Conferences draw more and more of their audiences from overseas, and the number of meetings that rotate among at least three countries is up as well. Add in that in March, The Center for Exhibition Industry Research reported the 18th straight quarter of growth for the industry, and you’ll see that in spite of access to conference calls, Skype, and social media, we all really value the chance to meet others in-person and create the deeper connections such opportunities provide. With that in mind, we have a few tips for how to attract international attendees and make sure they go home raving about your conference.
1. Identify your attendees and target them in their language. This seems obvious, but many people don’t think through this carefully enough. In addition to buyers, are you targeting suppliers, partners, or trade groups? Next, market to those groups in their own languages with the content adjusted to reflect what they value and want to learn about. You will come across with much more credibility, plus it will reassure them that your conference really is set-up for international attendees. Bonus tip: check the holiday calendars of your international markets to avoid scheduling your conference when your target attendees are unavailable. 2. Hire an event manager. This is especially important if the conference you’re planning is outside your own country. Event Managers know the local venues and suppliers and can make sure that you get exactly what you need for your conference. If the site you pick is overseas, it may be difficult or too expensive for you to visit more than once before your conference, so an event manager is an essential go-between. Additionally, if there are language barriers, an event manager can help you negotiate contracts and make sure the little details are properly discussed. Your event manager should be local and speak the local language, which means you may find you need to hire an interpreter to work with you and your event manager to be sure you fully understand each other, but in the long run you will save money and reduce your stress level. 3. Offer translation and interpretation services. Although your international attendees are highly likely to speak English, it is not their first language and they may find it difficult to understand all of your speakers and to follow along in fast paced discussions. Think about how hard it can be for you to understand people with heavy accents, even the difference between U.S. English and Irish English can be difficult. Hire interpreters for all your sessions from keynote to breakout in the major languages that are in attendance. If you have interpreters, your Q&A sessions and discussions will be livelier and more inclusive. Depending on your budget, you may also want to offer to translate key handouts, especially for your high profile speakers. And you should consider having signage in multiple languages if you anticipate a large number of international attendees. Finally, if you plan to communicate conference information through a mobile app or Twitter, you should hire a translator to make your communications available in all the major languages spoken at the conference. This will ensure that all of your attendees are in the loop. 4. Consider cultural differences. Think about how the customs of your international attendees may be different from your own. For example, in many cultures, people drink hot chocolate in the morning or during coffee breaks. In China, food is usually served during coffee breaks. It’s relatively easy and low cost to have muffins or fruit available, and if it makes your attendees happier, why not accommodate them? For dinners, you should offer vegetarian alternatives, and talk to your caterer to get his advice about the dietary customs of other cultures. Be prepared for your international attendees to be extremely punctual or perhaps more than fashionably late, based on their own cultural norms. German attendees are likely to be right on time and expect you to be on time too. Japanese are likely to arrive early, while Brazilians may arrive late. If you expect a large contingent from one culture, you should find out ahead of time what to expect and manage speaker expectations accordingly. Getting attendees from other countries to attend your conference will raise your institution’s profile, improve conference networking opportunities, and create exciting business opportunities for your entire audience. By following these four tips, you will ensure that your international audience will return home planning to attend the following year, and even better, they'll spread the word.
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RABI has opened a new Washington D.C. office!
We are so excited to have a permanent space in the nation's capital. Our full range of services will continue to be offered to D.C. area businesses, with a particular focus on events management. RABI has provided interpreters and technical equipment for conferences and events of all sizes across the U.S. for many years. We have experience working events that encompass multiple venues, and our extensive linguistic network means that we can easily accommodate last minute changes. We also provide localization services for marketing content and video production for product/brand marketing campaigns and event marketing. For international vendors exhibiting at trade shows and conferences, we arrange conference booth services, negotiate sponsorships and event advertising, and coordinate transportation and shipping logistics. We can also help you with localizing your presentations and event literature. The next time you're organizing a conference or plan to attend one, call RABI to help with your localization and interpretation needs. Boston’s busiest tourist season is about to hit full swing. This year the hub is expecting tourists and convention attendees from all over the world, with the tourism board predicting we’ll top last year’s visits of more than 1.4 million people(1). More than 100,00 of those visitors hailed from Germany and another 100,000+ from China. With new non-stop flights from Shanghai, businesses can almost certainly expect an increase in Chinese visitors this summer—good news since the average Chinese tourist spends $5,400 per visit to the U.S., the highest spending average in the world(2).
