Personalized communication has undoubtedly replaced mass marketing strategies as the driving force behind a successful product campaign. This shift in focus naturally puts heightened emphasis on the different ways companies present themselves to their global customers. Accordingly, diverse and multi-lingual language use has become an increasingly popular feature of advertising and marketing campaigns. While the implementation of multilingual and linguistically diverse marketing profiles is certainly beneficial to every internationally operating business, it also presents new challenges to marketing departments as they now need to ensure effective market localization and flawless translations that all have to be neatly integrated into the company’s corporate framework. Here is a brief look at how to address some of these tasks successfully.
In order to achieve the best possible impact, it’s not enough to reach out to your customers using only the general means and channels of communication. For example, using Google to advertise due to its dominance of the English language search engine market would be of little use in Russia, where Yandex is the largest search engine with approximately 60% of the market share. The logic of market localization dictates that not only your message needs to be tailored to meet the needs of the target audience and be delivered by the appropriate means of communication, but also that it can interact with the audience in the ideal context.
A successfully localized website is one that is accessible, usable and culturally suitable to a target audience. The first step in achieving this kind of accessibility and suitability is to properly analyze and research local markets and competitor performance as well as a thorough look at your own website. This process includes:
- determining the markets and target audiences
- analyzing markets’ socio-cultural, political and legal specifications
- analyzing the markets’ linguistic specifications
- pre-localization analysis of the source code and file formats
- identifying the areas which need localizing
Once this preliminary research is completed, it is time for thinking about how to effectively use your new localized website once it is completed. This requires an SEO plan. The SEO plan will help determine what kind of clients you will be able to attract with the newly localized website. An SEO localization plan, at the very least, should include the following elements:
- keyword and competition research (global and local search volumes)
- localization of identified keywords
- additional keywords suggestions
- keyword mapping
- landing pages mapping
Though the process of creating an effectively localized website may seem daunting, many people falsely convince themselves that the help of a professional is unnecessary. They believe that, through their own investigating, networking, and the availability of discount providers and freelancers, they can more affordably navigate the process. Better do it right from the get go. EVS Translations can help every step of the way. Our team of translators, IT specialists, and web designer localizes websites and other marketing collateral into more than 50 languages.
Learn more about how we can help you capture new business around the world and give us a call TODAY:
Our US and UK translation offices will be happy to answer all your questions!
Atlanta office: +1 404-523-5560 or send us an email: quoteusa(at)evs-translations.com.
Nottingham office: +44-115-9 64 42 or send us an email: quoteuk(at)evs-translations.com.
Website localization done right—-Part 2
