Marketers increasingly recognize the importance of localizing websites, but many only translate their product and service pages and often into only one or two languages. While we all know that the customer experience is king and that inbound marketing (thanks Hubspot) will radically improve our sales, we continue to neglect to localize for customer experience, and we overlook localizing inbound funnel content. Take, for example, Hubspot’s classic inbound marketing funnel. You can find this on their website. Hubspot defines 4 steps in the inbound marketing process: Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight. To reach all of your potential customers, you need to localize your content for each step. 1. Attract Notice that product and service pages do not even appear on the chart. The sales process begins with blogs, keywords, promotional videos, and social media, for which you need to create content that piques interest and draws visitors in. This means that if you want to attract customers to your website to see your localized product and service pages, you need to make sure you’re also localizing your social media, that you’ve optimized your SEO for the local market, and that you’re blogging in local languages. Localizing the attraction portion of your funnel requires more than just translating what you’ve written in English. You need to truly understand your customer and then tailor your messaging for that market and to the local language. Start by drawing up a list of customer attributes and then find all the information you can to see how those attributes differ across country borders and how you need to modify and talk about your offerings. Keep in mind that you may even need to tailor your marketing within a country. Think about regional, cultural, and linguistic differences within the U.S. Are you customizing your social media marketing to take advantage of the different niches? Buying habits vary greatly across cultures. For instance, only 20% of German customers use credit cards and many Japanese consumers pick up their packages at local convenience stores and pay COD.(+) Find out how buyers differ across your market and optimize your SEO ads and blog content for those differences. Finally, research how your customers access your website. Do they prefer a desktop, a tablet, or a mobile phone? During they access your site during business hours, leisure time, or on their commute? Recognizing the differences between your international consumers will help you better target your keyword ads, time your email campaigns, and blog about what resonates for them. 2. Convert By this point you’ve gotten the word out, and people are showing up on your site. You have a local team tweeting about your brand and your blogs are relevant. No longer is your Brazilian market hearing about how great it is that summer has arrived when they’re watching the leaves fall. The next step is converting those visitors. When a customer in Spain reacts to an ad, does he arrive on a localized landing page? Is the CTA relevant for his purchasing potential? Again think about how your South American visitors might be more interested in purchasing a sweater in July than a bathing suit. What about your forms? If you want Susi Q to sign up for email offers or company news, you need to translate your forms and adjust them for the local market. The last thing you want is to get someone to visit your website only to discover that the pages you so painstakingly created to explain your brand are only in English. Remember, you’ve done your homework and created tons of rich content, designed to educate and entice. Now follow through by translating them and adjusting them to attract your local customers. Dramatically increase your conversion rates by putting a process in place whereby all your content gets localized. 3. Close You’ve almost made the sale. Here’s where it helps to know payment and shipping preferences. Can you deal with the COD customer? Have you included all the duties and taxes in the price of your product or do they get tacked on at the end as an unfortunate surprise? How long will it take you to ship the product? Do you have local distribution centers or are you shipping on a slow boat from the U.S? If you’ve captured information about the customer in a form, do you have localized content that you can send that will tip him into purchasing? Think through the end of the sale. This is where you work not only to close the sale but also to get repeat business. Your follow up emails should be localized. Find out what level of post-purchase service competitors in the local market provide and go above and beyond to ensure your customers are delighted. Which brings us to: 4. Delight Hubspot lists surveys, smart content, and social marketing as three areas you should be using to delight your customer. Again, they should be tailored for the local market. This doesn’t just mean translated, but also adjusted to gather and provide information on what is important to your customer. Telefonica, a Spanish telephone company, realized that it needed to improve its customer experience, so it opened regional call centers both within Spain and in overseas locations. It wanted its Spanish customers to be able to talk to people who spoke the same dialect, walked the same streets, and could form connections with them. Telefonica also realized that it had different competitors in different regions, and by opening local call centers, they could respond to customer needs more rapidly, more effectively, and more competitively because their reps would know the local market better. Now Telephonica is working to make a seamless user experience for customers that walk into a shop and then contact the company through the website or by phone. Telefonica wants to make sure that customers get consistent information that is relevant to their market and their needs. This goes far beyond translation, to a strategic localization effort that works to consistently delight the customer. (++) From your earliest outreach to post-sale engagement, you need to think about what your local customer needs and responds to and make sure that your marketing content reflects that. This doesn’t mean that you need to create new content for every market, rather, create stellar content and then adjust it and localize it for each market. Your increased sales will justify the time and effort you put in. +(MultiChannelMerchant article Global Ecommerce on the Rise as Options for Addressing Barriers Increase, June 2015) ++ (http://www.customerexperiencereport.com/strategy-and-trends/telefonica-localized-customer-experience/)
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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. When is the last time you extracted information from Google Analytics about which global locations your website visitors came from? If you're only looking at webpage visits in aggregate, you're missing out on a wealth of information that can help you better target your customers.
