Do you have a business expanding its footprint into new parts of the world? How about reaching diverse communities locally? Sometimes you need to adapt your products and services so that different audiences understand them, but this isn’t just about translating language. You must also adjust for cultural, legal and political differences to reach specific markets. This adaptation is called localization.
Localization seeks to appear that your content and messaging are developed within the local culture, so it creates resonance and is understood. You want to be successful and have your brand stand out in all markets, so it has to be personalized to meet all your customers’ needs.
The advantages of localization include:
- Better Customer Trust: You will gain more trust from your customers when they see you have implemented localization. They engage more in it and appreciate your effort and commitment to communicate with them.
- Higher Search Engine Ranking: With SEO localization implemented, your ranking goes way up in foreign search engines because you use the searchable local language.
- Provides A Competitive Edge: If you can expand your market beyond your competitors, you become the leader and will experience rapid, global growth.
- Upswings In Traffic And Revenue: The more visitors to your site, the better because additional traffic leads to more conversions, which means increased revenue.
It takes commitment to invest in a robust localization strategy, and it is an ongoing task with every new piece of content you put out. It far outweighs the work, though, as you will gain more exposure to build your global brand.
Do you have a plan for this? Here are some great localization strategies.
Localizaiton Strategy #1: Plan Ahead
When creating content for your audience, consider a more expanded reach. This will help your lens widen to include part of the world where your messaging may travel. You want to broaden your communication to more markets, so why not plan now for it?
While you are creating:
- Concentrate on messaging that can work across multiple markets around the globe.
- Don’t over-personalize but instead, make it a universal, human experience.
- Make sure consumers understand your source material in various cultures.
- Take the perspective of the multicultural buyer in mind.
The more you do this during the creation phase, the less you will have to do later when it is needed to expand.
Localization Strategy #2: Video Localization
As a company, you probably use various methods for getting your messaging and content out to the consumer. In this digital era, video is becoming among the most popular way of marketing and for a good reason; it combines visual and audible content. To reach a broad market, you need to implement video localization.
A video localization service allows your videos to be translated into other languages, but it goes beyond that. You often have to rewrite the script and change video references so it is clearly understood in different markets.
Some aspects of video localization include:
- Captions
- Subtitles
- Voice overs
- Dubbing
- AI voice over
- Versioning
- Transcription
Because some references, common phrases and even pop culture are different, you can better reach people where they are, in their linguistic style.
Localization Strategy #3: Learn Your Audience
If you don’t know your target audience, you can’t customize your content, and the messaging may be wrong. Learn all you can about the country or culture you are moving into and get familiar with the imagery and nuances used throughout the language. You can better understand what is needed to bridge communication gaps using consumer-focused research.
Localization Strategy #4: Multilingual SEO and Website
If you want to be found in search engines by multiple markets, it’s important to use multilingual SEO.
You need country-specific URLs for international search engines and hreflang tags to help determine the intended region and language of the page on your website. Sometimes it can be confusing with multiple languages on the same page, so having different pages in only one language is good.
Choose what elements of your website to localize. This can be your landing page, product pages, about us page, content pages, terms of service and any multimedia live video and audio.
Localization Strategy #5: Measure Your Strategy
To succeed with your localization implementation, you need to see how it works. Here are some key factors to measure performance:
- Watch your market share to look for increases or decreases.
- Check out your social media engagement, including content sharing and conversations about your brand.
- See your SEO keyword ranking in search engines
- Monitor support cases when you move into new markets and locations.
- Compare conversion rates on your website before and after localization.
Digging into analytics is the key to your localization focus and will help you implement it properly.
