Digital marketing and keeping up with your business’s online presence has become a game of chess; It’s complex and takes time to get a competitive edge or progress in general. Personalization and localization have become staple strategies across every niche to stay ahead of the game via the company's website, social media accounts, and other digital marketing campaigns. These strategies seem one and the same but take different moves to accomplish. This blog will show you the difference between personalization and localization, why they work, and how to apply these strategies in Drupal.
What is personalization?
Personalization refers to tailoring content, products, or experiences to meet individual users' specific needs and preferences. It involves leveraging user data and behavioral patterns to deliver customized recommendations, suggestions, or offers. Companies will often take their customer data and break it up into segments such as age, gender, or occupation to morph their marketing to speak to those audiences, respectively.
The information you personalize may be the user’s name, when they last visited your site, or more specific aspects like their abandoned cart items or if they applied a coupon. The options are flexible and almost endless. Overall, the goal with personalization is to cultivate a relevant experience for the right consumers by presenting them with solutions or products that align with their interests, demographics, needs, and more.
What is localization?
Localization is the strategy of delivering the correct message to the right consumer within an individualized time and place. Like personalization, localization requires a narrowed view of the consumer, but it's based on where they come from or where they currently are. Consider localization to use real-time data from unique customer segments to create hyper-specific content and special offers.
Localization involves adapting content, products, or services to suit a specific geographic or cultural region's preferences, cultural norms, language, and requirements. It encompasses not only language translation but also adapting images, designs, formats, currencies, units of measurement, and even adjusting functionality to match the local context. For instance, a software application localized for a specific country would have translated user interface elements, localized date and time formats, and appropriate currency symbols.
What is the difference between personalization and localization?
Both personalization and localization are about making adaptable marketing campaigns but have different focuses and scopes.
Personalization narrows down to specific users, tailoring individual users’ experiences. On the flip side, localization looks at each customer segment as its own unit to market towards, involving a broader set of data based on geographical or cultural contexts.
Why do businesses need personalization and localization?
While the implementations of personalization and localization varies, the advantages are relatively similar.
Enhanced user experience
First and foremost, your site visitors/potential or returning customers will take better to content or marketing that suits and (speaks to) all of their characteristics. It’s not about bombarding them with advertisements, but timing everything right and using the most relevant information possible for each individual.
Lead generation and conversion rates
Offering customized offers and recommendations that match the customer's tastes and needs can push them to make that purchase or take your offers. Businesses may deliver relevant items, services, or information at the correct moment by evaluating client data and behavior, increasing conversions and sales. Meanwhile, localization ensures that the material is culturally relevant and connects with local clients, reducing any purchase hurdles.
Customer retention/loyalty
Personalization and localization contribute to customer retention and loyalty. Customers feel valued and understood when businesses personalize experiences and cater to individual preferences. This fosters a sense of loyalty and encourages customers to return, leading to repeat purchases and long-term relationships.
Competitive advantage
Businesses that tailor services and adapt to local markets stand out from the competition by providing a more relevant and localized experience. In the same vein, creating personalized experiences sets any business apart. This can attract new consumers, maintain existing ones, and develop a customer-centric reputation.
How to use personalization and localization on Drupal
Going head-first into personalization and localization should not be done cold turkey. The truth is, you'll need to find the right CMS or tweak your current one to get these strategies in motion.
The powerhouse content management system (CMS), Drupal, offers several ways to strategize with personalization and localization.
Personalization tools in Drupal:
1. User Profiles
Drupal uses geolocation, device type, search history, and behavior categories to create a unique, customized profile for each visitor. You can base a user's clicks and decisions in each digital touchpoint to create a more thorough picture of who they are and what they're looking for.
2. Contextual Filters and Views
Drupal's Filter core module lets you customize text formats for your site's text input processing. The module not only allows you to prevent the use of unwanted formatting, but it also allows you to modify and improve the appearing format.
A view in Drupal can be data in a list of nodes, users, comments, taxonomy words, files, and so on. It scans your website using whatever criteria you set and displays the results in your desired format.
Both views and filters can be used to change information per user. You may display personalized views of material on different pages or areas of your website by filtering content based on user factors like as location, interests, or prior behavior.
3. Integrations
Its open source community contributes to Drupal integrations, most of which are made by third parties such as MailChimp, Shopify, and Yoast among many options. These are often used to customize Drupal to upgrade it from the legacy CMS to a digital experience platform (DXP). The more integrations you make, the more personalization you can garner.
Localization tools in Drupal:
1. Multilingual support
Out of the box, Drupal has more than 100 languages available. Drupal's core modules provide a comprehensive translation of every aspect of a site, including content types and their associated fields, menus, blocks, taxonomy, users, contact forms, and comments. Textual information may be tailored to specific geographic areas or audiences, and languages can appear instantaneously and seamlessly.
It can also detect the user's preferred language based on browser settings, session, IP address, URL, and other factors. With their automatic language translation, you can reach multiple audiences with localized content.
2. Internationalization
This is something you'll need a developer's help with, but makes a huge difference in your website's localization. Internationalization is a set of modules meant to extend Drupal's core multilingual capabilities. It allows only content in the preferred language to be displayed for all pages on your website. Depending on the information, there are certain methods of internationalization you can find in Drupal's official documentation or within their various community forums.
Final thoughts
Personalizing and localizing your business' content and website as a whole are crucial at this point in digital marketing. Taking your products or services global will require localization and personalized marketing is the best way to speak to your specific set of audiences and stand out in your niche. In the past couple of years, the digital world has become just as impactful on consumers as in real life. Now is the perfect time to wield your unique customer data to market your business in a way that resonates with every audience you have.
