Translating your brand and localising it for a specific market is an essential process nowadays. What’s more, we know from experience that it generates an extremely positive ROI (return on investment), and it’s this information that will help you to establish whether your online marketing campaigns are having the expected impact in the target market.
But let’s start at the beginning.
If plans for your brand include expansion into a new market, translation is an essential step that you need to bear in mind. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ internationalisation strategy in which you just translate your website into English for various markets is no longer enough.
The localisation of website, catalogue and marketing campaigns in the language of the target market has benefits that a partial, English only, internationalisation strategy won’t have. How many times has an advert in English, targeted at a non English-speaking audience taken too long to produce results, or yielded less than was anticipated?
This is where professional native translators come into play.
We know that there is little point in having translations containing grammatical, terminological or even cultural errors that end up costing you, and which lead to mistrust from a potential client. A professional translation carried out by an experienced native qualified translator is the only acceptable option for avoiding wasted time and for achieving the desired results.
The fast turnaround times and the negligible cost of an automatic translation may be tempting, but you can’t ignore the problems it entails in the short and long term. Only a professional translator will know the best way to position your brand in their native language.
That said, with your brand translated and positioned in the target markets, what can you expect to happen?
Positioning is not an overnight thing. But in the days following the publication in different languages you should start receiving interesting new data.
Firstly, you’ll begin to notice how your website traffic increases. For your translated campaigns, you’ll also see an increase in visualisations of your ads and even how some of those views end in a click on your call to action buttons.
Another factor that will determine if this new market is generating the expected benefits or not is the number of users that visit and browse your website, and those that become new customers. How many users have taken a look at your catalogue? How many have abandoned the shopping basket? And the most important question: why have these things happened?
There are lots of variables within this situation. One of these, and the one stands out most when internationalising your brand, is the quality of the texts that you’re offering this new audience? At this point, the importance of a team of professional native translators, who can offer the required and expected quality, takes centre stage once again.
There are a number of the factors that engender trust in a new customer: the ability to make returns and/or the complexity of this process, the terms and costs of delivery, clear communication on the website, the catalogue, the marketing campaign aimed at the user, etc. and you shouldn’t neglect any of these.
A text that has been translated by a professional native translator will be create a positive first impression with users and be key to whether a potential customer decides to trust in your brand, as you’ll be effectively communicating with them in their own native language.
