“It’s very easy to be different but very difficult to be better”, says Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer, Apple.
And in a global economy and a fully connected world, ‘better’ should know no limits, and it does not. If you’ve built something good, word travels and customers emerge from different corners of the globe. But it’s no easy feat to enter a new market and the costs for doing so should be meticulously planned and carefully allocated.
During planning, the focus usually falls on the regulatory landscape, the setup costs, and talent acquisition. Unfortunately, language access and support is usually overlooked over more tangible challenges, but if you consider that failing to address your new audience in their language would basically trump every other investment you are making, then maybe you would reconsider.
65% of consumers prefer content in their own language and 40% of consumers will not buy in other languages. Source: Can’t Read, Won’t Buy – B2C, CSA Research
Language access and support is relevant to pretty much every content an enterprise is going to make use in its expansion plans, from product to marketing to legal etc., but the approach should not be identical and horizontal.
There are many options to optimize the localization and translation costs when targeting foreign market segments, and here are some of them.
Of course the priority is going to be on the product, but if you think about it, this might not be the first content your targeted new audience is going to be in touch with when being introduced to your brand, could it?
It is important therefore, even at market research level, to identify all the content for translation and map it in your customer journey; this will help you prioritize content for localization depending on the impact it has on customer acquisition and product adoption.
Prioritization can relate to two aspects:
i. timeline
ii. investment
This means that content that is high visibility & impact and comes in early in the customer journey, such as your landing page or website, could be allocated higher budget and could need more planning ahead as it will require more time before it reaches the quality level you feel comfortable with.
Another item you will need to include in your international expansion to-do list is identify your localization partner or partners. While most companies will try to save budget through a DIY approach, especially at early stages, moving past one country and towards a true global reach will require know-how and capacity that internal staff simply don’t have.
Selecting a localization partner from the beginning is not only a way to ensure a sound local market strategy, but it could also be a great lever to cost saving when entering new markets.
Tip: don’t consume your evaluation process in test translations as they will not really tell you much about the capabilities of your partner. Instead test your partner in a minimum viable process to iron out any kinks, and incentivize interaction between stakeholders of your team and your partner’s team.
What you gain by planning:
What you ditch:
Time to market (TTM) is crucial until it is not 😉. Depending on the industry you belong to, the adjectives describing TTM might mean different things. In verticals that are high quality and products have longer lifecycles, such as in the Life Sciences and software, long TTMs are the norm – mainly because the implications of anything else could be severe. Translation thus can follow the same flow. In verticals where moderate quality levels offset for shorter lifecycles, such as the e-commerce space and internal communications, shorter TTMs increase your competitive advantage.
In both cases, language support is crucial and should be viewed as a revenue enabler. However, focus shifts on different content types depending on the sales targets. For example, if you are in tech or SaaS, then customer base growth and user adoption are your number one priorities to achieve market share, and this starts with a good product, hence you can prioritize product localization.
However, if you are targeting a depressed economy or a saturated market with little differentiation margin, then your market entry depends highly on branding. It is marketing and messaging that will help you establish identity and solidify market share. In this case, the localization budget should be targeted to marketing content and your messaging, and should ideally include more than just content translation. For example, by performing local SEO, you can better understand the digital landscape in your target market, and by implementing A/B testing in different localized copies, you can optimize your ad budget to gain the best return on your marketing budget for the target locale.
What you gain identifying the needs:
What you ditch:
Quality levels should be tiered according to content types and intended use. Therefore, moving away from localization metrics that focus on linguistic accuracy and correctness, or on time delivery, will save you time and face. Building your localization metrics around your target users and making it possible to measure it will provide meaningful feedback that will allow you to adjust your published content and retain customer satisfaction and user experience based on their expectations.
And these are just some ideas, but there are numerous other options you can try.
Besides gathering the data, another important thing is to create a feedback loop that starts with target audience and ends to your localization partner. This will help your partner validate user feedback, update their assets and integrate it in future translations, thus increasing customer satisfaction and lowering costs for local review and rework.
What you gain by leveraging your users’ input:
What you ditch:
Ultimately, the cost for entering a new market is not so easy to accurately calculate as there are many hidden costs that are not readily visible from a first look.
When it comes to reducing your localization costs when entering a new country, it ultimately boils down to:
There are ways and there are options – you just need to know which these are and make the most fitting one.
Entering a new market and need help with your localization strategy? Contact our friendly team today!
Vasso Pouli is currently the CEO at Commit Global after joining the company in 2006 as an intern. She is always intrigued by new possibilities and perspectives, and loves to engage in challenging conversations. She particularly enjoys a change-oriented environment, has an appetite for new ideas, and is attracted to challenges like a magnet.
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