We’ve been running international consumer and B2B campaigns, for start-ups to megabrands, for the past 25 years so we have rich and deep expertise. We often get into conversations with clients and prospects alike on this, so here’s our eight essential tips to international PR and digital marketing success.
Bring on the experts
Any good agency needs to know your business and the sector that you are in. You should be able to offer insights and directions from a PR and digital marketing perspective across your key countries.
One team across borders
A great cross border team is a pre-requisite. People that have worked together, understand each other, and a lead agency that is sensitive and disciplined to the similarities and differences across geographies.
Creativity that scales
Any good agency likes to think it is creative. A key test to a great multi country campaign is to have ideas that scale. Not the multiplying budget kind but instead the economies of scale kind. Tricky but true.
Great account management skills
Having team members who can understand and analyse data and numbers is vital. The success of any campaign is only as good as the KPIs and targets you set. Knowing your data is becoming increasingly vital to everyone in our industry and your team should have this baked in.
Local knowledge and insights
You should be looking for an in-country team that can work with local managers, if you have them, and that is used to localising programmes and reporting back to the hub agency.
Getting the basics right
Beyond the obvious of what works and doesn’t work, it is important to know local days, key trends, what to do and say, what to avoid and so on. Also, with a strong local team should come a great translation process – teams to translate fast and efficiently for central and local sign off, tailored to local needs.
Lead, follow, scale and flex
A good lead agency facilitates consistent strategy, supports campaigns through creating toolkits, messaging and best practice sharing, provides day-to-day support and encouragement to local agencies and delivers consolidated reporting and measurement. It backs this up with great counsel for the client – ideally as an extension of the internal team.
As an independent agency, we are able to work with the best agencies across our network. Our mix of owned offices and the best independent agencies means we don’t have to work with teams just because they have the same name on the door.
As a group of similar sized agencies, you get the hands-on expertise of seniors combined with the entrepreneurial flair and drive of owner run businesses. Easy to flex and change to the needs of clients in dynamic markets.
That’s our secret sauce. What is yours?
This blog was originally published on OneChocolate’s blog