In this episode of Distribution First, Justin dives into the world of global content strategy with Lee Densmer, a global content marketing strategist.

Lee shares insights and examples of the pitfalls of global content distribution, as well as practical steps for content marketers to take when expanding their reach to global markets.

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In this episode, you'll learn:

1. How to know which markets to focus on
2. Why translating content isn't enough
3. What pitfalls to avoid when creating and sharing content on a global scale
4. How cultural and linguistic awareness can change the way content is crafted for different markets
5. Why starting small and testing is crucial

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All right, let's get in the show.

Welcome to distribution. First, the show where we flip content marketing on its head

and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I

share playbooks, motivations, stories, and strategies to help you repurpose and

distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you

created.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Distribution.

First, super excited to have Lee Densberg on. She is a

global content marketing strategist. And on today's episode, we

are going to emphasize global. We're going to talk all about global

distribution, what the sort of pitfalls are with global

distribution, what may be some of the mistakes, assumptions, all those things that go into

it as we're trying to create and share content on a global

scale versus just maybe our home market. So, Lee, welcome to the

show. That's right. Thank you. Excited to be here. Awesome. So

I know we were chatting before we got on here, but I think you've

got a great sort of just starting point to level us up on with

global distribution. So maybe we can just start right there. Yes.

So 70% of all businesses that are online

sell outside of their own market. And I don't think

businesses realize this. That goes up to 90% when those companies have more than

50 people on board at their company. So if you are online,

you are selling globally, you have a global market. Global people are

interested in your content. And I want to talk more about what that

means. Yeah, I love that. It's so interesting. So when I worked at

Techsmith two companies ago, definite global company, we

had sales across, over, I think, 180, if not 200

countries across the world. I had global in my title for that exact reason,

was like, hey, Justin, you're not just going to lead us content, you're leading our

global content efforts. A little bit different. When I went to the

startup world, we did sell globally, but it was less so.

But even now, running my own thing, it's interesting, like seeing the

stats on folks who purchase the course

or check out or on the email list. It's a global world we're in,

right? It's amazing to see that. So I'm interested, what

are some of those key differences that we need to be thinking about as we're

creating, sharing content, and knowing that it's global?

Even if we wouldn't say like, yes, we have a marketing hub in

Germany or we've got a dedicated us marketer, what

are those things that we need to be thinking about? So the first thing that

we all assume is that the English is readily understood everywhere. And yes, the

majority of people on LinkedIn and in our audiences do

speak English, but they don't prefer to do business in English. Something like

75% of people prefer to do business in their own language.

They read English, they understand English, but it's not theirs. It's not their

culture, it's not their language. So there's this myth that content

is global, that what you write will apply globally to people who

speak the language. It's just not the case. The buyers are

different. In every market, people believe different things. They

behave in different ways, they have different preferences. So you literally

have to do buyer personas for each market and step back and

recognize that that buyer is literally different. It's not just about language. It's

largely about language, but it's also about customs,

culture, preferences, beliefs, values. So how would somebody start

doing that then? How do you, if you come into a company or you're working

with somebody and they've got multiple. You look at their sales and they've

got multiple different countries or regions that they're

selling into, how are you thinking about that as a content person? And how do

you start to actually execute on some of that stuff? Exactly.

You start by identifying where the biggest growth is going to be.

Right. Because you can't approach all markets. You can't handle all

markets, not when there's potentially hundreds out there. So you figure out

where your biggest growth is, who are your biggest users, where's the biggest need,

and then you look at that market, you do the buyer Persona, you

conduct the research, you talk to customers in that market, and you build the buyer

Persona for that market. And then that helps you shift

what you're writing about, shifts how you're approaching it.

It also gives you an indication that you may need to translate that content. That's

one of the first things you do that's kind of like the lowest hanging fruit

is get it translated. But there's a process beyond

translation that's called trans creation. Trans, of course, means

across. So you're crossing cultures by

adapting that content, not just about the words. It's like you're changing

the colors, you're changing the images. You're getting rid of all those

american sports metaphors out of your content because people in

India don't play baseball, so you're actually

fully adapting the content. So it works for that audience, so it doesn't

alienate them or frustrate them or just not connect with them at

all. So it's kind of a dual process. It's like changing the words and

that's translation, and then it's changing the emotion and the

intent and the cultural aspects of it as

well. That's not cheap. So is that something

that, how do you even start thinking of a trans

creation world if you have a big subset in Germany

or Japan, for instance? Those are two very different

environments. Are you hiring? I'm assuming there are probably

agencies or people who help with this type of stuff. Yeah, there

are. So you need a content strategist on the ground in

each of your markets. Of course, depending on your volumes, you might

not have the resources to hire somebody full time, but you need somebody who's a

cultural expert, a researcher, a content strategist in

that market. So that's kind of a satellite of your home office, and

then that person can connect you with the market and help you with the

adaptation of that content. Engage a translator

or a linguist who can do that trans creation process.

