Quick tips on featuring local content within your global website

"Consistency is key" when it comes to brand positioning. For this reason, one of our team mantras is "think global, act local," which rings especially true for our careers website. Having global consistency around our web content structure and core messages ensures that our brand is consistent across the globe and that our audience has access to the same content.

With that said, the audiences in Brazil are completely different than the audiences in China and including localized content is paramount to giving the audience a great, tailored experience with your website. Here are a few things to consider when incorporating local content into your global website structure.

Organize by topic first, then by location

One of the issues with our Talent Acquisition Intranet site was that all of our content was broken out by topic per region. Within our training section, we had an overall global training page with four additional regional pages containing similar training information. In terms of maintenance and ease of use for the audience, it made sense to consolidate the training pages into a single page with large, colorful headings identifying which training materials were for specific locations and which were global in nature. This way, all users are funneled to the same landing page for information which made maintaining the content easier and gave us a single training link to send all of our team members to.

Your action: consider how you can reorganize the content on your site by topic first, then by location. This may not always be possible, but consolidating certain sections can help with maintenance and consistency.

Create space for local content

When we redesigned Dell's external careers website just over three years ago, almost all of the content was completely global upon launch with little deviation from that content. Over time our local teams expressed a desire to have some custom content specific to their country or region. Finding spaces to highlight local culture, team members and benefits within the global content structure of the site was important to ensure everyone, everywhere was getting a similar experience with our site. By highlighting local content in key places, we were able to ensure local content was showcased alongside our core messaging and that we still provided a consistent experience.

Your action: determine what local content would be especially meaningful to your audience and where you can feature it without taking away the global structure and content of your site.

It's all about maintenance

As with any semi-permanent content you publish, you will need to maintain it. When you begin to build out your local content, keep a record of where it is and what locations it's available to and in what languages. You'll want to do a regular review of this content to ensure it's still relevant and accurate. Our teams are asked to perform annual content reviews on their respective country sites to ensure all local content is up-to-date. Since we feature real Dell team members in several online locations, we've built up quite a long list of featured names. To ensure we're not featuring team members who have moved on to a new opportunity, we audit our master list once a quarter and make any necessary changes to our online properties featuring those team members.

Your action: take a few minutes to think through your content maintenance plan. What needs to be reviewed annually? Quarterly? Ad hoc as things change like team members leaving? Record these thoughts and put reminders on your calendar for them.

Coming up with a happy medium of global consistency and locally relevant content is a great way to keep your users engaged with your brand. We consistently see high engagement with our locally-featured team members and localized careers website information.

How do you think globally but act locally in your work?