A potential customer in Tokyo sees your clever slogan. But it’s written in English for an Australian audience and makes zero sense to a Japanese person.
The buyer — puzzled and unimpressed — browses your website for a few seconds before closing the tab.
Another sale that slipped away from your hands.
The culprit? Lack of content localization.
Localized content means you speak your buyers’ language — whether that’s Chinese, Russian, Spanish, or something else. You can connect more deeply with your target audience by tailoring your content to their cultural preferences, local context, and behaviors.
In this guide, we’ll give the nuts and bolts of content localization and share our best practices for building a strategy.
💪🏻 Build a content localization strategy like a pro
Check out our free content localization template and follow along as we break down the best practices to build a foolproof strategy.
What is content localization?
Content localization is the process of adapting content to fit different cultural contexts, languages, and regions. More than simply translating content from one language to another, this process revamps your entire brand to resonate more deeply with customers and create delight across international markets.
Localizing content involves a mix of cultural and technical aspects, such as:
- Infusing culturally relevant and acceptable humor
- Using local currency, measurements, and other conventions
- Changing taglines and micro-copy based on cultural nuances
- Recreating images, emojis, and media assets in line with the local culture
- Ensuring compliance with local regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California
Let’s dig deeper to understand how web content localization differs from translation.
How is localization different from translation?
Think of translation as learning to speak a new language, while localization is learning to live in a new culture.
Translation essentially involves converting content from one language to another. You can translate content word-for-word or put in the extra effort to create culturally relevant translations with familiar phrases and references.
However, when you localize content, you have to modify your brand experience to feel native to your target market. Add cultural nuances, factor in local preferences, and adapt to market-specific customer behavior.
In short: Localizing content takes you way beyond just vocabulary.
💡 Translation vs. Localization
Learn how these two approaches differ from each other and when you can use each one with this deep-dive guide. You’ll discover all the subtle differences and understand them with examples.
What is content localization software?
Content localization software is a specialized platform to streamline your localization effort. This software becomes a command center for localizing your content.
A good content localization platform includes a Translation Management System (TMS).
This is a centralized hub where your translation memories live, and a database of your assets is stored. A TMS makes it easy to coordinate with external translators and give them access to your content ecosystem.
The right content localization software also helps you:
- Automating your localization workflows (no more endless email chains)
- Creating a collaborative space for in-house teams and external partners
- Tracking performance metrics to see what’s working and what needs improvement
Now that we’ve cleared the basics, let’s look at different scenarios when you need content localization.
When you should localize content for your brand
Content localization isn’t a weekend project you can knock out in a single sprint.
Before pouring your time, effort, and money into this, take a step back and decide if localizing your content makes strategic sense for your business.
Here are a few scenarios when web content localization can fuel business growth in new markets.
You want to build trust and loyalty
Brands localize content for one compelling reason: earning their audience’s trust.
When you speak your customers’ language, they feel seen and heard. You can establish a more organic connection to build a genuine, long-term relationship.
The payoff? You become a familiar, trustworthy brand rather than a tone-deaf foreign entity.
Whether customers are signing up, making purchases, or joining your community, localized content makes them comfortable buying whatever you’re selling. And that trust compounds into long-term loyalty.
You want to scale your SEO game
Once you’ve translated your content into different languages for your target markets, you should start ranking for keywords in the target language.
Take a look at ‘baby clothes,’ for example.
In Germany, the majority of searches are in German, as you’d expect. If you haven’t translated your landing pages and blog posts into German, the chances of ranking in this local market are slim.
As a result, you might miss out on a huge volume of traffic and potential sales from organic search.
📝 Localizing content for SEO
Find our best practices for long-form content localization to level up your international SEO efforts across different markets.
You want to increase traffic and engagement
Here’s a fact to chew on: About half of all Google searches are multilingual.
People prefer searching in their native tongue. By localizing content, you tap into this massive demand and potentially increase your search traffic.