Take advantage of the summer season and set yourself apart by marketing to tourists in their own languages. Place translated brochures in area hotels, use advertisements in local native language newspapers to reach tourists who are visiting their relatives, and put signage in major tourism languages in your retail locations. Based on last year’s tourist demographics, you may want to concentrate on German, Mandarin, French, Japanese, Italian, and Portuguese. When planning your marketing strategy, don’t neglect social media. Tweet, post to Instagram, Facebook, and other social media channels in the major tourism and international business visitor languages. It’s a great way to offer discounts, create buzz, and raise your profile. You can be sure they will be checking those sites while they’re in town. If your budget extends to it, it’s not too late to advertise your businesses in overseas markets, including Chinese social apps WeChat and Weibo, so that visitors already have your destination in mind when they arrive. Localization companies like Red & Blue can help you craft and execute a marketing strategy to successfully target foreign visitors in their languages. We provide expert advice, on-site interpreters, high-quality translation, and localized promotional videos in all in-demand languages. Contact us to talk about how you can attract this summer’s influx of international tourists to your business. 1. Mass Office of Travel and Tourism, 2014 Report 2. http://www.ibtimes.com/golden-week-tourism-chinese-tourists-spend-lavishly-top-restaurants-1696824 Meetings can be bad enough when everyone is in the same room, but when participants are scattered across the globe, they can be downright unbearable. From listening to people eat, to hearing people type, and to having to repeat information for those who checked-out part way through, we're all in need of ideas to improve distributed meetings.
1. Decrease the scheduling hassle. If your participants are scattered across time zones, it can be difficult to keep track of who's up and who's asleep. Timeanddate.com has a nifty color-coded tool that shows at a glance who's working and who's off. Red is for sleeping, green is for working, and yellow is for likely to be out of office. 2. Rotate the time. Often the person running the meeting sets the meeting time based on her schedule. This is great for the leader, but if you're based in Boston, for example, then your Beijing team is never going to be at it's best on the calls, and if the calls are frequent, they will also start getting grumpy. Switch the times up so everyone has an chance to be on the call during normal working hours. 3. Consider hiring interpreters. If your distributed team speaks English, but in a somewhat limited fashion, or you're holding an international meeting with a client, you might get better results if you involve an interpreter. Lots of companies waste time through simple misunderstandings. At one company I worked for, we thought out British team was on-board with our plans when they said they were "fine" with them. Turns out, "fine" meant not at all happy; we needed to strive for having the plans be "brilliant", and that conversation was all in English! Interpreters for conference calls don't have to be on site. They can call in from a separate location, which can reduce cost, since travel time and inconvenience won't be an issue. 4. Speak Slowly When people can't see you and cue off of your body language and your face while you speak, they have to rely solely on your voice. Also, they may be trying to participate using their second language. You need to make sure everyone on the call really slows down when they talk. They need to pause more frequently, and they need to ask more check-in questions as they go. This brings us to the next point... 5. Summarize More You can't see who has fallen asleep or has started to play a game on his lap top, so you need to ask dial-in attendees to summarize what they think they've heard and outline what their action steps are. Otherwise you're likely to get a lot of comments like "yes, we're good with that," when what they really mean is "hmmm...I have no idea what was just said." 6. Excellent Minutes Finally, you'll want to designate someone to be in charge of taking detailed, clear notes of the meeting and distributing them quickly afterwards. This will help clear up any lingering ambiguity. If you use a localization agency, it can be useful for you to have the notes translated, again to make sure that the meeting outcomes and action steps are as clear as possible. If your company is like many, you have different people in charge of different marketing streams. A team for social media, one for print ads, one for online ads, and another couple for content creation. Or maybe you're at a smaller company where everyone is expected to contribute to blogs and Tweet out pithy statements. Whichever boat you're in, when pitching to international markets, you need to unite your teams and present a unified, localized front.
