- Estimated read time: 5 minutes
This article highlights the importance and advantages of online personalization and localization, addresses a few common challenges, and provides strategy tips.
What do we mean by personalization and localization?
Personalization and localization are two essential strategies in online advertising, and they have distinct approaches and purposes.
However, you could think of them as two sides of the same coin, with the coin name being “does the person see themselves in the ad?”
Personalization
First and foremost, personalization is all about tailoring content and advertisements to individual users and create a unique and relevant experience for each person. This strategy can lead to higher advertisement engagement and conversions. Sophisticated personalization heavily relies on data collection and analysis to understand users’ preferences, behaviors, and demographics.
Localization
While personalization focuses on the individual user, regardless of location or cultural background, localization involves adapting marketing efforts to specific local markets or geographic regions. The goal is to produce advertising content that is relevant and culturally appropriate so that it resonates with people in specific regions with unique characteristics — language, cultural nuances, local customs, and preferences. For example, translating ad content into the local language or creating separate campaigns for different countries.
Combining personalization and localization strategies often complement each other and can be incredibly effective in online marketing. These strategies enable ads to connect with diverse audiences in more meaningful ways and therefore can significantly enhance overall ad performance.
Why is it important in digital marketing?
While there are many reasons, let’s focus on three that should merit a business to include personalization and localization in strategic goals:
1. Competitive Advantage
In the competitive digital landscape, companies that embrace localization and personalization gain a competitive edge.
Businesses connect with customers on a more personal level and offer a superior customer experience stand out against their competitors, leading to customer loyalty and repeat business.
2. Data-Driven Insights
Both localization and personalization strategies rely on data collection and analysis. Through data insights, marketers can gain a deeper understanding of their audience, identifying preferences, behaviors, and trends. Algorithms and machine learning models enable marketers to generate dynamic content and product recommendations.
This data-driven approach allows for continuous improvement and optimization of marketing efforts.
3. Social Media and Algorithm Benefits
Many social media platforms and advertising algorithms reward personalized and localized content by promoting it to relevant audiences.
This increased visibility can lead to higher reach and engagement, amplifying the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns.
Three common challenges to achieving highly personalized/localized advertising and strategies to overcome those challenges:
Achieving highly personalized and localized advertising does present some significant challenges for businesses.
1. Data collection and privacy
To personalize content effectively, companies need to gather and analyze vast amounts of user data, which can raise privacy concerns among users. To overcome this challenge, transparency is key. Businesses should clearly communicate their data collection practices and privacy policies to users, allowing them to have control over their data preferences. The use of server-to-server data pass-back minimizes some concerns, working with partners to review a framework to ensure all parties are implementing robust security measures, plus complying with data protection regulations are all essential aspects of building trust with customers.
2. Content creation and adaptation
Tailoring content for different audiences and regions can be time-consuming and resource intensive.
To address this challenge, Rocketer has invested in content management systems and automation tools that streamline this process. For others, leveraging templates and reusable components can help expedite content production.
3. Technology and infrastructure
Implementing advanced personalization and localization technologies requires a strong digital infrastructure.
Rocketer overcomes this challenge with its a scalable and flexible system that leverages the vast data processing of the platforms and clients MI along with content delivery for our clients’ activity.
Execution of localization and personalization differs by digital media platform:
A strategy across digital media platforms should consider that each platform has unique characteristics, user demographics, and advertising formats.
For example, on Meta, advertisers can use detailed targeting options to deliver personalized content to specific user segments. Dynamic ad formats enable real-time personalization based on user actions and preferences. Localized language, visuals, and cultural references can enhance the effectiveness of campaigns.
Leveraging data from Google Analytics and user behavior on various Google platforms, advertisers can create personalized ad campaigns. Localization involves using region-specific keywords, localized ad copies, and region-specific landing pages.
TikTok thrives on short-form, visually engaging content. Advertisers can create personalized video ads tailored to the preferences and behaviors of the target audience. Utilizing popular local trends and music can enhance localization efforts.
Rocketer’s MyCity Meta product, for example, utilizes geo-targeted ad units with creative and text across Facebook and Instagram.
While on Google, MyCity product delivers dynamic search ads with contextual relevant information for the geo locations or search related queries.
Localization and personalization help mitigate the escalating costs of search and social advertising, here’s how:
When ads are perceived as culturally sensitive and relevant, users are more likely to interact with them, and this can positively influence ad platforms’ algorithms, leading to better placement and potentially lower advertising costs. By adopting localization strategies, advertisers can target specific local markets more effectively. Instead of running broad and generic campaigns, they can tailor their advertisements to resonate with the cultural preferences and behaviors of each region. This increased relevance leads to higher engagement rates and a more efficient use of ad spend. Localization allows advertisers to optimize their budget by investing in the markets that are most likely to respond positively to their offerings. Moreover, localized campaigns can lead to better click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall ad performance.
Personalization, as a strategy, aims to create a unique and tailored experience for individual users. By delivering highly relevant content and product recommendations, personalization can increase user engagement and drive conversions. When users find the ads more appealing and useful, they are more likely to click on them, leading to improved click-through rates and potentially lower costs per click. Additionally, personalization helps reduce ad waste by ensuring that users are exposed to content that matches their specific interests and needs. This can lead to higher conversion rates, effectively utilizing the ad budget on users who are more likely to convert.
By employing both localization and personalization, advertisers can optimize their online advertising campaigns to achieve better results while potentially reducing the overall cost per acquisition or engagement. However, it’s important to note that eliminating advertising costs entirely may not be feasible, as advertising expenses are a fundamental part of reaching and acquiring new customers. Nonetheless, by leveraging these strategies, advertisers can make their marketing efforts more cost-effective, efficient, and impactful, helping them get the most out of their advertising budgets.
In summary, executing a sophisticated localization and personalization strategy is worth the effort and can be accomplished with these key pillars in mind:
- Localization and personalization are complementary strategies
- Common scalability challenges can be overcome with proper technology infrastructure, data collection and privacy practices, and content management systems
- Improved performance means improved cost efficiencies and ultimately a competitive advantage
Ainslee Connage
Account Director
