With the right amount of localisation, Yahoo! and Google may rise above local search engines like Korea's Naver and China's Baidu in their respective markets.

The logic of managing international search on a global or regional model is powerful for many reasons:

• You can set and achieve global strategic and financial goals plus consistent global messaging.
• You can allocate budgets dynamically among your different markets to exploit local success and minimise failure.
• You can compare local campaigns on an apples-to-apples basis, regardless of currency or other variables.
• The unified platform and central management required will yield significant efficiencies in both raw costs and labour.

However, you need more than global campaign management and powerful technology to run a successful regional search marketing campaign. Each new market will be different in many ways -- in language, search engine mix and most probably in social and business cultures. To address each issue you'll have to approach it differently.

Global and local: both necessary
The only way to ensure effective marketing in any country is local insight from people who are culturally attuned to an audience and interact with it regularly. At the same time, though, as you make sure that each website, landing page, ad, keyword and sales channel is optimised for local conditions, you'll still need to keep enough control -- and have enough information to ensure that your local campaigns stay on message and operate efficiently.

Setting the scene: language and culture
If customers in a new market speak a language different from your own, the need to approach them differently is obvious. But even when the language is the same, the meaning, nuances and impact may not be.

If you are thinking of running an overseas search campaign, ask yourself these questions:

• What language will your customers search in?
• What keywords will they use? Different cultures choose keywords very differently and, what's more, search in very different ways.
• Do you have content in that language to service them?
• Do you have appropriate landing pages in that language?
• Are your paid search ads in that language?
• Do you / will you have a native-speaking call centre number on the site?
• If you manage to get the language elements right, can you then control your messaging?

Tactics to overcome the language barrier include creating a site and landing pages that:

• capture the full flavour of the target community and are optimised to achieve high organic rankings in the local search engines
• are free of offensive literal translations
• are fee of cultural inappropriate imagery
• create effective search ads in the local language and make appropriate choices from among the different paid programmes available 
• ensure that the order and payment process are aligned with local customs.

Choosing search engines and administration
While you're getting to grips with language and culture, you must also grapple with different processes and players in the search campaign itself. Google, while bigger in North America and Europe, is playing second fiddle in the Asian region to local giants Naver in Korea, Baidu in China and Yahoo! in Japan. This demands radically different approaches.

Even engines with the same name (Yahoo!) may operate as separate business units in different markets, in different currencies, have different minimum keyword bid increments and require separate business relationships and credit arrangements.

You will either have to develop those relationships, or work with an established player. You will also need bid management technology that can interact effectively with each of the search engines.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have the in-house capabilities to handle a campaign across multiple search engines in multiple foreign currencies and then to make sense of the results?
• Do you have the resources or the time to build up in-house resources to handle financial and technical relationships with search engines?

Finding solutions
So, what's the best way to handle these cross-border challenges? As an example, let's look at one of our clients, an online travel company. The client was running a search campaign in multiple countries within Asia. A consistent reporting strategy was implemented and consideration was given to each country in relation to which search marketing campaign would generate high conversion rates. Here's how:

• Determining for each country which search engine would drive the most traffic for the campaigns.
• Ensuring that the native language was used for all creative and landing pages.
• Respecting cultural nuances. For example, traditional Chinese was used in Taiwan but in China, simplified Chinese was used, or in Hong Kong a strategy is to implement English and Chinese landing pages to ensure that all the market is captured. 
• Understanding how the searcher thinks. For example, in Taiwan, search words are broader than other countries -- they may just type in "Tokyo" rather than "Tokyo holiday" when researching holiday options in Tokyo. 

Robbie Hills is managing director of 24/7 Real Media in Australia. Read full bio.