Beyond organic search, research suggests that 65% of people want to consume content in their own language rather than generic, one-size-fits-all content. That’s a huge opportunity to scale engagement on social media platforms.
From likes and comments to shares, a new audience is more likely to engage with content they can relate to and understand.
You want to improve the customer experience
One of the main goals of a content localization strategy is to create customer delight.
Whether potential customers are reading your blog, navigating product pages, or chatting with your sales and support teams, the experience should feel authentic from start to finish.
This means you have to create a consistent customer journey across all touchpoints, not just the homepage or checkout flow. True localization creates an immersive experience where every interaction is tailored to customers’ preferences and cultures.
You want to gain a competitive advantage
Localizing content can also help you one-up the local competition.
Analyzing competitors will reveal localization opportunities to better appeal to potential customers and improve your positioning.
For example, if you’re based in the US, you might think that creating content in English is enough.
But a closer look at the local players will tell you that they also target the Hispanic community, which represents nearly 20% of the US population. So, it’s important to understand whether this group of potential buyers prefers to consume content in Spanish or English.
7 proven content localization strategies to fuel global growth
Now that basics are out of the way, let’s get down to business.
We’ll cover seven best practices to build your content localization strategy. Download our free content localization template to follow along.
1. Create a localization team and set goals
You need to involve individuals from different teams to execute localization effectively. Designate a team member from each department to own a part of the strategy.
The payoff? Better collaboration and process alignment across the organization.
Who should you include?
- Designers, so they can design defensively and choose culturally relevant images.
- Developers, so they understand the code implications for multiple languages.
- Marketers, so they can craft campaigns that work across markets.
- Product managers, so they can stay on top of deadlines and markets.
- Business leaders, so they can see how localization fits into their tactical perspective.
Once your localization team is set, bring everyone to the whiteboard for a goal-setting exercise.
Clearly outline your goals for content localization and align them with each team’s priorities, work methods, and standards.
For instance, your marketing team can work toward the objective of driving regional engagement on social media. On the other hand, your product team can prioritize improvements in the product interface for better feature adoption among specific language users.
Fill out these sections in our template when you complete this step:
2. Identify target markets and define localization needs
Identify target markets where localization efforts will yield the greatest return on investment.
You have to consider factors like market size, growth potential, effort, competitive landscape, and cultural affinity with your brand.
Categorize all your target markets into three groups based on the degree of localization your customers expect:
- Low: Customers don’t mind experiencing your brand and product in a non-native language
- Medium: Customers expect some degree of localization to resonate with your brand
- High: Customers might feel alienated if you don’t offer a fully localized experience
This categorization will allow you to set expectations with stakeholders and sponsors for the efforts you put into supporting market entry and growth.
Keep in mind that the degree of localization can vary significantly across markets and languages.
Localization expectations can also vary across different touchpoints based on many factors.
In markets with high competition, you need deeper localization at every step of the customer journey to establish a genuine connection with buyers. But you can simply localize content assets when entering emerging markets.
The key is to strategically allocate resources where they’ll create the most impact.
A good question to ask yourself is: What extent of content localization would be enough for prospects in [add your target market here] to buy our product?
Write down your observations, make assumptions, and come to conclusions to understand the degree of localization that’s necessary.
Here’s a good example:
- Observation: In some non-English speaking countries, conversion is very similar or even higher compared to English-speaking markets
- Assumption: High levels of education and income are highly correlated with English language proficiency → High overlap between our target segment and the English-speaking population in some countries
- Conclusion: Localization is beneficial in countries with a low level of English but a high level of education and income
Once you’ve come to conclusions for each of your target markets, map out the degree of localization needed for different touchpoints.
3. Prioritize content and choose assets to localize
The more elements you want to localize, the more skills are needed to do it. Naturally, coordinating with multiple stakeholders will take more time and effort to get the final product.
The result: higher costs.