So, yeah, you need people on the ground who know the market. Yeah, I'm

curious, is it better to do this

poorly or to not do it at all? I love

that question, and I'm not sure that I have a,

yes, it's better to do it poorly than to not do it at all,

with a lot of caveats. Because I'm going to give you a funny example. If

you do it poorly, you can screw everything up. Example? So

you remember the got milk campaign in the United States? Well, that was

translated into Spanish by an agency in San

Francisco. And the way that they translated it, it came out

as. Are you lactating a

little? Know, maybe not quite what the milk association was

going after? No, not so much so

offensive. I mean, funny maybe to us, but offensive in that

market. And so that not only was that a waste of

money and they fired the agency, but it alienated the market,

it frustrated the market. So that is what happens when you do it

wrong. There are pretty big consequences. But translation,

doing something to help that market understand your content is better than

ignoring that need completely. Because

sometimes it's easy, especially now with some AI tools and

things like that, to do translation probably pretty efficiently

and pretty accurately. A little bit harder to go into that

trans creation side where you're doing research, more in

depth content changing tone, changing all of those type of

things. Exactly. So would you say then that step one maybe, is that

sort of translation like if you've got these

things in here, maybe set up some landing pages, some web pages, et

cetera, some other pieces of content for those markets

as translated in that get those to be as good as you

can before you worry about jumping into custom content across

there. Right. So you would pick the most

important pieces, your most important landing page, your

best lead magnet, some blog posts that would be good for the market. And

translate those, and translate those carefully. Be careful with AI

translation. It's best for like a service manual or like

faqs, but you should not translate anything that's highly branded

with AI. I mean, you're going to get, are you lactating if you do

that? Yeah. So don't do that. But I would pick the top pieces,

the highest performing pieces, the most important pieces, and get those carefully

translated and then you can go deeper when you get more

traction in that market and create

custom campaigns, adapt existing campaigns, go deeper once you

get traction. But it's a step by step process. Is there

a good sort of rule of thumb with the companies that you've

worked with as far as timelines?

How long does a process like this take? Right.

If you're going to just. Translation can happen quickly. Translation

doesn't take a long time in and of itself, but creating those buyer personas,

creating a campaign for a specific market, understanding the

distinct distribution channels. Social media is not the

same world round. Facebook is used differently, LinkedIn is used

differently world round. You have to decide which channels you're going to distribute on because

it's different for each market. So translation is easy. But laying that

strategy, that customized strategy, takes as much time as it

does for the home market. You're leveraging from your home market

strategy, but you're adapting it for that specific market, and

that takes time and expertise to do that. Yeah, it feels like it might

even take more time because at least for me, I feel

like I would be second guessing a decent amount of things.

Not knowing the market. I'm relying on that sort of boots on the ground

person or some sort of advisor on

the region or something to be able to actually pull that off in a coherent

way to where we're not doing the got milk? Campaign, we're doing something that actually

makes sense. And I have more crazy examples. It is

iterative, just like with your home market, just as long as

it took you to get it right in your home market, you do some tests,

you try some things, you translate a landing page, you see how it does and

then you tweak. That's the way we roll in content marketing.

Try tweak. Try tweak. Put content out there, test

concepts in the market and then change it if you need to. Yeah. So on

these global scale, are we also then scaling

the practitioners, like if we're

doing paid ads, are we having a paid ads expert for a particular market

or somebody who's in, or can it function as, oh no, your

home team. Your home team can kind of manage that and they just

have to get the right assets in place. Yeah. A mix. So

if you're really big and you're a brand like Nike

or like Nokia, then you're handing all of that

off to a language services company. So they're big companies

that handle multiple languages, multiple deliverables. They put technology

in place. I mean, you can go from having a bilingual person translate a

landing page to having a big company that

serves 250 languages and as many markets

doing all of your adaptation. So there's definitely a

continuum, depending on your size, how much you want to

double down in that market. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense.

