In a recent article in Brand Quarterly, Dr. Nitish Singh discusses how companies have historically centralized their marketing functions, standardized their identity across markets, concentrated on a few brands, and limited their packaging sizes and styles. However, as Dr. Singh explains, these companies should be moving away from standardization and toward localization. If they don’t, they risk missing many great opportunities and could even be offending or alienating potential customers.

In addition to relaying stories about the trouble companies get into when trying to directly translate their name into other languages, Dr. Singh discusses other aspects of localization and how critical it is to understand regional markets and adapt to them.

An interesting point that Dr. Singh makes is that pricing affects perception in the marketplace. He points out that a low-end U.S. brand may actually be a mid-range brand in another country. If you use the same marketing strategy, it’s unlikely to work, given that your consumer perceives a different level of quality. Think about the difference in an ad campaign between a budget furniture brand and a high-end brand. You would probably be confused if the high-end brand used the bright colors, graphics, and jingles that we expect from the budget-priced product. To be successful, you need to adapt your copy and perhaps your look and feel so that your marketing efforts reflect your product placement.

The article also discusses how standardizing your product packaging may limit your sales. In the U.S., consumers often want to buy products in bulk, but in places like India, customers frequently want to buy in very small packages. How can you manufacture and ship smaller packaging, but still price it so that you make a profit? Again, how does it affect your in-country marketing strategy? You need to plan for less room on the packaging itself, consider how to display smaller packages on shelves, and decide which product attributes should be called out on the packaging to appeal to that region's shopper. Don't forget to think about packaging color too. What looks attractive in one country may not appeal in another. 

Social media and purchasing methods also vary greatly from country to country. In some countries, more than 50% of purchases are made from mobile devices. In Japan, customers may make the purchase online, but expect to pick up the product in person. You should familiarize yourself with the popular purchase and delivery options for each region, but also think about any disruptive technologies that may put you ahead. If you're used to selling your product online, how can you push mobile purchasing in a market that hasn't yet adopted that method? What incentives will work for those consumers? Note that if you pursue an online strategy you will need to create a site in that region's language. You cannot expect consumers in other countries to purchase from an English language site. In the case of a market like Japan, is there a local delivery company whose services you can engage so that your customer no longer has to go to the store to pick up your product? Consumers are likely to choose your product over your competitors if you make the purchase easier for them. 

Companies that research marketing, packaging, and distribution for each regional market can gain a great advantage by creating manufacturing efficiencies where practical, but also tailoring product and consumer marketing where it will lead to greater sales. Don’t just translate the words on your packaging and websites, but adapt the content to appeal to the consumers in each local market. Learn from your successes from the U.S. market, but combine them with what consumers expect from their local shopping experiences and you're more likely to beat out your competition. 

As we recently Tweeted, U.S. metropolitan area exports were up $36 billion dollars in 2014, reaching $1.14 trillion. Houston led the way with exports of $119 billion. The next four largest exporting cities were New York, LA, Seattle, and Detroit.(1)  But what does this mean for you?

We think it shows that despite the strong dollar, U.S. goods are in high demand, and if you're not looking for opportunities to diversify globally, then you're missing out on potential revenue streams. If you're just getting started, you may want to download the commerce department's export guide. The book strives to answer any questions you may have about exporting. 

Also just released at trade.gov, are the 2015 Top Market reports. These reports provide an assessment of future industry-specific export opportunities and an examination of the competitive landscape. Available free for 19 different industries, the reports include sector snapshots and detailed information for specific countries. 

Once you've figured out where your industry is heading and what countries are your best bets, be sure to take the time to create a detailed marketing plan for how to enter foreign markets. Pay close attention to what each market's consumers want and talk up those features. Each market you examine may get excited about different aspects of your product, so it's good to do your homework. You may also want to tweak your offerings. For example, in some markets red is a lucky, and highly desired color, but in other markets it may not be popular at all. Just by doing even a little consumer preferences research, you'll increase your chance of success. Remember, it's better to make a good impression from the start, as it can be much harder and more costly to repair a reputation than to build it from scratch.

And finally, don't forget that part of your marketing plan needs to include localization of your marketing materials: videos, website, sales sheets, case studies, and your social media presence. Your overseas prospects are far more likely to buy from you if you market to them in their own language. 

1. http://www.trade.gov/mas/ian/build/groups/public/@tg_ian/documents/webcontent/tg_ian_003620.pdf

Are you someone who thinks corporate meetings are a boondoggle, dreamed up by people who want a party and don't care about wasting valuable time and money? 

SAP's CEO Bill McDermot argues in this CNBC OpEd that corporate meetings can be highly productive and extremely influential in improving employee moral and productivity, even helping companies to turn themselves around. Additionally, they inject money into the local economies where they are held, providing a positive ripple effect to local businesses.  

McDermont's right, you can accomplish far more with people when you're all in the same room. But, when you bring together employees from all over the world to meet each other and get aligned with corporate strategy, you're likely to run into some language barriers as well. In order to foster productive discussions and make sure that everyone's voice is heard and that everyone leaves the meeting feeling valued and knowing what direction to take in their corner of the business, you should have materials translated and hire interpreters. Don't make employees use their second or third language skills. This can lead to misunderstandings and a failure to properly communicate. By having linguists on hand to help your overseas employees navigate the meeting, you'll ensure full participation and money well spent.

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. 

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/)

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

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. 

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. 

You’re ready to expand your company internationally. You’re working hard to get your website up and running and figure out the tax code and shipping procedures, but have you given enough thought to the cultural differences between the U.S. and your new market? 


Different languages, aesthetics, and values all create challenges to your expansion efforts, but by adjusting your marketing strategy to fit local markets, you can provide your company with a competitive advantage.

Read our guest blog on the Boston Chamber of Commerce's website to learn 4 strategies that will help make your company successful internationally. 

If you've localized your website for your international markets, you've taken a good first step toward tapping your global customer base. But online competition is becoming fiercer and your marketing has to get even more sophisticated in order to compete effectively. As this Multichannel Merchant article reports, in countries outside of the U.S. there are (gasp) other popular search engines besides Google, and they use different algorithms to serve up top search results. For example, if you're marketing in China, you'll need to optimize for Baidu which has nearly 60% of the market. 

Additionally, you need to pay close attention to your SEO terms. Hire a professional translator to ensure that you correctly translate your key words and ask them to think broadly about what words the local market uses. In the same MCM article, they cite a French example where  a chocolate sweet roll is usually called a pain au chocolat, but in the southwest it's called chocolatine. You'll encounter the same issues in Latin America, where English words translate very differently depending on country and region. For example, green beans can be translated to 
habichuela, chauncha, vainita, or ejote depending on the region. If you happen to be peddling green beans, the SEO words you choose could have a huge impact on your search ranking. 

Think about the U.S. market. In some areas you would order a sub sandwich, but across the country we also have hoagies, grinders, heroes, and spuckies. If you use the wrong term for your market, you won't get nearly so many customers. 

If your product is trendy, you'll have to be even more aware of what terms local consumers use. Keep a close eye on social media for each market and adapt your strategy to the local terminology. 

• Don't rely on messaging from headquarters; be sure to tweak it for your market.  
  

• Use local terms in your website content, your local blogs, and your SEO strategy to improve your visibility.