That’s why you should remember that you don’t have to localize everything straight away.
Estimate the profitability of your localization efforts and prioritize high-value, low-effort initiatives.
Maybe you can start with the easiest markets that are not necessarily the most profitable. This will help you experiment, learn from your mistakes, and maximize your chances of success when you enter markets with more complex localization needs.
For example, it’s a lot easier to translate from English into Spanish than into Arabic. You don’t need to change the layout across all customer touchpoints to accommodate for the fact that the language is written right to left.
What types of content can you localize?
You can localize all types of content, from customer emails and paid media ads to product UI and packaging. Below, we’ve focused on the most popular types of content you can localize.
Marketing collateral
Marketing translation is a strategic decision. Localizing your go-to-market collateral shows a commitment to understanding your local customers’ needs and preferences.
This involves aligning content with cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions, and regional sensitivities. At the same time, you need to stay consistent with your brand’s tone of voice, and messaging. You might also need to localize videos, images, and designs.
Product UI, packaging, and more
Design-stage localization is a powerful way to continuously release fully localized products like mobile apps, web apps, and games.
When you design with localization in mind, designers can create their prototypes and mockups in Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD, populate them with different languages, and check how the design will look with different translations early in the process.
That means your designer can adapt the design and UI to suit different locales before a single line of code is written.
Sales and support content
Sales and support localization span customer emails, transactional emails, surveys, help documents, and chats, adapting language tone, formality, and idiomatic expressions to local communication styles.
Localization complexity varies based on the content type, whether personal, like chat support, or impersonal, like help docs.
Legal & financial material
When expanding to new markets, localizing legal and financial content is essential. This includes terms and conditions, data security regulations, payslips, contracts, etc. Merely translating this content is not enough because legislation, employment benefits, and formats vary between regions.
You’ll need financial and legal localization experts in each region or country to ensure compliance with local regulations and standards.
Prioritize content with our template
Instead of localizing everything all at once, take a phased approach to maintain good quality. Use this section of our content localization template to categorize your assets into four stages of priority.
4. Create a content localization roadmap
Managing content localization is no small task, especially if you’re handling large volumes of content in multiple languages.
Planning, timing, and coordinating all the preparation activities and estimating when localization can/should start is challenging. That’s why localization preparation needs its own roadmap.
Here’s one we created after lots of trial and error:
- Preparing the groundwork (Q1): Focus on chalking out your content localization strategy. You want to create a strong business case for this project to get stakeholder buy-in. This is also a good time to start outlining your roadmap for this project.
- Building workflows and partnerships (Q2): You have to be ready with a scope of work document for your localization project. Then, evaluate and finalize a Translation Management System (TMS). You can also start thinking about localized packaging designs and find localization partners (if required) in your target market.
- Execution and launch planning (Q3): This is when your localization efforts come to life. Centralize everything with a localization dashboard and put things in motion, like publishing your localized website. You can also start planning the launch strategy for each market.
- Documentation and guidelines (Q4): The final phase of your roadmap focuses on documenting everything. You want to create content creation and translation guidelines with branded glossaries. You can also build a localization kit to simplify the process in the future.
The bottom line: Content localization has many moving parts. You’ll most likely manage content across central and local teams. Having a roadmap helps plan your localization process properly while making sure it aligns with wider company goals.
5. Document everything in a localization kit
The easiest way to future-proof your content localization strategy is to identify challenges early and document everything. This way, your team knows how to proactively plan for and tackle these challenges.
Prepare documentation, outline processes, create QA checklists, and anything else that will make localization workflows a lot smoother.
If you don’t already have a brand style guide, create one. This is fundamental for marketing, product, and design teams, as well as translators.
Your style guide should include information about:
- Your tone of voice and whether it’s friendly, formal, or something in between
- Specific conventions and elements of grammar to avoid, such as contractions
- Your brand personality traits and what it’d be like if it were a person
- A glossary of industry or company terms, acronyms, and phrases
- Examples of competitors you like or dislike and why
- Colors and design elements you use and how
Since multiple translators, marketers, and designers will work on this project, a style guide can bring everyone on the same page.
