Video breaks down barriers and allows global brands to reach audiences anywhere they consume video on the web and mobile. More and more large enterprises are constantly working to uncover new audiences in global markets. This article simplifies global video delivery by outlining 4 key best practices to deliver video to new markets and regions, such as EMEA markets or as far east as China. We’ll cover methodology, technological, and tactical requirements needed for effectively delivering and localizing content in global markets.
Questions you should be asking and probably why you stumbled on this article:
- How do you develop a video strategy for global markets and global delivery?
- What types of challenges might you face with distributing video into new markets?
- What online video platforms should you consider for global video delivery?
- What critical technology and feature sets are required to distribute video seamlessly to different markets, and provide functionality to be localized?
- What is the responsibility of the marketer and respective organization vs the online video platform?
Before setting off on designing a new global video strategy first make sure you have built a solid foundation in your primary market. This means you have had measured success delivering video on your website, in email, on landing pages, social etc. If your organization primarily conducts business in the United States for example you should have the following components already in place for all english video: a video resource portal on your website, asset organization and metadata framework, video production and distribution workflow, and key measurement indicators. If those components are established then it is safe to venture out to other markets and languages.
We’ll now outline the steps to go beyond english videos and expand to other languages and regions respecting localization best practices. Activating localized video content can be very simple and generally fits into one of these four buckets:
- Transcriptions & Closed Captions: Taking a single english video and transcribing/translating into various languages with text tracks. Those text tracks can be uploaded and associated with the video and using an online video platform with multi-language text features activate english captions or transcriptions in the video player as a language selector.
- Audio Tracks: You can take it a level beyond text tracks and have the transcripts read with voice over talent in each respective language and be activated as audio tracks that appear as a selector in the video player similar to the text tracks but overdub the video.
- Multi-Video: If your budget affords for it you can recreate each language version of a video with new audio and visuals for each video rendition. This method would create a video asset for each video and allow you to present all the language options to your audience.
- Page-Level Localization: If you’re presenting video content in a resource center or video gallery consider implementing page-level video localization. This method only works if you are taking the “multi-video” approach and your working with multiple categories of videos in each language. You can create web pages with collections of videos specific to each language and implement code that will detect browser language and serve the viewer the appropriate video collection accordingly.
To determine which approach will work best for your organization consider these questions:
- Why take video global? Are there specific business initiatives or campaigns tied to a multi-language video marketing strategy?
- Are you going to take existing video content and repurpose it for other languages? If so, which content will get translated? In most cases looking at video analytics will quickly answer these questions.
- What regions outside of your primary market are you going to distribute video to? You may want to consider picking a few to start with versus trying to cover the whole world. Also budget will play a big factor in this decision.
- What considerations need to be made when developing video content such as localization of language, clothing, location, actors?
- Any technical issues needed to address such as legal, security, etc? For example most video does not playback within mainland China so there are specific legal and technical requirements needed to be successful with video marketing in that region. See our article on delivering video in China.
- Are there global teams that need to be involved in creating and translating videos? Who’s going to do the translation work? Most large global organizations typically have a team in each region that can assist with translating. There are also services like Cloudwords that specialize in video content localization.
- How are you going to measure the results of global video? Will it be the same as the rest of your video marketing KPIs?
Once you have thought through these questions you can then start to formulate your organization’s global video strategy. Next step actions may be as simple as making adjustments to your content or could be as complex as finding new video technology and partners for translation.
