How to Run Global Marketing Promotions with Multiple Brands, Countries, and Currencies?

Companies frequently manage multiple brands, each with its unique identity and customer base. However, handling multiple brands or a global brand presents its challenges. Imagine a company with numerous brands across different countries, each with its pricing, promotions, and currency strategies. Coordinating sales promotions across these brands becomes highly complex.

In this blog post, I’ll explore the difficulties of managing global marketing promotions and how you can overcome them with the right technology. I’ll focus on the primary challenge: coordinating promotions across multiple brands in various countries involving multi-currency management.

What is a global promotional strategy?

A global promotional strategy involves planning and running sales promotions across many brands in a company's portfolio, typically across different countries, regions, and currencies. The goal is to make marketing more effective by tailoring promotions and loyalty programs to fit each brand's identity and target audience. 

What are the challenges of running global marketing promotions?

1. Maintaining consistency across multiple brands

81% of customers worldwide value the option to earn and redeem points across interconnected brands within a loyalty program (Fidelity Information Services). However, consistency is key to ensuring this interconnected experience. It's crucial to maintain unified promotional messaging, branding elements, and customer experience across all involved brands. This includes aligning promotional strategies, imagery, and messaging to maintain a cohesive brand identity while still honoring each brand's distinct traits.

2. Securing profit margins

Managing various brands on an international scale also entails setting up similar promotions but with varying discount levels. This is because each brand or even product has a distinct profit margin and target audience; therefore, finding the right balance is crucial – offering enticing discounts to attract customers while ensuring each sale is profitable.

3. Handling multi-currency in promotions

Dealing with multiple currencies and product margins adds another layer of complexity to global promotions. Ensuring accurate currency conversion rates, pricing and promotion consistency, and transparent communication about currency-related details are essential to avoid confusion and maintain customer trust.

4. Managing communication between multiple brand teams

Ensuring effective communication and collaboration among the teams handling promotions for different brands or countries is essential for successful campaign management. This involves agreeing on promotional objectives, timelines, and budgets to ensure smooth execution and campaign optimization.

5. Unfit tech platforms for global promotion management

Adapting tech platforms for international marketing campaigns can be challenging because they often consolidate all promotions into one project, limiting your ability to break them down into smaller units. This requires workarounds or extra investments to meet each brand's unique campaign needs.

One of the key features of a good promotion engine to support a global marketing strategy is the ability to isolate campaigns by market or brand. This means having separate API calls for each market or brand campaign, setting up separate projects within the low-code management UI, and establishing distinct accesses and workflows for each of these projects.

How can weak campaign isolation (per market or brand) negatively affect international marketing campaigns?

• Mismatched promotions: When all promotions are global and cannot be tailored to specific markets, you miss out on the chance to create market-specific promotions. Different countries may require different promotions based on varying spending habits. For instance, a 10% discount might motivate a customer in country A to make an additional purchase, whereas a customer in country B may require a 20% discount. Additionally, different countries observe different national holidays, which companies may want to incorporate into their promotional calendar. Having only global promotions available restricts the ability to customize promotions for each market, resulting in lower ROI.
  ‍
• Risk of compliance issues: Different countries often have distinct regulatory requirements and compliance standards regarding advertising and promotions. Without market isolation within your promotion management engine, there's a higher risk of violating local regulations, leading to legal consequences or damage to brand reputation.
  ‍
• Risk of human errors: Conflicts can also arise when teams from different regions or countries share a promotional management tool. Interference from one team into another market's promotions can lead to clashes over strategy. Miscommunications, lack of oversight, and misunderstandings become more prevalent when the promotional management system does not offer dedicated roles and approval workflows.
  ‍
• Scalability and performance concerns: As the number of brands and markets expands, the complexity of managing promotions grows exponentially. Without market or brand isolation within the promotion management system, scaling becomes challenging.

What are the best practices for running a global marketing strategy?

1. Localize your promotional strategy

Tailoring the promotion to fit the cultural, linguistic, and regulatory variations of each region or country is important. This might mean translating promotional content, scheduling campaigns to coincide with local holidays or events, and adhering to applicable laws and regulations.

