As a modern business, you are likely using marketing automation and a CRM system to help you understand your prospects and customers. You also probably have a content management system ready to generate and manage content. And you have email and social media technology ready to send that content to your audiences in a timely manner.
But what happens when your prospects and customers are spread all around the world? How can you ensure you’re reaching them with relevant and compelling content that helps you acquire, retain and grow them?
Here are seven important ways translation can lead to better global marketing:
1. You are already global. If you have an online presence, chances are high that people from other countries are already visiting your website. What percentage of your traffic is coming from people in other countries who speak other languages? What might your traffic be if your website was offered in those languages, with customized content for your top countries? Taking languages and countries into account in your marketing planning is simply building upon trends that already exist.
2. Personalization means speaking the languages of your customers. With all the talk of personalization and customization, relatively few businesses have stopped to consider the importance of language. Yet, numerous studies show that speaking to someone in their native language dramatically increases the likelihood of them making a purchase.
3. A better user experience requires local content. User experience designers are increasingly considering local preferences when creating optimal designs. Personas and pathways to making a purchase differ significantly depending on the culture, the language, and the country a person is from. If you review your website traffic data by country, you’ll see that users in different places are drawn to different offers and different types of content on your website.
4. In-language content means higher customer satisfaction. Even if a customer speaks some English, he or she will be happier if you make the effort to translate your content. Instead of struggling with a language barrier, your customers can focus on your brand and product experience.
5. You owe it to your company to maximize your content ROI. You spend a lot of money creating high-value content. Why not leverage that investment further by translating some of it? Translation is only a fraction of the cost to create source content, especially when you consider all of the creative hours invested in your original assets. For a relatively modest investment, you can translate into 10 languages and significantly expand your market reach.
6. Your competitors are already doing it. On average, the number of languages that companies translate into is rising each year. Check your competitors’ websites. Are they in other languages? If not, you have an opportunity to obtain the first mover’s advantage. If they are, they’ve already proven there’s a market for customers who want information in those languages. You need to take advantage of this insight.
7. Everyone wants global data. There are few things more gratifying for marketers than being able to spot clear trends and understand how specific actions will produce financial results. In previous eras of marketing, this simply wasn’t possible. Now, marketers have the opportunity to use data not only to generate, measure, and optimize results within specific segments, but also to view the data at country – and language-specific – levels.
Translation doesn’t need to be complicated; and today, a translation management system is available to make it easy to incorporate translation into your global marketing plans. To learn how this technology can help you optimize your international marketing performance, download our free eBook, “The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Global Content Creation.”