Marketing localization: How to adapt marketing content for going global

Globalization significantly changed the "game rules" and business processes, forcing companies to focus not only on the local market but also on additional regions. The prefix "worldwide" or "global" to the brand name significantly boosts the trust of potential customers and increases the possible market size several times. Because of this, companies are increasingly starting to choose localization as a winning strategy and invest additional resources in it.

One of the pillars of successfully reaching regional customers is marketing localization, which allows building a central bridge between the business and the audience. Marketing content's effectiveness depends entirely on its competent adaptation and often correlates with the company's success in the market. The main benefits that provide marketing localization are:

• Build a trusting relationship with the audience. Based on the latest statistics, 40% of users wouldn't buy services and goods if the information provided was in a non-native language for them. Thus, the marketing content that often forms a first impression about your business should be fully resonated with and understandable to the end user.
• Increase competition advantage. 65% of the users will always prefer content in their native language, so adapted marketing content always wins the race compared to content that is not translated.
• Boost engagement. Mobile devices are among the most popular channels for getting users' information (57% of all online time is via mobile devices). People scroll and search when they wake up, go to work, after a hard day, or when they relax. At this time, the last thing the users are interested in is getting through the incomprehensible words, terms, and texts.
• Raising brand visibility. The content adaptation additionally impacts the SEO results and makes your business visible to regional customers.

Five steps to adapt marketing content for different regions

To make your marketing localization easier, we prepared the five general stages you have to go through.

1. Find out everything about the regional peculiarities. The marketing team must understand all cultural nuances and possible pitfalls to communicate with an entirely new audience.
2. Build a marketing content localization strategy. You should clearly understand your budget, the amount of content that should be translated, plan the load for the translating team, etc.
3. Transcreation — build new, relevant messages. First, your team should define which messages can't be translated directly and which require additional work from the creative side. Slogans, unique selling offers, and advertising do not always resonate with the audience's pain points and offer relevant proposals. Test the main business messages regarding cultural and other local nuances to prevent spending the marketing budget on initial losing activities.
   

Read more → Famous products localization overview

4. Hire a professional translating team. The final result depends mainly on the expertise of the translators you hire, so finding a team that can perfectly fit your business needs is the first step to success.
   
   

5. Track the feedback and provide improvements. Continuously tracking the users' comments, feedback, and behavior allows for timely implementation advancements to the marketing content and prevents significant failures.

Three marketing localization challenges that can fail your globalization

Even though everything seems simple, localization is always a complex process, and the main challenges you can face while working with marketing materials are:

1. Misinterpretations and a low understanding of the cultural background. Symbols, colors, figures — every small detail is important and can be missed when creating local marketing content. A simple example is that in Eastern European countries like Ukraine, an even number of flowers in a bouquet has negative connotations and is associated with funerals and mourning. At the same time, in some countries like the USA, an even or an odd number of flowers don't have any symbolic implications.

Read more → A picture is worth 1000 misunderstandings

2. Maintain consistency throughout various content types. The marketing content includes various texts and visuals - ads banners, decks, one-pagers, e-books, emails, social media posts, etc. When localizing, it is essential to guarantee that the tone of voice of the marketing content matches the other business texts, such as the website, sales pitches, UI elements, etc. When adapting marketing content, involving a team of translators is essential, and each of them must clearly understand the target audience and follow the same direction in communicating with it. So, the synchronization of the efforts of all team members is the most challenging part of maintaining uniformity of content.
   
   
3. Constant updates and changes management. The marketing field is one of the most changeable, and new texts, updates of the current campaigns, and additional content arise continuously. To meet the deadline, translators must receive information about newly generated/updated original text. It is especially essential when new features and updates are coming, and the company wants to launch them simultaneously for all regions.

How can Lingohub support the localization of marketing content?

Using an appropriate translation management tool like Lingohub can handle the most significant challenge with marketing content localization, and we will prove this statement with just a few examples.

Support your team with cultural understanding by providing a comprehensive context via editor suggestions. At Lingohub, you can add the style guide, which will affect the machine translation results, context images, and additional information for the needed terms like image, description, and translatability options. Additionally, order the translation from professionals inside Lingohub who can translate and proofread the required content, considering the context and other customer requirements.

Consistency maintenance also is not a big challenge anymore with Lingohub TMS. The pool of tools was designed to make your business voice unified without additional efforts from the translators' side, namely - quality checks that will warn about deviation from the set rules, a glossary that provides only correct suggestions for specific word translation, and a style guide which was already mentioned in the previous point. With all these solutions, you can ensure that your team uses the same tone of voice and terms and can easily see the violations if they happen.

Lingohub is a translation management system, which means that a big focus in our solution is on creating optimized processes and their control. Thus, we did our best to allow your team to handle the content and easily see the new ones that require attention. Additionally, marketing localization can be simplified by creating separate project(s) just for precise content types. For example, the splitting of data inside Lingohub allows you to have all your content for localization in one hub and, at the same time, divide and categorize it into project groups.

To sum up

Adapting the marketing content for the new region is often a complex process that requires a professional linguistic team, deep research, and a suitable tool for comprehensive management.

At Lingohub, we understand businesses' challenges, so we design our solutions with the customers' needs in mind. Book a short demo call with our team and get a comprehensive consultation about your case. Want to try it yourself? Start the 14-day free trial (no credit card required) and evaluate the benefits of Lingohub for yourself.