McDonald's is known for adapting its promotional strategies to suit different regions and market segments. For instance, in India, where cultural norms dictate a preference for vegetarian options, McDonald’s offers items like the McAloo Tikki burger and the Maharaja Mac, which contain no beef. In the Middle East, during Ramadan, McDonald's adjusts its operating hours and offers special promotions tailored to the festive season.

2. Enhance your tech stack

Utilize technology platforms or tools to simplify promotion management across different regions. This can involve implementing promotion & loyalty engines, CRM systems, project management software, or marketing automation platforms allowing brand or market isolation. These tools aid in communication, collaboration, and performance tracking, ensuring efficient management of promotions on a global scale, using the same toolset but having different rules set up for each market or brand.

{{EBOOK}}

{{ENDEBOOK}}

3. Monitor compliance

Ensure regulation compliance in every region or country where the promotion is active. Familiarize yourself with laws concerning promotions, advertising, taxes, data privacy, and consumer protection to prevent potential legal problems or tax risks.

4. Enhance promotions with a currency-agnostic approach

Implementing a currency-agnostic approach allows promotions to be accessible across regions regardless of currency differences. This strategy allows promotions to accommodate various currencies without requiring complex conversion processes, simplifying transactions and encouraging participation across diverse markets.

5. Track performance

Set up comprehensive performance tracking and reporting systems to monitor how well the promotion is doing in each region. Keep an eye on key metrics like sales, engagement, and ROI. Compare results across regions to spot trends and pinpoint areas where the promotion can be improved.

After the promotion, carry out a thorough analysis to assess its overall impact and ROIs in various regions and countries. Identify what worked well, the challenges faced, and areas that need improvement.

How Voucherify supports global brand management?

Managing international marketing campaigns demands appropriate software. Voucherify offers the essential tools to efficiently execute global multi-brand sales promotions and loyalty programs with features like:

• Projects: Voucherify's projects simplify campaign management by providing a structured way to organize and oversee multiple brands or markets within a single interface.

• Management API: This feature offers API endpoints specifically designed for managing projects. It allows users to configure projects programmatically, offering flexibility and automation options beyond the interface.

• Currency-agnostic: Voucherify supports multiple currencies, enabling promotions to be easily executed across regions with automatic currency conversion.

• Team management: With this feature, users can efficiently collaborate on campaign management tasks by assigning roles and permissions to team members and incorporating approval workflows for campaign oversight. User roles can be limited to specific markets or brands.

• Metadata: Voucherify allows users to attach metadata to promotions, enabling deeper insights and categorization for better organization and analysis of campaign performance.

• Dynamic discounts: Instead of relying on fixed discount values, Voucherify enables the creation of dynamic discounts using mathematical and logical operators. By assigning formulas to determine discount values during redemption, the same promotion can adapt to various factors, such as customer location or preferred currency.

How CASA manages an international loyalty program with Voucherify?

CASA is a global network of modern interior decor stores with over 500 outlets, subsidiaries, and franchise locations dedicated to enhancing home spaces. With a presence in 8 countries, they serve nearly 200,000 customers weekly.

Due to its international reach, CASA efficiently operates two large-scale loyalty programs with Voucherify, each in a different currency – Swiss Franc (CHF) and Euro (EUR) – and with distinct earning rules.

Both programs are point-based, with dynamic point allocation based on member spending. Members earn one point for every 15 CHF or 10 EUR spent. The loyalty program is available in 8 countries: Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, France, and the Netherlands.

In addition, CASA has integrated Voucherify's APIs with their Toshiba POS system. This integration enables efficient management of loyalty cards across over 1,000 Toshiba POS systems in 500 physical stores across various countries.

How to split international marketing campaigns in Voucherify?

Voucherify provides advanced management for global promotional campaigns, enabling campaigns to be divided based on either brand and country or solely by brand. Each approach has its own pros and cons, designed to cater to your unique needs and scale.

{{CTA}}

Ready to run global promotions?

Let's talk

{{ENDCTA}}