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

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. 

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.  
  

Increasingly the word transcreation is popping up on the internet and you may be wondering what it means. Well, building off of last week's blog, transcreation means adapting a marketing message from one language to another while keeping the tone, style, and intent the same. This generally means that marketing messages should not be translated word for word, as such a translation would result in stilted, awkward text and is likely to have diminished impact in the target market. Rather, the professional translator should read the entire text to be translated and then render it in the target language so that it accurately reflects the intentions and feel of the original. 

Often transcreation will require translators to substitute different jokes, appropriate in-country slang, or modified rhymes. If your original marketing message ties into what's currently in vogue in your culture, for example with teen slang or referenced pop music, your translator will need to understand the culture of the destination language well enough to use appropriate references from that market so that the essence of the marketing message remains the same and is relevant to the local consumer. 

So the next time you take your marketing campaign out of country, give your translation team a little leeway to fully adapt your message to the local market. You won't get a word-for-word translation, but you will get great results.

After studying 50 million tweets, linguists gained amazing insights into Spanish dialects. Through maps overlaid with demographic information, they could see the distribution of the dialects was affected by rural vs. urban areas, and that immigration played a major role in both the spread and containment of dialects. 

Go-Globe.com's Chinese social media infographic shows that Chinese consumers are strongly influenced by social media. 91% of the Chinese population uses social media, as compared to only 67% of the U.S. population, and 38% say they make decisions based on recommendations from their social network. View the entire infographic here: http://www.go-globe.com/blog/social-media-china/