Consider this; 99% of the Internet users on earth do not live in the Australia/Oceania region. Because Australia has a high online penetration, it’s easy to forget we’re a comparative drop in the bucket to the rest of the world. Our nearest neighbour, Asia, is the biggest geographic region in the world. If we really are living in the Asian Century, there’s a huge opportunity for Australian businesses to make their content more attractive for a foreign market.
Asia presents huge opportunity
To give you some perspective on the scale of the opportunity, Australia has over 24 million Internet users with two-thirds of the population using the Internet. Asia has more than 1 billion (1000 million) Internet users which is just over one quarter of the region’s population. Growth is expected to explode.
So how do Australian businesses reach the other 99% of online consumers? The first step is to take a global view of your content. As explained in an earlier post, translation is not enough. Globlalisation is a complex, something you can’t do in isolation or mandate from your head office.
Marketers lack global content strategies
I was surprised to hear the results of a survey taken at the most recent Content Marketing World in Cleveland, USA. According to Heidi Lorenzen, Chief Marketing Officer at Cloudwords, over 60% of the global marketers surveyed admitted they didn’t have a strategy in place for multilingual content marketing. The survey was completed by more than 500 of arguably the best content marketers in the world so it’s a good indication of a major gap in our strategic thinking as marketers.
To be fair, we’re a burgeoning discipline and many content marketers and business owners are still grappling with how content marketing fits into a traditional marketing department. Australia seems to get the need for a content marketing strategy. However, the Cloudword’s intel indicates those of us who do start with a strategy are likely to focus on their own country and miss a broader global market.
Coming up
Next week I’ll be discussing how businesses can create a global content strategy. There’s no one way to go about it but there are definitely pitfalls to avoid.
I’m also speaking to content marketers on how they can globalise their content for an international audience at Content Marketing World Sydney. There’s still time to register for the event and I’d love to have you attend my session whether you’ve cracked the global content code or you’re just starting.
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