Marketers often find themselves at the forefront of a company’s global expansion and responsible for creating a strategy to reach customers in target countries. While an exciting opportunity, going multinational is also a huge challenge for those tasked with overseeing the development of new marketing strategies.
Entering new markets requires rewriting the playbook that brought domestic success. While brand consistency is important, different markets favor different approaches, and the pieces of effective translation and digital optimization are no exception — this can be a daunting task.
However, the right combination of tools and automations for your strategy can ease that burden. While investing in shiny, new tools alone may deepen the trough of disillusionment, combining the right tools and experts with your strategy will help your team hit target audiences effectively on time and within budget.
Leveraging Automation: Translation Automation to Fit Your Strategy
Similar to how your organization-wide strategy sets the vision and defines strategic objectives, market-entry should include translation automation that does the same. Start by identifying your overarching goals for leveraging automation, the strategic areas that you feel could most benefit, and the budget that you have available.
If entering a new market, you likely have a lot of content to translate and a limited budget and timeline within which to do so. While human-translated content can be key to expanding into a new market, sometimes it isn’t practical financially or logistically to have all of content localized by human translation. It’s critical to understand the different types of content you have, their different weights of importance, and then prioritize them accordingly.
With a prioritization strategy and a staggered translation process, your brand expansion can reach your desired market successfully. A staggered translation process includes using automation where possible for certain types of content, and saving more costly expert translation for more complex or nuanced types of content. There are also specific types of content that necessitate discussing with a translation strategy expert as cost and time savings may differentiate depending on industry.
There is some content that can be effectively machine-translated to save time and money. User-generated content such as user forums and user reviews can be efficiently translated with machine learning as well as frontlines of communications like SMS or emails. Other resources that translate well via machine are FAQs, knowledge bases, and alerts and notifications. By using your style guide, term glossary, and machine learning these are excellent places to utilize automations.
Conversely, there is some content that necessitates more localization involving expert (human) translators. Some examples of content more appropriate for the nuances of human translation include advertising, legal, and marketing content. Other content such as websites, software application interfaces, documents and manuals, and user guides may be able to include some cost savings by integrating different levels of machine translation.
By differentiating, prioritizing, and staggering content, your business can focus on high-quality translations in the areas that matter and:
Achive Faster Time to Market
Gain First-Mover Advantage
Stay Within Defined Budget
Meet Legal Requirements
Agile Translation Solutions to Drive Your Revenue
An agile company should be able to connect to popular enterprise applications so that you can work directly in your native environments. For example, by connecting to the highest-rated applications on the market such as Adobe, Drupal, and WordPress, Lingotek gives your project managers the ability to work with translated content in real-time and on the tools with which they are familiar. Expert translators, project managers, designers, and marketing leaders can translate, localize, update, and publish global content within a single, uninterrupted workflow resulting in quicker time to market.
To create a seamless work environment and meet your goals, your translation partner should be able to work with your vendors with ease. It’s critical that your translation company is able to fill in the gaps that you need by either working with your vendors or having the capability to handle every aspect of your needs. As companies scale up, there is value in having partners who have the flexibility to fill in the needs of your supply chain in order to minimize disruption and create process efficiencies.
Trusted Experts to Meet Your Goals
With over 20 years of optimizing automation systems, one of Lingotek’s relationship leaders, Richard Roberts, provides the following tips: “Begin your venture with the end goal in mind. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. What are your company’s unique goals and values? While some organizations are focused solely on cost savings, others may prioritize increasing accuracy, enhancing the customer experience, or reducing vendor utilization.”
In order to define your market entrance strategy and the appropriate partners, consider the following questions:
What are the problems your organization needs to solve?
What resources do you currently have to solve those problems?
What is your prioritized content?
Where does automation make sense?
As businesses continue to globalize, companies can gain a competitive advantage by focusing their marketing efforts on content that targets the right international markets, adapting their products and strategies to appeal to local customers, and resourcefully using the right tools and automations in the right time and place.
Reach out to Lingotek to work with our expert advisors to find the custom strategy to meet your company’s goals. We’re ready to help provide you with a competitive advantage in the global marketplace.
