The difference between conquering international markets and just entering them?
A localized marketing strategy.
A good localized marketing strategy requires more than spending thousands of dollars on automated translation software that will mistranslate the power of your message, or to leave your company’s first impression in hands of random freelancers who don’t really understand your brand’s concept.
Although you might’ve been in the info product business for a while, created a bunch of content and even nailed down your market’s needs and desires…
Entering a new market might feel like starting from scratch, and it is to a certain degree.
All your existing content, from your programs to your marketing assets, social media posts, images, videos, etc. could potentially work in your new language’s niche just as well if not better as they performed in English.
But there’s way more to it:
The wording, the tone, the upload dates and times, the platforms, cultural references and even expressions must be accurately localized for the new target...
At this point we should already know that cultural misunderstanding can ruin all the hard work you’ve already achieved.
As you’ll see later, even massive companies have lost millions because they got “lost in translation”.
And just to understand from other’s mistakes let us tell you about one of the most common ones:
This is what usually happens when we trust digital or non-native translators instead of employing a localized marketing strategy because it’s mainly done translating word by word and ending up as nonsense…
A good example of this is what happened to Pepsi in 1963 when they were trying to increase their sales by convincing young people that Pepsi was made for them and introduced the slogan “Come Alive With Pepsi”.
It was a success in the United States so they decided to bring it to other countries, one of them was China, where unfortunately the translation wasn’t as good as expected.
Because what should’ve been a successful slogan ended up being culturally disrespectful.
Imagine the sentence… ‘Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead’ as a slogan in a country where ancestors are venerated from generation to generation.
Which bring us to the second most common mistakes:
2. Cultural differences
This mistake can only be prevented by being familiar with the new market’s culture. Knowing their:
- Needs
- Desires
- Traditions
- Favorite Platforms
- Worries
And this whole “understanding your locale’s culture” can seem really complicated, and make it a little bit scary for any company to venture into non-English markets.
Spoiler alert: It really isn’t when you partner up with a team of native professionals.
And the results can be outstanding, as untapped markets offer brand new revenue sources, with lower ad costs, higher conversions and minimal competition:
Appia, the infotech company, did a test across its ads network in 3 different countries France, Spain and Germany.
They wanted to prove how the performance of each ad changed depending on the strategies applied, one of them: Localization.
So they chose their top 5 ad campaigns and localized them into spanish, german and french.
Both, the English and the localized campaigns were shared in their ad networks at the same time. Surprisingly the localized campaign out-performed the English versions in both, click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.
The English ads had an average CTR of 2.35% and a conversion rate of 7.47%….
While the localized versions had a CTR of 3.34%, an increase of 42%, and 9.08% conversion rates, a 22% lift over the English creative.
Facts like:
- The wording game (more cultural references)
- The smoother tone (more conversational instead comercial)
- And the less rational and more emotional the message gets (get into people’s minds and you’re securing a sale)
Create a deeper engagement with the customer, which obviously makes them more likely to buy.
3. Where machines become useless…
Nowadays globalization, more than an opportunity, is a must for all companies to keep on growing. Did you know that businesses that invested in translation were 1.5 times more likely to observe an increase in revenue?
And since the chances of entering multilingual markets are bigger for all of us, of course technology couldn’t be left behind on this one…
So to make it ‘easier’ for everyone, they’ve been working on improving their Machine Translation, or MT for short.
But how efficient are they really?
Let’s start from the beginning, how do they work? Let’s say they divide each sentence by ‘parts’ to translate each of them and finally put all those parts back together.
But this might be where the problems start because this usually creates weird sentences or even nonsense.
We should all remember: “Literal translations usually never work”.
And of course not everything is bad news with MT, it also has its pros, like:
- Fast and less time consuming for us
- Easy to use
- Adaptable and developer-friendly
Besides this, Intento, an expert in machine translation evaluation, published his results last year where they focused on researching the efficiency of MT depending on the domains.
The evaluation was in 14 language pairs and 16 industry sectors, including Computer Software, Legal Services, Finance, and Healthcare.
The results proved that unfortunately, the hardest areas for MT were:
- Business services
- Instructions for use
- Sales and Marketing
Because it had a more complex and detailed way of sharing information with the audience.
So the real question… Is it really worth it? Can you trust your brand’s image to the MT?
Being honest, there are other cons to worry about, like:
- Not being able to translate images, charts or videos
- Inability to translate some local phrases
- Difficulty to understand and adapt slang
Or other situations where, at the end, the only solution left requires double work and a bigger budget because they must be fixed by a human…
Caring about giving your brand the best adaptation quality is a key step of this whole process and to truly understand the importance of this, let’s compare adaptation with something we all love doing: traveling.
The same way you would ask a local the best places to eat or to go out…
Native translators are the ones who can communicate with the most accurate expressions, creating a deeper bond with the audience.
For example, did you know that 86% of the localized advertising campaigns outperformed the English campaigns in both click-throughs and conversions?
Or that apps that fail to localize may lose as many as 8% to 13% of its customers?
These kinds of details are important to successfully conquer the international market and apply strategies that work depending on the customer behavior you’re targeting to make a good impression.
And this may sound like money and time-consuming thing to do by hiring multiple freelancers, and even worse…
Having multiple unrelated teams trying to create a cohesive product, will risk your brand image in a new market.
That’s why the InfOhana family focuses not only on localized marketing strategies with our “True-Meaning”, 100% accurate translations method but also takes care of:
- Graphic design
- Video editing
- Subtitling and managing voice actors
- Media buying (or consulting for your team)
- Social media content and management
- Customer support
- Email Marketing
- And even coordinating affiliate launches for the right partners.
More than just a strategic partner, we make your mission OURS…
With InfOhana, you’ll communicate with just ONE person, your dedicated project manager. To serve as your multilingual concierge, overseeing the entire project from start to finish and managing all team members (so you don’t have to).
Imagine having the right team of experts to make your product look reliable and local in languages like:
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Or even german
We want you to trust the InfOhana family just like other customers have already done, letting us do great things together, such as:
- Increasing company revenue by 2X or more without launching new offers, building new funnels or hiring more staff, as we did for our client MindValley, for whom we’ve localized over 80 programs.
- Increasing your potential loyal customers by reaching new markets with a high-converting localized marketing strategy.
- Avoid rising ad costs and constant competition from other A-Players on social media.
- Improving your multilingual SEO and driving thousands of targeted visits to your website each month.
- Gaining a strategic advantage over your competitors by going beyond the English-speaking market.
And these are just some of the benefits of breaking down the cultural barriers with the InfOhana family by your side.
If you’re ready to grow your business don’t hesitate to schedule an exploratory call so we can work on the best strategy for your business.
