For B2B brands investing in thought leadership, localisation is often an afterthought. But if your ambitions are international, treating localisation as a postscript is a fast route to irrelevance.
Thought leadership content – in the content marketing sense – is designed to position a business as a trusted authority. It doesn’t sell directly. Instead, it builds credibility, opens conversations, and influences decision-making over the long term. That’s particularly important in B2B, where buying cycles are longer, purchasing is more complex, and trust is non-negotiable.
But thought leadership only works if the thinking is relevant to the audience. And here’s the challenge: what counts as relevant thinking in one market may miss the mark entirely in another.
With more functional content – product pages, help articles, paid ads – localisation is relatively straightforward. You’re adapting language, tone, calls to action. There’s a clear user intent to match.
But with thought leadership, you’re dealing in nuance: ideas, perspectives, assumptions, narratives. These are shaped by the cultural, professional, and digital context within which your audience operates. So localisation can’t just be about translation – it’s about recalibrating what you say, how you say it, and sometimes even why you’re saying it in the first place.
And that’s where many B2B businesses get stuck. They pour time and effort into a whitepaper, report, or opinion piece designed for their home market – usually the UK or US – then assume they can translate it and publish it globally. The result? Content that feels tone-deaf, irrelevant, or just plain dull.
In Oban’s experience, businesses typically face three key challenges when localising B2B thought leadership content:
You might be addressing a pain point that doesn’t exist in other markets – or not in the same way. A UK piece about digital transformation in public services, for example, may fall flat in a market where digitisation is already far more advanced (or, conversely, still in its infancy). And content premised on your brand being ahead of the curve may come across as naïve or misplaced in a different context.
A sleek thought leadership video may go down well on LinkedIn in the UK, but in Japan, your audience might expect a written piece in a more formal tone, shared through a different platform entirely (say, Note or directly via email). And while LinkedIn dominates B2B content distribution in the West, it’s a non-starter in markets like China. Localising thought leadership isn’t just about content – it’s also about the digital ecosystem around it.
In some markets, status, hierarchy, and formality shape how B2B relationships are formed. In others, directness and innovation are prized. These differences often map to whether a culture is high-context or low-context – where in high-context cultures (like Japan or the UAE), meaning is more implicit and relational, while in low-context ones (like Germany or the US), communication tends to be more explicit and information-rich.
So what one audience sees as authoritative, another may see as arrogant. What plays as insightful in one region may come off as meandering or vague elsewhere. Even your choice of expert – the face or voice of your content – matters. Is it credible to that audience? Is it relatable?
It’s not about transcreation. It’s about interrogating whether the central idea of your thought leadership still holds water in-market. It’s understanding the current conversation on the ground – what’s been said, what hasn’t, and where your brand can add something meaningful.
It might mean starting from scratch in some markets. Or adapting a core idea in different directions. Or choosing not to publish at all in a particular country because the content simply doesn’t fit. (There’s bravery in restraint.)
At Oban, we see this time and again. Our network of LIMEs – Local In-Market Experts – live and breathe the cultural, linguistic, and digital environments our clients are trying to reach. They’re not translators. They’re context-builders. They tell us what’s credible, what’s clichéd, what’s already been said, and what your audience is sick of hearing. That insight is gold – and without it, your thought leadership risks falling flat.
Let’s be honest: B2B content marketing is hard enough without layering in cross-market complexity. It’s very competitive. Buying journeys are long. The number of stakeholders is high. The appetite for generic messaging is low. Thought leadership has a role to play – but only if it feels smart, local, and attuned to the reality of the reader’s world.
That means taking localisation seriously from the outset. Involve local expertise before you create content, not just when you’re pushing it live. Build flexibility into your editorial planning. Think globally – but execute market by market, not with cookie-cutter content but with ideas and executions that make sense locally.
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If you’re serious about localising B2B thought leadership – not just repurposing it – we can help. At Oban, we combine global strategy with local insight to make sure your content doesn’t just cross borders, but lands with impact. Drop us a line if you’d like to talk.
