The Pareto PrincipleHow Leaders Allocate Their Global Digital Content

20% of the invested input

80% of the result

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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.

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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:

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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%

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.