Global marketing is an expensive business. Campaign success requires you to do more research, cover more markets, assess more creative options, prepare more content and campaigns for more channels, and allocate budget for translation and localization. All these tasks eat up time and money. They require more intensive project management and coordination, usually with shortened lead times. It’s all too easy for costs to spiral, so savvy global marketers are always on the hunt for ways to reduce wastage and eliminate unnecessary costs.

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31 ways to save money on your next global
marketing campaign
by Freedman International

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
1. Don’t fall in love with a “Big Idea” or a creative
concept that does not work for your global markets.
2. Be clear on what the markets actually need when
you create a global asset toolkit for them to use.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
3. Avoid late change to creative work – with a
global campaign this will have significant knock-
on effects as any changes will need to be
cascaded across multiple markets, assets and
formats.
4. Deliver global assets as a complete
toolkit rather than drip-feeding them to markets
piecemeal. Drip-feeding is inefficient for everyone.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
5. Plan the local market image and video
needs at the outset– do this once, when
you organize video and photo shoots. Don’t
waste time and money on multiple follow
up shoots.
6. Think through the needs of different
groups of markets – large markets vs.
small markets.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
7. Make sure that content creation and localization
is done with SEO in mind.
8. Create and communicate a clear list of assets
that you plan to deliver for the campaign.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
9. Understand the broadcast regulations and restrictions in different markets before you
create and finalize your TV commercials – otherwise you may find that a commercial can’t be
shown in some markets.
10. Plan, budget and negotiate global usage rights on all media (images, talent, music)
upfront and before you commit.
11. Plan and manage your critical delivery deadlines very carefully to avoid missing media slots,
or having local markets spend time and money creating adverts locally to meet local deadlines.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
12. Make sure that digital assets are built in a
format that allows for them to be localized
easily.
13. Ensure designs have allowed for
localization by taking account of potential
issues, such as font sets, foreign characters,
length of buttons/layout, etc.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
14. Always use native speakers and international production specialists to handle localization.
15. Consolidate localization and production across all media types into a single implementation
when you have a roster of creative agencies supplying parts of the campaign (digital, ATL, BTL,
social).

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
16. Integrate translation and production into a
single process instead of using separate
translation and production suppliers.
17. Automate file formatting and manipulation
tasks wherever possible and use international
standard coding systems, like UTF-8 and native
formats like XML, json and srt to reduce risk of
errors.

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18. Make sure agencies supply open files with
all linked content so that they are easily
localized.
19. Use an international production specialist
to build assets once the creative concept is
finalized.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
20. Establish an efficient way to share and store
digital assets, ideally by using a digital asset
management system (see here for more
information on DAM’s).
21. Integrate your website content management
system with a translation management system.

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22. Consider using a proxy-based web
translation software solution.
23. Use a translation memory system to store
previously translated content so that you do
not get charged more than once for each
piece of content.

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24. Use auto-templating software if you have a high
volume of assets with lots of versions, such as
programmatic banners and product labels.
25. Always use an online approval system to
manage the routing of proofs and revisions
through QA and approval stages.
26. Always use subtitling software to manage the
process of getting videos subtitled. This will allow
you to localize, edit / update and resave subtitles
whilst playing the video and comparing your edits
vs. master copy.

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27. Establish a centralized way to adapt campaigns for all markets instead of sending assets to
multiple local agencies.
28. Eliminate multiple translation and localization rounds by building a top linguist team to
handle translation with up to date online glossaries and proper briefing to eliminate errors and
misunderstandings.

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29. Always send content for translation in IDML format so that formatting and typesetting cost
and time are minimized.
30. Use a specialist global marketing implementation team to manage the localization and
production process.
31. Establish an efficient review and approval cycle so that
multiple, never ending rounds of reviews and revision are
avoided, saving time and everyone’s sanity.

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31 top ways to avoid wasting your budget
Anything we’ve missed? Please let us know if you have other techniques for taking unnecessary costs
out of the development and production of global campaigns and we’ll add them to the list.

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