Translating Digital Marketing Content to Conquer New Markets
Translating your website is a snap, right? Don’t you just run it through some sort of translation machine and start collecting money from new consumers? We’ve seen sites like this, and they do not loosen purse strings. Fortunately, we’ve put together a foolproof way for translating digital marketing content.
How Do You Get Started?
The first step in translating digital marketing content is creating a project team. Though it may seem like this is solely in the wheelhouse of the marketing team, your site localization project should include stakeholders from web groups, product management, in-country staff, IT, and more.
Reduce costs, offer a consistent brand experience, and boost efficiency by centralizing the management of your website translation and other similar processes.
Next comes one of the most obvious steps: choosing a language. Your decision should be based on competitive analysis, your global goals, the current countries where you are getting web traffic from, how many languages are spoken in each country, and analysis of potential revenue in each market.
According to the latest numbers from Internet World Stats, the ten most popular languages on the web are English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian / Malaysian, Japanese, Russian, French, and German.
Next, you want to ask yourself how you want to optimize your website URLs. As you consider your objectives, whether it is to target consumers by language, country, or both, you may want country-code top-level domains, subdomains, or subdirectories.
Make Sure You Choose a Knowledgeable LSP
Language service providers (LSPs) are able to take most of the headache of translating digital marketing content off your shoulders. The key is to choose an LSP that is experienced and has a reputation for customer support and quality. How do you choose the best LSP for your needs? Here are a few tips:
- Ask for sample translations from their previous jobs
- Request customer references
- Make sure they follow the best practices for the industry
- Find out how quality is measured
- Your startup’s needs must remain central
- Understand the other digital marketing translation services they offer
- Talk to their solution reps
- Be sure they have the resources for each of your target languages
- Are they able to scale?
- Examine the LSP’s proprietary technology and tools
The LSP can only suggest the best options for your needs once they fully understand your online strategies, technical issues, and business goals. Lokalise provides even more tips for choosing an LSP.
What Is the Best Translation Method?
Most websites have several types of content, such as technical data, forum posts, creative advertising copy, and more. Cut costs and increase efficiencies by mapping content types to the ideal translation method.
We use a combination of professional human translation and translation memory software. We’ve found this provides the best balance of speed and quality.
Next, you should prioritize the content you want to be translated based on revenue potential, audience value, brand perception, relevance, asset or page performance, and other variables. After all, you want the content most important to your success to be available first.
You will then need a translation workflow in place. What is the best way to get source material from your CMS to the LSP? This will depend on content volume, CMS utilization to automation, update cadence, and other factors. Your provider should have a translation management system in place. Ideally, you want a translation company who can integrate your content creation and translation systems.
Before you ever spend a dime, we submit a proposal outlining your organization’s goals and translation needs along with our detailed solution. Carefully examine this document before approving it. We want to be sure we meet your expectations.
How the Translation and Localization Processes Work
Once the final proposal is approved and plans are in place, it is time to kick off the project. The professional translation service will work with your startup’s stakeholders to brief them on technologies, workflows, and processes.
To ensure the translation team provides consistent quality, the language lead for the project will create a localization kit with linguistic assets, reference materials, and files for translation. We also provide multilingual SEO services, including researching and identifying target keywords.
To get an idea of what goes into creating localized content, check out this checklist from the Content Marketing Institute that covers eleven of the things we look for to ensure your digital marketing content resonates with the new market.
How do you tell if the translations are any good? Most LSPs have a comprehensive review and quality control system in place to streamline sign-offs and approvals. We deliver final draft quality to your in-country reviewers.
Once the final files are delivered as outlined in the proposal, you will go live with professionally translated content. The next steps include translation updates and website maintenance as well as preparing for the next languages and markets you want to pursue.
