How Marley Spoon localised their content for 8 markets (2024)

Launched in Germany in 2014, meal kit delivery service Marley Spoon has rapidly grown into a household name in eight countries throughout the world. Today, the company employs over 1,800 people on three continents.

Marley Spoon has built a strong brand around its promise of excellent quality, seasonal ingredients, sustainable business practices and inspiring recipes for everyone. The company even won the ultimate stamp of quality when it teamed up in 2016 with lifestyle icon Martha Stewart for its relaunch in the United States. It has continually expanded its market share, reaching new fans with the promise of delicious, home-cooked meals.

In 2017, Marley Spoon expanded its brand portfolio by launching Dinnerly, an affordable meal kit delivery service. While Marley Spoon caters to a gourmet audience of enthusiastic home cooks, Dinnerly offers quick, delicious recipes at a family-friendly price.

To engage with its audience of food lovers around the world, Marley Spoon has been working with content creators and localisation specialists through Contentoo since the
beginning of 2022.

Our marketing strategy mostly consists of outbound marketing, and we runa lot of global campaigns for both Marley Spoon and Dinnerly. In the CRM team, where I work, we localise our content for 8 markets: Australia, the US, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark. Originally, we were doing most of that localisation internally. But to make things more efficient, we decided to start working with external localisation partners.

We really want our content to showcase our brands. Both Marley Spoon and Dinnerly have a distinctive tone of voice. So, this is something we prioritise when working with external partners.

Contentoo had been working with other departments at Marley Spoon since 2021 so they already understood our brand and how to use our tone of voice. In January 2022, my colleagues and I in the CRM team started working with Contentoo to localise our campaigns. It’s been working really well for us ever since.

The Contentoo platform is by far the easiest localisation platform we’ve ever used. It’s great to have a single platform for handling the entire workflow of a project. With Contentoo, I can keep track of my whole project, end to end, all in one place.

It’s also been very easy to get my team members onto the platform. At first, I was the only member of our CRM team who was using it. However, once we decided to start working more intensively with Contentoo, it only took me about half an hour to train the rest of my team on how to use it.

Now, all 12 members of my team are using the platform on their own. It’s been a great experience for everyone.

Contentoo has helped us significantly reduce our project lead times. Previously, it would take around a week and a half to two weeks to finalize copywriting internally.

With Contentoo, that process now takes less than a week, and it’s a lot easier for me and my team members. Best of all, I feel like we always have full control over the output as channel owners.

From the moment we started working with Contentoo, they really got our tone of voice right. The communication has simply been great. The freelancers on the platform are all very communicative and really take our feedback into account.

They take the time to make sure that everything is right for us. They’ve been a huge support to us and enable our internal team to work much faster.

In the CRM team at Marley Spoon, we run one global campaign along with different campaigns for the three different lifecycle stages we target. In addition to that, we might need quick fixes that we submit to Contentoo for existing content that we have. So, in terms of volume, we work with Contentoo a lot.

Our projects are not small. We often brief for month-long campaigns, where it might be a series of six emails, plus three push notifications or SMS, plus direct mail. Recently, we also launched communications via WhatsApp as well.

Our experience is that we can always rely on Contentoo to deliver. We even had one project where the freelancer unfortunately fell ill. Michelle, our Customer Success Manager at Contentoo, immediately arranged to hand over the project to another freelancer. Everything worked out perfectly, and they still delivered on time.

“Since I’ve been working with Contentoo, I’ve learned that I can really rely on them.”

For me, the biggest benefits of working with Contentoo are definitely how much faster I can launch a campaign now, and how much more ownership I have over what goes into the content.

Both of these things are important for CRM. We’re in charge of multiple channels. It’s up to us to determine the outline of what goes into which communications. And when we work with internal writers, it can be difficult to maintain control of the content.

Maybe there’s a particular phrase or USP that I want to focus on, but the writer sees it differently. With Contentoo, we have complete control.

I definitely recommend working with Contentoo. More and more of our teams at Marley Spoon are now interested in working with them too, so they are quickly becoming a valued partner throughout our marketing department. In just a few months, Contentoo went from working just with our content writers to working with us in CRM.

And now, I already have other online channel managers reaching out and asking me, “Hey, where did you get that great piece of content for that campaign?”