Research shows that using pictures or videos in your social media posts, on your website, and in your emails dramatically increases your click throughs. In fact, Forrester reports that videos in emails increase click-throughs by an astounding 200-300%!
In order to get the most from your videos, localize them for all your major markets. Rather than relying on YouTube's built in subtitle service, apply a little advance planning and can create videos that captivate your audience all over the world. For truly professional looking and sounding videos, hire a localization agency that will create a frame-by-frame transcript of your video. This will ensure that the voice-over starts and ends with the video, with no awkward gaps or overruns. The agency should also have a roster of professional translators that will adapt your transcript so that it reads as if it were written in the local language, with the right terminology, local slang, etc. You should also ensure that you hire voice-over talents that are native speakers in the languages you want to localize into. Your videos need to sound like they were created by native speakers or you will lose credibility in the marketplace. Finally, when it comes time to record the videos, be sure to have a monitor in the recording studio with you. The monitor should be a native speaker and able to tell if the voice-over talent inadvertently makes a mistake, allowing you to correct it in the moment. This will save you time and money, because you won't need to schedule another session for re-takes. By hiring the proper professional talent, and taking the time to pace your transcript and adapt it to fit the local customs and marketplace, you'll create a video that will look and sound like it was created locally, and you will dramatically increase your international audience engagement. For more specifics on how to achieve great video-voice overs, read our multilingual corporate video case study.
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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. |
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