When companies split up their marketing streams, they can often keep on message for their domestic market where they have a well-defined target audience. But for companies looking to sell abroad or to niche communities within their domestic market, the messaging gets more difficult. Transcreation is a buzz word used in the localization industry. Essentially, it means that content created in one language needs to be almost re-written for a different language and culture. The essence of the content remains the same, but rather than doing a one-to-one literal translation, the meaning within the content is rendered more faithfully and more meaningfully into the target language. Companies with marketing stream silos often rely on one-off translations (or worse, poorly rendered machine translations) and don't give enough thought into how their messages are being received in the new language/culture. If your company markets to other cultures and or in other languages, be sure to have one person in charge of all messaging to that market, and consider enlisting a localization agency that can provide the relevant industry expertise. Voice-overs for podcasts or YouTube videos, scrutiny of video footage to ensure it resonates, localization of white papers to incorporate in-country terms, sales sheets that are redesigned to emphasize product attributes that are important to the local market are all aspects of how international marketing needs to step back and take a wider view of how to adapt the corporate messaging. Localization, if properly done, requires a holistic view of your entire marketing engine, and often a bottom-up redesign of your messaging to ensure you are reaching the market in a way that reflects your company's mission and that optimizes the aspects of your products and services that the local market most values. We're excited to kick-off the new year with some great simultaneous interpretation projects, which reminds us that now is a good time for everyone to take a look at their calendars for 2015 and start planning. If you have conferences or seminars on your books for later this year, it's not too early to think about securing interpretation services. Also, consider whether you need materials translated for your attendees. This can include signage, presentations, hand-outs, brochures, advertisements, or even subtitles for videos you plan to share at your event. Get a head start on 2015 by thinking about your speaker and attendee needs now. Happy New Year! "Language Is a Window into the Mind." Steven Pinker, renowned linguistics expert, discusses how nuance in language affects our relationships, both business and social. He also delves into the importance and usage of metaphors in language. Because language subtleties are so key to effective relationships, companies need to have translations of their documents done by professional translators who are fluent in the target language to ensure that those nuances are not lost or transformed. http://youtu.be/UnyJvCJrRys Back by popular demand, the Before Babel Brigade, a Korean non-profit group, has established a phone number people can call if they need help talking to their waiters, taxi drivers, or hotel staff while attending the World Cup. Volunteers who speak English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Korean are standing by, ready to help lost World Cup fans. The only charge is the cost of the phone call. Samsung has volunteered to pick up the tab for marketing and promotion. Find out more about the service here. Lack of Ability to Speak and Read English Creates Business Opportunities Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the fastest growing immigrant groups in the U.S., and 35% of them are classified as not speaking English "very well." While Chinese is the most commonly spoken language of Asian immigrants (with 472,000 Mandarin speakers and 454,000 Cantonese speakers), Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Korean are also popular languages spoken in the home. Moreover, there are an additional eight South Asian languages that are spoken by more than 100,000 people in the U.S.
Why does this matter? The statistics show that millions of Americans have limited ability to speak and read in English. This represents an opportunity for businesses to branch out from just English and Spanish advertisements. By advertising in languages that are used in the community, for example Chinese language television ads, print ads in Vietnamese newspapers, or websites in Korean, businesses can show their markets that they are tapped into their needs. Companies that ignore these opportunities may lose out when their competition recognizes the value of the under-served local market. For More Information, read the Center for American Progress' Press Release and access the full report. |
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