As a marketer you have a profound understanding of how the digital arena influences the way you establish and develop your domestic brand and marketing efforts.
But what if you’ve been operating in an English-centric digital bubble all these years? You may know your own domestic industry inside-out but when it comes to pitching your brand to foreign markets, you risk losing a lot in translation.
More business owners than ever are recognizing how important it is to localize their websites to foreign audiences. The truth is customers abroad are hungry for high-quality products and services that solve problems and make their life easier. Yet the provider of such services and products who are able to communicate to them in their own language is often missing from the picture. By taking advantage of this provision “gap,” your company is liable to score lots of new clients and reap major profits from interested foreign customers.
Still not sure whether you should go down the localization route? Here are five big reasons as to why you should embrace localized digital marketing:
1. You Connect to a Global Audience
According to a Sheffield Hallam University study, the vast majority of the world’s population, (75%) does not speak English. The other 25% may not speak the language very well or wouldn’t be able to understand sophisticated English marketing campaigns with all their cultural nuances and idioms. Only 6% of the global population speaks English fluently. Understanding these figures will help you understand the sheer value of what it would mean to present your brand in a target market’s local language.
2. You Expand Your Business
A recent survey conducted by the Common Sense Advisory found that 84% of foreign customers preferred buying products and services from online sites that are offered in their local language. The global market is worth billions, so when you localize and pitch your site in a local language, your can generate huge profits. When you go the extra mile and additionally localize your applications, software and other digital tools marketed by your site, you reach a wider audience for your services and products. The additional exposure, in turn, boosts demand and sales.
3. You Heighten Customer Satisfaction
When you localize your content, you are showing to the world that you value your customers. By taking care to localize certain elements of your website, such as the color scheme, the website’s photos (that feature local people), content, currency values, and more, you are reassuring your customers that you understand their culture. Delivering a personalized experience to the target market in question facilitates increased engagement and a greater customer trust in your brand.
4. Provides Good Value
Localizing your digital presence may save you time and money in the long run. Localization costs are only a fraction of product or service development costs. In other words, if you’ve already invested thousands of dollars on creating an application from scratch, spending just a small amount of that on adapting the application or software to foreign markets — which potentially leads to significantly higher revenue – means its a good investment.
Costs of localizing also go down when you make it a part of the development process early on. Using localization tools such as style guides and translation memories as you develop your product or service saves money for you in the long run.
5. Competitive Advantage
Have your industry competitors localized their digital presence? If they have, then it’s time you caught up. But if they haven’t, then you’ll profit from the benefit of being among the first companies to engage with foreign prospects. According to a report released by California State University at Chico, 65% of multinational companies believe localization is vital for boosting revenue. In turn, an Appia study found that 86% of localized campaigns outperformed campaigns in English when it came to total click-throughs and conversions.
The Takeaway
Embracing localization is smart because you’d be speaking directly to multiple audiences around the world. You’d be fomenting connections not only with prospects and first-time customers, but building relationships with returning customers who are the bread and butter of your business.
If you are looking to offer an easy shopping experience that engages while empowering your customers to find out what they want, it’s been proven that taking a multichannel localization approach really works in bringing home the profits.
Bio:
Denise Recalde is a Senior Content Writer at Day Translations, a human translation services company. A seasoned writer and editor with eleven years of experience under her belt, she is a bonafide wordsmith who loves playing with the written word creatively and always takes care to lend a certain hue of snap and color to her drafts. Always one to rise up to challenges, she has traveled to 14 countries and has worked on a smorgasbord of writing projects that spanned several industries, from finance to health to beauty and fashion.