The world steadily becomes digital, a little bit at a time. Indeed, with internet users accounting for more than half of our planet’s population, considering the audience on the internet becomes vital regardless of what you do. Reaching greater audiences around the world is a win situation today, yet it requires some additional effort and investment. There is a couple of solid marketing tricks that will help you keep your feet on the ground regardless of what part of the world you target and what kind of business you do. However, there’s one thing that can largely boost your presence and does not require too much investment, thus, becoming one of the most efficient and reasonable steps to take in your business.
Translation and Localization are the Modern Gods of Online Presence
Yes, translating your content online does a lot of work for your presence on the internet. Any translation knowledge base will tell you that language is quite an important aspect of human life, so integrating it in the business, especially today, when nearly everything gets internationalized, is more than reasonable. Yet, while translation might do a great job for your business, there’s one thing that’s much better in this regard ad that’s localization.
The translation is a great thing for the internal purposes of your business, yet, as you go communicating your audience and set up your PR campaign, there’s no better helper than localization. Essentially, localization takes the translation of your content to another level adapting it to the cultural norms of the country and, hence, the audience you target. As a result, your potential customers will prefer your product or brand because they’ll find it more relatable and familiar to them. So, localization requires not only quite a skill in translation but also some creativity. Here are just a couple of ideas that might help you get your localization up and running well.
1. Use relevant dialects. As you plan your international campaign, you must decide what audience to target. And when you want to take a less risky way or simply enter new territory, you might consider aiming locally. That means that you should target not the whole country but rather a separate region. Should you decide to do this, you should make sure that your website can be perceived properly by the audience of that particular region. This is not only about European and Latin American Spanish, for instance. Spain itself is full of regional dialects, like Catalan, which has lots of specifics and is somewhat different from the standard Spanish language.
2. Localize visual content. An image is worth over 1,000 words indeed. People perceive visual information much better than textual, so inserting a picture into your website is a superb idea. And making that picture not only readable but also recognizable to your audience does even a better job. Translate the text that appears in the image, make sure that people look familiar to your audience (i.e. don’t put fair-skinned and fair-haired people if that’s not typical for the region you target), or adjust to the consumer and buying habits of your audience.
3. Adjust the website’s design. As your content changes, the user interface of your website must also follow suit. Every button has to fit the text conveniently for the user, the orientation (left-to-right or right-to-left) must be considered, and other details like time zone and currency have to be adjusted so that your customers could feel at home.
4. Localize your SEO. While search engine optimization is a good thing to consider alone, internationalizing it is an even greater idea. As you optimize your content to drive the traffic to your website, you essentially strengthen your presence and increase your reach. And when you do that in another country, your presence increases by the number of users that you can potentially attract in that country. Yet, SEO is not the easiest feat regarding translation, so you might need to go beyond the automatic or machine translation. Which brings us to the last but still pretty important point.
5. Address human professionals for localization. As you have probably noticed, localization is a rather creative process, so it cannot be fully trusted by the machines. Working with human professionals is the only way here really as it offers all the flexibility and creativity you need. For instance, if you work with leisure and entertainment content, you can pick the best video game localization agency to work on your project and produce the most fitting and efficient result for you. Such specialists will very unlikely let you down and you’ll be able to figure any issues with them should any arise.
Localization is the Key… But It Requires Some Investment
Yes, even if you list all possible benefits of localization, the free of charge status will not be one of them. However, all the investment you’ll make in this direction will worth every penny for sure. Being a highly creative process related to language and cultural flexibility, localization can provide you with the greatest audience you’d ever see at a relatively low cost. Although it might not seem like it, localization is quite common today, so it won’t be too costly and will take nearly as much as a simple translation.