1. Find out where your customers live. Are they all from the U.S. or do they come from all over the world? Click on a specific country to determine which region or cities your visitors live in. How do conversion rates differ across regions? Is there an opportunity to create a marketing campaign that targets a specific city, region or country? 2. Find out whisch languages your visitors speak. If your website is only in English, but you have a large number of French visitors, maybe it's time you invested in a French language site. If you have a high bounce rate, could that be the reason? 3. Learn more about visiting patterns. How do visitors from specific countries vary by new/return user rates? If you localize your site for a foreign market, how might you want to adapt your content based on those rates? Check out how users from different countries or cities flow through your site. What is similar and what's different? This is another chance to think about targeted marketing campaigns based on user interest/awareness. 4. How did your international users get to your site? Did they come directly, through a campaign, a local referral, or a search engine? Maybe you need to significantly increase your use of social media in a particular region or maybe you need different ad words. Thinking about usage patterns can help you be more creative about acquisition. 5. Use of multilingual sites If you determine that you need to localize your site for different regions, you should do a little research about how to best set up those sites so that Google indexes them properly. A quick cheat sheet can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en The point is that by delving into the international data that Google Analytics provides, you can learn a huge amount about your visitors that can help you prioritize the localization of your site, improve the targeting of your marketing campaigns, and determine which local markets to put your advertising dollars in. 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. Not too long ago, we provided interpretation services for a major event that took place at several venues across Boston and required interpretation in more than one language. While this kind of event is a common occurrence for Red & Blue, we recognize that many event planners have never used interpreters at their events. Research shows that international participation at conferences is growing, making it more likely that you will need interpreters in order to provide a superior experience for your attendees. Here are four tips that will make your event go more smoothly.
1. Contact a localization agency early in the process. Depending on the subject matter of your conference you may need to book your interpreters far ahead of your conference. For example, if you need an interpreter who is familiar with medical device terminology, biotech jargon, or anthropological terms for the Mayan civilization, your localization agency will need some time to find the perfect people. Give your agency as much heads up as possible so that they can find native speakers with a background in your field. 2. Provide speech materials whenever possible. Often, conference organizers request that speakers provide their PowerPoint decks ahead of time so that they can be loaded into the system. Be sure to provide copies of the decks to your interpreters and, if at all possible, any other background information or speaker notes that you can get your hands on. The more preparation your interpreters can do prior to the event, the greater the accuracy of the interpretation, especially if you are using simultaneous interpretation. 3. Overestimate. Sometimes clients minimize their interpretation needs in order to save costs. However, what we often find is that at the last minute the number of attendees that need wireless headsets increases as participants realize that the option is available to them. Also, event planners often forget or underestimate the need for interpreters at break-out sessions. Adding interpreters and equipment at the last minute can increase costs and will very likely increase stress. We advise you to think carefully in advance about all the sessions where you may need interpreters either for speakers, or to enable the full participation of attendees. It's a lot easier to scale back than to add in, although high-quality providers should be able to rise to the occasion. 4. Double check the languages. This may seem like a no brainer, but it is critical that you check with your attendees to ensure you're providing interpreters in the right languages. Just this week the Swedish government landed in the papers because they provided Romany language interpreters to Romanian immigrants. Romany is a completely different language than Romanian, and none of the immigrants could understand it. The last thing you want to do is promise a high level of service and then fail on something easily avoidable. With the right level of planning, you can make your event stand out as a must-go for international participants. Expand your audience and your revenue by providing excellent service for your attendees. Build in comprehensive interpretation services from your earliest planning stages, provide your interpreters with as much background information as possible, and plan carefully for when and where you will need interpreter services. Your reward will be great customer feedback and the opportunity for more international growth. Social media can make or break a brand. Unlike stuffy corporate brochures, or expensive, well-planned commercials, Tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagrams can be quick one-offs, often hastily done when an idea strikes. This can be great, or it can be disastrous. Often the company uses social media to show a sense of humor, poke fun at itself, or highlight a charity that it supports. This can be a great way to build a brand following. However, because social media is tapped in to local culture, relies on less formal speech, and plays off of local goings-on, it's critical that companies give extra thought to how they use social media in other languages and cultures.
