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It might be easier for businesses to apply strategies to their home market. But what if you want to be familiar with new audiences in other countries with diverse cultures and complicated languages? It all boils down to your localization strategy. By implementing an appropriate localization strategy, you can facilitate your conversion rates in your new target market.
Here are some tips to enhance your appeal globally.
Keep in mind that not all of the elements of your brand might suit everyone and every region. If you want to enhance your localization strategy, it is compulsory to carefully analyze your local audience and take the first step in your adaptation process by reviewing what vital culture-related contents should be noticed. From that point, translators could understand its original meaning and accelerate the localization process punctually without any pitfalls.
Who can understand a given culture better than a local? The local experts here could be your staff, agencies, or local partners from your target markets. Since they are not only knowledgeable in their field but they also speak the same language and experience the similar culture to help you get rid of localization pitfalls.
As you intend to enter a new market, the best way is to hire a localization agency within the community. These teams will be the key role of SMEs (subject matter experts) in your industry to guarantee your message will be delivered properly from the original meanings and meet the specifications and expectations of your audience. Furthermore, their adequate internal resources will ensure that your localization process will follow punctually to your deadline. This solution is perhaps the single most important element of any localization strategy.
Read more:7 Essential Translation Skills That Linguists Can’t Miss
Ignoring the local culture and customs may lead to catastrophic impacts on your brand image. To truly be expertise at localization, your company must adapt to the culture and avoid literal translation. Hiring translators could help your product message be literally understandable. However, it still leaves you with the difficulties of applying cultural context to your brand. Therefore, research to understand the context or similar activities is essentially required to utilize suitable words to describe your products.
You may find how important localization is when looking at the KFC slogan in China back in the 1980s. When the company opened its doors in Beijing, there is a mistranslation accidentally made when the original slogan “Finger-lickin’ good” became “Eat your fingers off”. To prevent similar blunders in your business, you should take the localization strategy into serious consideration with your language service providers.
There are a lot of aspects in localization that we should concentrate on than just translating the content. Several technical factors should be considered such as font size, the reading order, layout,… Since while users look into your content, they will prefer it to be presented naturally. For example, when you launch a new website for the Chinese market, you may still make the mistakes of using the same style and layout of the English version though the content has been carefully modified. Because the Chinese characters are larger than English characters for readability reasons, most of the text are expanded over the menu bar of the layout which may instill a sense of confusion and annoyance to potential Chinese customers.
On the other hand, Japanese characters seem to be shorter than other languages in expressing the same meaning. Therefore, it is necessary if translators could be provided illustration tool that includes a visual preview of the website, application, or software platform to easily see if any alteration is required to suit different languages.
Optimizing for Mobile Audience
It’s also wildly vital in today’s economy to ensure your digital assets are mobile-friendly. According to GSMA real-time intelligence data, “there are more than 8.97 billion mobile connections worldwide, which surpass the present world population of 7.71 billion implied by UN digital analyst estimates”. Hence, your online elements should be accessible for mobile viewing, translate precisely and support vivid navigation.
Omitting mobile development in your localization strategy may lead to severely hamper growth potential. It’s principally in markets where mobile growth is surging, such as the Middle East and Africa.
The number of Social Media users has been boosted in recent years thanks to the Internet connection. Through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are already famous on a global scale, some specific locales have their digital communities which should be discovered for an appropriate penetration plan.
For instance, WeChat is the largest social media platform in China with over 1 billion monthly active users. However, Facebook and Instagram are prohibited in this biggest country. Thus, any company intending to access the Chinese market should add Wechat to their list to communicate instantly with their potential customers.
When penetrating a new market, companies often assume that their pricing should be the same as the pricing for their domestic market. These firms always struggle in the initial stage due to the competitive price of existing local competitors. This could be solved by some adjustments such as re-packaging your product or by lowering (or raising) your price in specific markets where demand and supply allow it.
The vital key to your company’s pursuing success is localization. Understanding and adapting to the local culture of the individual market and translating diligently. If you are not sure where to start, or how to implement the localization strategy properly and smoothly, don’t hesitate to contact us. We will help you connect the dots!
