When you are considering translating your website for growth into new markets, it is vital that you apply localization alongside your translated content.
Translation will only offer a change in language – it does not account for local variances in cultural tastes such as, linguistic distinctions, image representation, significance of colour, and so on.
Localization of your website will consider all these factors, boosting your chances of success in your target market, and ensuring your brand is accepted by the new audience.
The benefits listed below highlight why localization of your website, product, service, and branding are essential before venturing into new territories.
1. Boosting Sales
As customers we prefer to purchase products, services, or goods online from a website that is written in our native language.
Based on a survey, undertaken by Common Sense Advisory, of more than 3,000 global consumers in 10 non-Anglophone countries in Europe, Asia, and South America, 75% prefer to buy products in their native language.
These figures highlight the need to appeal to customers in their native language, and show why so many leading companies are localising their websites, branding, and products.
For example, consider the burger chain McDonalds. They have fast food restaurants in 119 countries, with 65% of their revenue generated overseas. They quickly learnt that different countries, and regions, have specific food preferences, and tastes. As a result they now tailor their menus based on where the restaurant is located. For instance, in Asia, McDonalds offer its classic fries served with seaweed flavouring. And in India, where beef consumption is prohibited on religious grounds, they offer the Chicken Maharaja Mac, a Big Mac with spicy grilled chicken instead of beef.
This is localization, put into practise – tailoring products to target consumers with familiar, and recognisable qualities in a bid to increase sales, boost business, expand trade. For McDonalds, it is obviously working!
2. Customer Commitment vs Customer Churn
Localization triggers an emotional response from customers in a way that promotes your product. Listening to your customers (as with McDonalds in the example above) will allow you to satisfy their demands, and shows you are making a commitment to them. If you don’t know what they want, how can you fulfil their needs?
To avoid customer churn (when a customer purchases a product, but does not repeat buy) it is assumed that there is something about your product, or service, that didn’t connect with the customer. Encourage customer commitment through your localization efforts.
Localization will ensure that you are ‘speaking’ directly to your customers, appealing to their emotional buying responses, therefore, prompting repeat purchases.
3. Brand Reliability
Localization offers reliability for your brand. It will check for double meanings within slogans, logos, and product names, and offer suitable alternatives that will appeal to specific areas.
It should also take account of the less obvious, subliminal messages portrayed within your branding such as, colour, graphics, and numbers. If you are unaware of what is morally correct, or socially acceptable, to your target audience you can risk causing offence with inappropriate advertising, unsuitable images, or incongruous wording.
For example, if you are selling shampoo in an Arabic country you would not use an image of a woman with her hair uncovered in your promotional advertising, as this would cause offence in many Muslim countries.
Remember, what is normal, or acceptable in one country, is not always the same in another. Localization helps overcome these issues, ensuring your business gets off on the right foot in new territories.
Paying close attention to how international markets will receive your brand will boost sales, improve customer commitment, and encourage new purchasers.
Without localization your company risks wasting time, effort, and money on translating a website that is not likely to appeal to its target audience. Mistakes in branding can be costly, with product recalls, delayed launches, or an insulted target market.
Select a professional localization company to work with on your website translations, and this will pay dividends in the long run.
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