So is there a good way to basically start

thinking about distribution globally

where we're not stuck on,

you had the quote in the beginning of the episode, the stats that are sort

of like. And how different the reality is

probably to how people are currently thinking about it. So how should people be

currently thinking about distribution for these global markets,

especially if they don't have any resource in place right now to do

any of that work? Yeah, I know. That's the question for startups and

smaller companies who are selling online and they're like, oh crap, we might be global,

right? So the first thing is to develop an

awareness and to think about how their content may or may not

be appropriate for all audiences. Gain an

understanding of the nuances of

culture and how cultures are different. So

it's an awareness at the start, right? Like, not everybody

responds to this content the same way as my american clients or my

european clients do. Awareness of the differences and then an

awareness of how content can be global. There is

a way to create content in English that is

suitable more or less for most markets. Unfortunately, that

makes it more generic. But you can create

content in a way that's suitable for most markets. What are some of those things,

Lee? What are those things that we can do to make it, I mean, even

if it does make it more generic, what are some of those things? Yeah, it's

idioms, metaphors, jokes. Those things are not

universal. They don't ever translate. Every culture has their own idioms,

jokes, slogans, and then there's cultural and political

references that you don't want to have in your content probably anyway, right?

In this landscape. Right? Like, you need to be aware that those can be

perceived as inappropriate or just baffling. In other

countries, even the use of colors can be funky. Like the

color red in Africa is troublesome. It's associated with

mourning, with mourning and death. So you have to be aware that

use of colors can be problematic. There's a lot there, Justin.

It's all really interesting, but I get that it's maybe overwhelming. I

mentioned sports metaphors. We have something like

35 baseball metaphors in English, we say, I mean,

touch base, hit, a home run. So many baseball

metaphors. And I've come to understand that

Europeans and bilinguals in other countries learn

English and learn those metaphors, but often they don't know that they came from

baseball. They don't even know. So sports metaphors,

yeah, all those things. And even like, images and

emojis are perceived differently in different countries.

So if I can do anything through this podcast episode, it'd be to

raise the awareness that there's all these elements of language that are

specific to our culture that can

offend or perplex people in another culture who might be reading your

stuff. So this one I'm doing the hand symbol with the ok

sign. This is something kind of off color in.

I mean, why would an American know that unless you've traveled to China or have

a chinese friend? Yeah, it's definitely

feels like there's so many little pitfalls that

you can fall into. It also feels like, to me, like when we did this

at Techsmith, when we decided we were going to really

outside of having a key marketer for our

key regions, but really put emphasis on

global content creation, we had

somebody in house who basically took the reins

with all things global and became the check

person to me as leading content

marketing. That was super helpful because even just

listening to you, I'm having semi flashbacks of all the things that go

into creating a true.

When you are not a Nike and you don't

just outsource every single thing to an agency or even

when you're got milk and you just, we screwed up. We'll take the campaign.

There's enough dollars behind those type of things to where

they're willing to probably just not dot every I and cross every t

and all those type of things. So I am really interested

in terms of, like, I like what you mentioned earlier with the baby steps and

try to just go with maybe some of your best markets, some of your best

pieces and then think about those

and do those the best way you can for those markets,

versus chomping off the entire bit

of the pie and say, well, everything we're doing

now is global focused. Everything we're doing now is going to

be, if we're doing this campaign in English, we got to get it all

translated for Germany and France.

I like the way of approaching that. And then you can see what works and

what doesn't. That's the only way to do it. Otherwise you're going to spend

tens of thousands of dollars for uncertain ROI.

Translating everything is not a strategy. So another thing

that's interesting, and my expertise is in the latin american market.

There are 26 countries that speak Latin, America that speak Spanish, and

each of those countries is a different culture. You can loosely associate country with

culture. Right. 26. So people ask

me, do you translate in 26 different ways then? Because there's

dialects involved. Spanish is not the same. The vocabulary is not the

same, the syntax is not the same. And

no, you don't. You don't need to translate Spanish 26 times

if you've got latin american buyers. Spain and Latin

America are quite a bit different from each other, but there's a way to

translate into Spanish that reaches that market appropriately without doing

it 26 times. So how would you go about that,

then? Right again, you look at the

markets where your product is being sold. You look at the markets where people are

interested, is it predominantly Spain, or is it predominantly Latin or South

America? And you choose a variety of Spanish

that's regional enough for that market. There is

a form of generic Spanish, which is actually kind of fascinating because

it doesn't exist. It's a version of Spanish that doesn't exist,

but it's used in literature and translation to appeal

to all Spanish speakers. Nobody speaks

interesting, but everybody understands it. Yeah. I love the idea

of not translating everything for the sake of translation.

