Now You’re Speakin’ My Language

If you don’t know your customers, you can’t give them what they want. And the most basic form of personalization is language. By reaching your audience in their native language, your brand can foster a powerful personal connection.

Smartling hosted a webinar featuring Lucid’s International Marketing Manager, Eliana Cameira. We discussed ways to scale global growth through localization and best practices to help improve localization efforts through translation. 

Four key takeaways — 

• Humanize your brand: treat users as unique individuals
• Leverage data and qualitative research to uncover key localization insights
• Focus on the full-funnel experience
• Collaborate with translators from the get-go

Watch the webinar “Now You’re Speakin’ My Language” in its entirety.

Localizing the Full-Funnel Experience

Truly investing in localization means driving growth by localizing the full-funnel experience. This means understanding customers’ motivation and cultural nuances, tailoring content appropriately to customers based on that understanding / data, and connecting personally with them end to end — from the point your customers first reach your website to when they are using your products.

Your goal should be to ensure that the customer experience is consistent throughout the entire customer life cycle and in their native language.

Translating for the complete buyer journey also means tailoring SEO strategy for your markets. Customize your SEO strategy for each market by incorporating locally relevant head terms in content and creating a unique content experience using colloquial phrases and idioms specific to your target market. Investing in local marketing experts will help identify key market insights for what to localize and how to market the localized content.

And rather than merely translating English content and replicating it into another language, first understand the target personas in each of your key markets and search behavior, identifying unique pieces of content specific to these audiences.

Finally, share strong data points with internal stakeholders to help increase cross-collaboration with other teams and get buy-in for some globalization and localization efforts to invest in further.

Building Personal Connections with Localization

Personalization refers to a unique experience, and localization is a component of this that takes an extra step. Localization recognizes that consumers have distinct values, cultures, and preferences shaped by geographical regions and creates unique experiences for targeted locales.

Nothing speaks louder than brands that connect directly with customers and speak their native language. But thinking globally while maintaining local relevance can be quite challenging when you have a small team to tackle this.

However, localizing and personalizing the content and user experience should be your goal from the get-go, knowing that this will help enhance your competitive advantage in global markets. Collaborating with a translation management company could also help scale local content creation globally and efficiently.

Watch the webinar “Now You’re Speakin’ My Language” in its entirety.

Best Practices to Help Improve Localization Through Translation

• Set clear goals and expectations regarding localization by sharing global growth and marketing strategies with your translation management provider.
• Translators should be an extension of your team. Collaborate with translators as much as possible to optimize the translation quality and process. For example, you can help translators learn more about your brand or provide them with keywords relevant to your product to support the company’s SEO strategy.
• Get local insight (in-house or externally) about your target markets. Listen to your users to get feedback on the user and product experience.
• Provide the full-funnel experience. Walk through the user experience from start to finish and see what works well and what needs improvement for your content — such as landing pages, pricing page, checkout, in-product, support, etc.
• Embrace a growth mindset: test small, pivot, test again, and scale what you see as wins.

Want to keep learning how to scale global growth through localization? Download the Modern Marketer’s Guide to Global Content Creation.