Every now and then, I attend a webinar or presentation where the presenter and I think completely alike. It’s always a good feeling, as it validates what I’m thinking. I enjoy it ever more when the presenter provides me with additional information to consider.
Last year, I had an opportunity to attend a couple of presentations that were given by Kathleen Bostick of SDL. Kathleen’s presentation was titled, “The Global Marketer’s Blueprint.” Kathleen provided an overview of 10 key steps that global marketers should consider when making their content global-ready. This week, SDL released an eBook that expands on Kathleen’s presentation and provides important details that every global marketer should take to heart.
10 Points
The eBook details 10 points of the blueprint for global marketers:
- Adopt a complete global marketing solution. It is important to plan for global from the start and to make sure that you have taken all customer touch points into consideration. Specifically:
- Website localization
- Transcration/marketing translation cultural consulting
- Technology/platform
- International SEO
- Video localization
- Mobile / apps
- Brand / competitive analysis
- Multilingual chat
- Customer reviews / user-generated content
- Email / campaign translation
- Create consistent content & information architecture. Before you begin translating content, think about these things:
- Global templates
- What information is global? What information is local?
- Are you going to localize content by language or by country?
- Localize your global SEO. While Google is an important search engine, be sure you optimize for local search engines as well. For example:
- Naver in Korea
- Yandex in Russia
- Baidu in China
- Globalize your mobile marketing strategy. Think “mobile first,” rather than treating it as an afterthought. In many countries, access to the internet is move common on mobile devices that on computers.
- Ensure your platform supports mobile display formatting
- Consider app localization in your strategy
- Apps can be inexpensive to localize – you may want to support more languages using apps that on your website
- Remember video, visuals, & transcreation. Transcreation is an important approach for conveying subjective and emotive information in a culturally-relevant way. Be sure to use experienced linguists when you transcreate content. In addition, there are three ways to handle video translation:
- Subtitles, where the audio is transcribed and translated, and appears on the screen as text.
- Voiceover and original (overdubbing), where the volume of the original audio track is reduced so the listener can still hear it, along side the localized voiceover.
- Voiceover only, where the original video is removed and a localized version is applied in its place.
- Translate your user-generated content. For brands that rely heavily on customer reviews, translating those reviews can be very important.
- Add language support strategically. With so many languages being spoken all over the world, make sure that you plan your strategy for translation:
- Assess the market opportunity
- Take advantage of analytics
- Measure ROI
- Determine the right translation method. Sometimes, human translation is going to be the best method to translate your content. Sometimes machine translation might be best. To help you decide, consider these aspects of your content:
- Value to the customer
- Shelf life
- Where it will be consumed
- How it will be used
- Stage of sales cycle where it is used
- Overall impact to your brand
- Reduce the complexity of globalization. Don’t over-complicate global marketing activities. Plan and simplify.
- Monitor, measure & multiply. If you have followed this blueprint, you will be able to integrate and align your global marketing processes. You will like see an increase in efficiency, and you will definitely improve the customer experience.
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Implementing a complete solution ensures that all of your customers have a similar user experience.
Get the eBook
Get your own copy of this useful eBook click here.
And if you need help planning and executing your global content strategy, please give us a holler.
Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Roche, and IBM. Her fourth book, “The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale,” was published in 2021 by XML Press.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
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