I remember when I first took over running content at

Techsmith, one of the initiatives was like, we were doing

blogs, and we had obviously way less content on our

german and I think japanese or french blogs at the

time. But we were, in some ways, the strategy really wasn't a

strategy. It was just a little bit of, well, we

released this one in here, so we're going to go get it created over there.

And especially at that time, it was like there was no way

to cross check keywords or semantics

or if this thing was going to rank or not, because once it went over,

I could do that in English, but once it went over to translation.

The translator is simply just trying to do their best to translate it at that

point and get the thoughts across. At least in that case, they weren't

necessarily a marketer. Right. So I'm curious, do you have any thoughts on that?

Like, how could I have done that better? Or what are some of the pitfalls

there? So you've made a couple interesting points. One is that a

translator isn't a marketer, just like a copywriter isn't

a marketer. It's the same. It's a parallel

concept. So a translator can be excellent at their craft and really

good at converting concepts from one language to another, but they don't

understand the big picture of marketing in another country. So

there is a specialization there. You talked about SEO,

so multilingual SEO is a big deal and there are experts out there

in that. And the main things to understand is that people do not search the

same way in each country. So if you are

doing an SEO play to drive traffic and to drive leads in another

market, you need an SEO strategy that's appropriate for that market. It's

another instance of something that you develop for your home market.

It just doesn't work. So often the mistake is to just

translate keywords and it doesn't work. They are new,

they are different. You have to research the keywords for every single market and then

of course, use those keywords in that content. So

translating is a first step. Yes, but I think I'm characterizing for you how quickly

it can go wrong. Yeah, it's a huge undertaking. I think that's the biggest

thing that I'm coming across from this conversation

is it's just like a remembrance of

how a daunting that it truly can be. Because content

marketing, all that, it's daunting doing it once, trying

to do it across multiple languages, multiple dialects,

multiple countries, it all just adds more and more

complexity. But I think the moral of this episode

is, I think for a lot of content marketers, maybe just

check, see where outside of

your home market, like where are sales coming from, where are website traffic

at those type of things. Those are easy sort of first steps for content

marketers to be able to see, oh, we do have a global brand, look at

that. There are visits from X, Y and Z country. So I

think that is step one. And then two is like, yeah,

planning. Just start small, like your two best pieces, your

three best pieces across maybe a little bit of the funnel or a little bit

of the plan, or what's your best email series?

Start slowly working those things

across, and then by the time you know it, you've got a little bit more

traction, a little bit more learnings, and you don't have to feel

so overwhelmed. Absolutely. That's the only way to

do it. And then, as I mentioned, the awareness, the cultural awareness of

the differences in cultures, and then the awareness

of what you're writing and how you're writing it and how specific. You don't

even know that what you're writing is so specific to your culture until you start

studying it. And you realize, I am uniquely

american. Everything I write is so american, and

you can't take that out. You shouldn't take that out.

But american content marketers are writing american

content. I mean, we have some peers who are european,

and their content is slightly different. The words they use, the way they

explain things. Yeah, super interesting.

Anything before we wrap, Lee, anything you would need to get out to the world

here before we close out? I

think I want to give one more terrible. Absolutely. Let's do it. That'll be a

good way. Let's see. So there is an

airlines called Branif Airlines, and they were

promoting leather seats. They have leather seats, so it's a

differentiator. And their campaign was fly

in leather. Right. But in Spanish. Again, problems with

Spanish. They translated that as fly naked. So, I mean,

it could be appealing to a specific target audience, but it probably wasn't what they

meant. So now everybody's goal is to go look up translation

miscues in marketing, and you'll get a whole list.

That's hilarious. Between lactation and

naked, we've got quite the translation faux pause here.

That's right. It can go really wrong. Yep. Awesome.

Well, Lee, it was super fun to chat a little bit about the global side.

I think people will get an idea of a how complex

a global content marketing strategy, kind of what that entails,

but also the steps that they can take to not have to dive all the

way in, but get a little bit here and there to make their marketing better

on a global scale. Absolutely. People are welcome to follow me on

LinkedIn and reach out. I love talking about this stuff. Awesome. Culture and language

is super interesting. That's awesome. So thanks, Lee. Appreciate it. Thank you,

Justin.

All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Distribution

first, and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you

so, so much, and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in

this episode one way or another, into your content strategy as

well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year. That

are going to help you build your brand, ten x your content and transform

the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe to the show and sign

up for my newsletter at Justinsimon Co. So you don't miss

a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next episode as well. And

until then, take care and I'll see you next time.