become so useful that Evernote meets with local influencers and active users to get their in-country feedback on a regular basis.
7. Grow your own in-country audiences
This step supports the imperative today to own your own audiences. Social media and other online platforms with followers provide excellent additional audiences, but they are secondary. This is because, across markets, engagement rates on social media, where companies need to compete for attention with many others (plus sponsored content), are much lower than in direct communication as via emails. In addition, social media will always prefer native content and users staying on their platforms rather than linking to other sites. Instead, companies need to build and grow their own email lists of opted-in contacts, blog subscribers and others—genuinely interested communities that can be expected to engage with your content and amplify it. This is the solid customer base that companies need to consciously build and nurture over time.
Every piece of content published, or any demand generation activity, should lead to increasing your owned audience. This then reinforces the reach your assets and activities achieve. In the spirit of global marketing, this means; segmenting your global lists by language preferences, cross promoting content across locales, making it easy to share and promote content, and supporting word of mouth and referrals.
Putting it all together
Individually, none of these steps in the global marketing flywheel model are really revolutionary. The model's beauty lies in the way it shows the comprehensive nature of international marketing and how it helps identify gaps or sources of friction that hinder your efforts. And clearly it no longer relies on the traditional, linear buyer journey frameworks.
No individual stand-alone tactic can have a significant impact. Experience shows there are no hacks or shortcuts that will have a long-term impact. “Localize and they will come” no longer works. Providing a great localized web experience is not enough. Real growth can be achieved when all the components in the flywheel are in place and contribute, building on the goodwill created by delighting existing customers over time.
This model encourages us to think about how to make the flywheel bigger, how to make it spin faster, and how to eliminate unnecessary frictions that slow it down and reduce energy
Potential frictions come in many shapes and forms. It is not unusual for localized content to not resonate well with the targeted in-country audiences. Fairly often, companies may create great content in the given language but fail to promote and amplify it properly. It’s also not unusual for the localized product or web experience to cater for the specifics of larger markets, say Germany, but not smaller ones, hurting conversion rates and adoption. Frictions may also arise internally, between the central and the local marketing teams, or between product teams and marketing, etc. In every case, the flywheel model helps identify sources of friction and find ways of fixing them.
Take it for a spin
The model reinforces itself with every new language added, every new piece of content localized, every new international customer won. All of these increase the speed of the flywheel. And while the initial revolutions may be difficult, it gets easier over time and feeds into long-term growth.
This article was originally published in MultiLingual magazine, issue #192.