How Leaders Allocate Their Global Digital Content

1. The Pareto
Principle
How Leaders Allocate Their
Global Digital Content

2. 20% of the
invested input
80% of
the result
02
The Pareto Principle
(also known as the 80/20 rule
or the law of the vital few)
A decades-old cause and effect law that applies to
many business events. The rule is named after the
famed economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that:
Roughly 20% of the invested input
creates 80% of the result.
In globalization and localization, the Pareto Principle is
the rule of thumb concerning where best to produce
global digital content: 80% at headquarters, with
20% driven by regional or local sites.
The following graph provides a glimpse of how
international content leaders allocate content
production compared to their mainstream peers.

3. 03
Source: International Content: Monetizing Global Content Assets and Measuring Success (Econsultancy, 2017)
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
0-10%
4%
5%
11-20%
2%
5%
21-30%
11%
10%
31-40%
5%
8%
41-50%
16%
14%
51-60%
11%
15%
61-70%
13%
16%
71-80%
17%
16%
81-90%
10% 10%
91-100%
14%
7%
Leaders Respondents: 225Leaders
The proportion of global digital content replicated
across markets, rather than locally produced:

4. 04
Internationalization of content: The data
Source: International Content: Monetizing Global Content Assets and Measuring Success (Econsultancy, 2017)
Leaders have a clear tendency to produce
larger proportions of their content at global
headquarters—which makes sense, as
they are also inclined to exert high levels of
centralized control.
72%organizations describe their governance of
global content as tightly controlled at a global
level, with some or no local autonomy.
of high-performing
For leaders, according to these findings, the
average percentage of global digital content
output replicated across markets is
64%
For mainstream companies,
the average is
57%

5. 05
Following this model, the vast majority of
content is replicated across geographical
regions, with about a fifth produced in
isolation by individual markets.
80/20 = centralization/flexibility
While leading organizations are more likely to centralize control
of their content, they recognize the importance of flexibility at
a regional and individual market level and enlist locale-specific
expertise to produce content suitable for these markets.
This is where the 80/20
approach comes in.

6. 06
With 20 language websites in over 100 countries,
Kaplan International English is one company that
operates successfully on this principle.
Around 20 percent of the content we produce is related specifically to local
markets. As an example, we recently published some content unique to Italy,
which related to a government initiative where they ran a competition for the
first 3,000 students to get a grant to study abroad.
Henry Burr, Head of Optimization and Customer Insight

7. 07
See his CMO Insights discussion on MarTech Advisor, How to Build a Successful
Global Marketing Team, to learn the organizational structure needed to strike a
balance between local relevancy and global scale.
What do these
leaders look like?
A successful global content strategy starts with a
modern marketing team that embodies a certain set
of roles and responsibilities.
As SVP and CMO at Lionbridge, Clint Poole is
responsible for bringing together the key players of
an effective global marketing team—from corporate
stakeholders to SEO masterminds—in an
increasingly connected world.

8. 08
What else are the
leaders doing?
According to Econsultancy research, leaders
are also more likely to expand their global web
presence, demonstrate agility, establish clear
lines of content ownership, and more.
See for yourself in a new report, published
in association with Lionbridge, International
Content: Monetizing Global Content Assets
and Measuring Success.