🎨 Grab our style guide template
Struggling to create a localization style guide? Check out our free style guide template with rules, best practices, and examples to create a stellar guide for your brand.
6. Build a seamless localization workflow
Translations often go through multiple rounds of feedback. If you’re translating the UI, translations happen as the product is being developed.
This means that once new iterations are released, content localization teams will need to work simultaneously on the changes happening in the product. You need a flexible and adaptable workflow to keep up with this iterative localization process.
Outline the localization process within your organization, including how you’ll weave localization into your current processes.
Answer these questions:
- Will you use agile methodologies?
- Will you use AI translations to speed up your translation process?
- Which tools will you use? Will you use a translation management system for example?
- What about quality assurance measures to ensure accuracy, consistency, and cultural sensitivity in localized content?
A good localization workflow typically involves uploading assets, translation, review, and delivery.
Each step involves many stakeholders and processes. Without proper coordination, you run the risk of creating dependencies and slowing down your entire operations.
That’s why it’s best to automate communication and handoffs with tools like Lokalise.
Lokalise gives you a centralized hub for managing all content localization projects. You can also build automated workflows to build a well-oiled localization machine. Plus, the platform integrates well with advanced automation tools that allow you to weave localization into your workflow.
7. Estimate the success of content localization
So, you’ve launched your localized content in new markets. But how do you know if it’s actually working?
Without proper tracking, you might just be throwing darts in the dark. That’s why you need to monitor performance consistently to discover what’s working (and what’s not).
Here are a few steps for creating a performance tracking workflow:
- Set your baseline: Review your current performance in a target market and create a baseline for metrics that matter, like website traffic, social media engagement, user sign-ups, and more.
- Create market-specific dashboards: Set up a different dashboard for every target market to track performance separately and compare the data to find meaningful insights.
- Schedule regular reviews: Create weekly, monthly, and quarterly check-ins at different scales. Analyze data proactively to steer your strategy towards maximizing localization ROI.
- Compare against competitors: How do your localized assets stack up against local businesses? Benchmark your performance against competitors to get a better idea of where you stand in each market.
You can track metrics like incremental sales, organic search rankings, and conversion rates to get a better idea of your localization success.
Content localisation case study: CoachHub’s global growth story
Businesses across 90 countries use CoachHub to create personalized coaching programs.
But CoachHub’s rapid international growth hit a snag when its manual and error-prone localization process couldn’t keep up.
Teams struggled with a patchwork of manual workflows and tools. This led to inconsistent translations in Word docs, poor quality output, and disconnected operations with zero scalability.
Something had to change.
That’s when CoachHub started using Lokalise.
Lokalise helped CoachHub build a fully integrated and scalable localization infrastructure. Its array of content assets, like articles, course material, and visuals, are available in a centralized hub. So, all its language partners (agencies and freelancers) can easily access content in one place.
The team also integrates Lokalise with its CMS, Storyblock. Isabelle C.V. Bayer, Senior Content Manager, shares how this integrated setup helps the team.
“The direct integration between Lokalise and Storyblok gives us the opportunity to figure out the status of content when it comes to Storyblok and track progress when it comes to translations. This is a huge benefit because localization is especially challenging when content is spread out across emails, files, cloud services, task managers, spreadsheets, chats, meetings, and so on. Critical information can get misplaced or even lost.”
Lokalise’s 50+ integrations also make it pretty seamless to onboard new language service providers and build flexibility into their operations.
Using Lokalise to streamline its content localization effort has enabled the team to double the number of languages available. It has also freed up 25% of their time with greater efficiency.
More importantly, localized content has significantly increased NPS and customer satisfaction.
Sign up on Lokalise for free to level up your content localization efforts.
