Eid Al-Fitr – What is it?

As one of the biggest Muslim holidays, Eid Al-Fitr presents a great opportunity for marketers to engage with consumers across the Muslim world. By understanding the cultural and religious background of the holiday and the ways in which it is celebrated, marketers will be able to effectively target their approaches to a vast audience of consumers. From the holiday’s history to current market trends, this guide will break down what you need to know about Eid Al-Fitr to make the most of this opportunity. (more…)

One of the key factors to marketing success in the Middle East is understanding and relating with an Arab audience. Given that Arabic is the main language of more than 300 million people it is essential that a brand figure out when and how to localize their logo into the Arabic language to be effective in the region. It is important that the Arabization of a brand’s logo and name be done in a way that is both easy to read in Arabic while maintaining the overall theme and colors that the brand has in English. In this post we will give examples of some big brands that have done a great job at localizing their logos in an easy to read format while maintain the branding.

Subway

Subway has gained huge popularity in the Middle East and you can now find the franchise across many of the countries in the GCC, the Levant, and North African. Subway used innovative designers to capture the famous white and yellow logo and flip it around for Arabic. They were even able to incorporate the arrows at the beginning and the end of the logo to give it that truly Subway feel.

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If you’re looking to take your marketing in the Arab world to the next level this post will provide and in-depth look into seasonal marketing opportunities in the Arab world. Feel free to use this post to help you plan out your seasonal promotions to Arab consumers in countries across the in Middle East.

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Though the world of Arabic PPC is always expanding, many new ad campaigns fail to be effective due to several common mistakes. Any ad campaign run in Arabic needs to be optimized just as an English campaign needs to be optimized. We find many companies try to save money by outsourcing translation of ads or by having Arabic ads run by someone without experience running Arabic PPC campaigns. In most cases we’ve seen this ends up costing the company much more in wasted ad-spend, than the company saves from not hiring a professional to run the ads. We’ve literally seen companies waste tens of thousands of dollars on irreverent keywords and targeting in their ad campaigns in an effort to save a small amount on the management side of running ads.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the most frequent mistakes we see in Arabic PPC campaigns in the MENA region so you can avoid these pitfalls in your own efforts. 
 

1. Using poorly written or nonexistent calls to action

When creating ads in Arabic, it’s important to utilize similar calls to action, like “buy,” “find,” or “shop.” Without these calls to action, the meaning of the ad can become unclear to the customer. For example, the ad below is for a company that finances Islamic real estate purchases, meaning they provide a specific kind of financing for Muslim customers. The ad was generated while searching for      “عقارات لندن” (London real estate) and it advertises mortgage financing. However, the ad’s wording leaves the user without a call to action, opting to instead state the services offered. For a list of Arabic calls to action you should be using, see this article.

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