One difficulty with social media, is that it does not work to translate each Tweet into Spanish and hope that your customers in Madrid will catch the references. Depending on your product, you may even need to create social media posts in several languages just for your local U.S.-based market. In any case, you need to have someone who is current with the local culture so that your message is relevant to what's going on and the humor is appropriate. When crossing cultural divides it can be easy to offend. Having a local person involved in your social media strategy will help you avoid those pitfalls. Additionally, pictures and videos are key to getting your message widely shared. The more relevant your pictures, the more they will resonate with your target audience. This means that you may not want to use a picture of a New York city street if you're trying to reach a Paris market. Again, by having someone familiar with the local market work with you on your social media strategy, you can identify images that spark understanding or help convey the humorous message you're trying to get across. Don't forget to localize your website too. Research shows that people are more likely to buy from companies whose websites have been translated into their languages. There's no point in building a solid global social media following if they tune-out when they hit your English language-only website. Take the time, do it right, and the sales, loyalty, and buzz will follow. Last week we talked about how using your cousin to translate for you is not a good way to cut costs. This week, there was an article in MinnPost that talked about the often dire consequences of using a bilingual person for medical translation, rather than a professional, certified translator.
In one case, according to the article, a translator told the medical team that the patient was intoxicated when he was actually nauseous. The result was that his brain aneurysm was not properly treated and the patient wound up paralyzed. In fact, when amateur translators make medical translation mistakes, those mistakes are potentially dangerous 77% of the time. Even professional interpreters make mistakes, which underlines the importance of hiring interpreters who are certified in medical terminology. Many hospitals provide access to interpreters for patients who request them, and there are many translation agencies that provide medical interpreters who can go with you to an appointment or provide over the phone service. By taking better advantage of these services, we can greatly improve patient outcomes. Similarly, the business world can and should learn from the medical community. While less likely to have life or death consequences, improper translation and interpretation can have huge negative consequences for the company's reputation and its bottom line, especially when contracts are involved. Getting specific business terms correct reduces ambiguity and helps to ensure better relationships moving forward. Sometimes this may mean that specific terms not be translated, but that the term from each language be included in the text so that there is no chance for ambiguity or misinterpretation. As we've said in other posts, you work too hard to create a superior product or service to then lose credibility in the marketplace through poor translation, or to get bogged down in a dispute with a vendor over a poorly translated contract. Build translation into your cost structure from the beginning, hire professional, certified translators who have experience in your industry, and be confident in how your image will be perceived by others. We often hear of people trying to cut their localization costs by hiring their brother-in-law's sister's cousin who used to live in Mexico to translate their company's product literature into Spanish. While this is a cheap way to go, it's not going to get the job done right. Here are 4 better ways to reduce your translation costs and get an excellent final product.
1. Hire a certified, professional, native speaker. I hear you saying, wait a minute, that has to be expensive! Actually, hiring someone who can do the job right the first time around will be less expensive in the end then hiring someone who doesn't know what they are doing. A professional with background knowledge of your industry won't have to peruse a dictionary in order to get your localization done. Plus, you won't be spending time and money on re-writes to correct their errors like you would with that cousin. 2. If it's a long document, make sure your localization agency creates a glossary of terms. Consistency is key with localization. By creating a glossary of frequently used terms, trademarked names that shouldn't be translated, and industry lingo, you and your translation agency can ensure that the final product is consistent throughout the document. If you plan to have the document translated into multiple languages, this glossary will really help cut down costs. 3. Give yourself the gift of time. One of the most avoidable ways people run up localization costs is by requesting on a tight turnaround time. Plan in advance for your translation and build the time into your production schedule. 4. Finish the document before you hand it to the localization agency. Every time you need to make a change, it costs you more, especially if your document needs to be localized into multiple languages. And if you do decide to change the source document, keep a detailed record of all the changes you make so that the localization company can easily see where they need to amend their versions. |
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