Localization and globalization go hand-in-hand in the ever-growing technological landscape. As consumer markets grow and we become increasingly more interconnected with one another, localization becomes the key tool. Speaking the same language as your audience and market enables you to future-proof your campaigns on a level of personalization and omnichannel publishing.
The role of localization for marketers and content creators
When it comes to localizing your content, it’s not just about translating the copy. It requires adapting your content to communicate your brand to a local audience within your global marketing strategy.
With localization, your brand can focus on staying local, while keeping global – the goal to build awareness, access new markets and audiences, create demand, and thus, sales and conversions.
Whether that may be through language-specific reviews on your site, currency conversions, customer service, local payment preferences, date/time formats, adjusting left-to-right languages versus right-to-left languages, as well as social media content, visual cues in your user interface, lingo, and even the usage of emojis that best suit your audience’s market, a level of ‘transcreation’.
HINT: Transcreation is the act of adapting the meaning of your content and copy to resonate with a local market and its audience while staying true to your brand’s voice.
Through creating your content and digital marketing campaigns centered around your brand, customers expect more than before an all-in-one experience that connects and resonates with their values – a prime opportunity in turning your customers into brand advocates. A study found that 75% of buyers are more likely to purchase a product in a language that they understand.
For marketers and content creators, this can become a make-or-break opportunity in connecting with your audience in your campaigns, as well as the products or services that you sell. This is where omnichannel can come into play in aiding the process of connecting with your audience.
Omnichannel localization on one hand not only involves publishing your content in multiple languages but also understanding the channels and devices that best suit your audience.
This requires deploying content that spans across multiple devices and channels, whether that be websites, landing pages, email marketing, payment gateways, mobile apps, social media, or IoTs.
The power of a global omnichannel approach
With many brands shifting and moving away from the original brick-and-mortar establishments, having a consistent and seamless experience that allows your audience to switch between channels and devices is a must.
Omnichannel allows that switch to become a connected experience in your brand engaging with the customer. According to a Harvard Business Review survey, 73% of consumers use multiple channels throughout their customer journeys to make a purchase. On top of that, businesses that already have omnichannel campaigns are reported to achieve a 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rate.
Imagine the possibilities that can be achieved when localization comes into play to speak your omnichannel strategies in the language of your audience?
What are the benefits of localizing your digital marketing campaigns?
Creating a story that lives across channels and devices, yet breathes in the culture and lingo of your audience opens a plethora of possibilities into omnichannel storytelling and your marketing campaign. Here are the main reasons why you should consider localizing digital marketing campaigns:
1. Decrease your barrier to market-entry
While your brand could cast a wide net of access into a global market and different languages, your audience could get tongue twisted with your multilingual website, which can be easily fixed with localization.
Only 25.9% of interactions made online are in English, leaving the remaining 74.1% of other languages as a huge potential for other audiences and markets to tap into and understand.
Localization in this case allows you to access your market more easily, reducing any barriers previously, as your site would be ready and compatible with whichever language, region, content, and currency, while staying true to your brand’s identity and storytelling.
While some wording, imagery, references, and even color might pass in some countries, in others, this can be a big no-go and with some countries being unforgiving.
With plenty of epic fails in global branding you can look to, make sure to research and understand the language (dialects and local vocabulary), culture, cultural references, and audience of the market you want to target.
2. Improve your organic visibility
Website localization goes hand-in-hand with bringing the right message, at the right time, to the right audience. It also acts as an all-in-one into optimizing your content for international search engines.
Localizing your content, not only includes translating your copy, but also adjusting images to the market and including locally-searched keywords to the mix, thus aiding you in improving your rankings and SEO locally.
Make sure to stick with only one language per page, as Google bots/crawlers understand and determine the language of each of your pages.
While it ignores code-level language information such as “lang” attributes to Document Type Definitions (DTD), keep in mind that some web programs automatically create such attributes, thus making it not quite reliable when crawlers determine the language of your website.
The best rule of thumb to follow in this case is to make sure whichever content you localize, is search-engine ready for results to appear.
3. Brand identification amongst local market
As with any marketing translation campaign, it is how you position yourself in the market and audience. In the localization of your campaign and its content, this goes beyond just telling what your product or service does but finding a way to directly connect with the audience subtly as if your business were local. Think of it as a new market, as an opportunity for a new brand attribute to adapt and create to your new market.
For example, McDonald’s is known worldwide for the fast-food empire that it is. Yet, when it came to expanding outside the United States, McDonald’s success owes itself to understanding their market and adapting accordingly (opening a vegetarian McDonald’s in India), seeing which existing product resonates and is desirable to your market (McDonald’s fries and sundaes), adapting their products to the market’s taste (South Korea’s bulgogi hamburger).
How does Storyblok’s CMS and Lokalise’s localization come hand-in-hand to go-to-market?
While many businesses miss how crucial it is to engage with your global audience through localization, content needs to be transient in upholding the same quality across all your channels and devices as you strive for omnichannel publishing.
This means, any translation and cultural interpretation that you take on, must match throughout the omnichannel experience.
This can be quite difficult when it comes to monolithic, or traditional content management systems, which makes you localize each piece of content and device separately. However, with a Headless CMS like Storyblok there’s an easy way to organize all your content in one place, and publish it anywhere.
By connecting Storyblok with Lokalise, you can go even further and simplify the process of creating, managing, and publishing content in multiple languages.
Here’s why you should consider Storyblok and Lokalise as your marketer’s and content editor’s dream setup.
Storyblok is the central place where your marketing team and editors can work on any new marketing campaign. All of your content is safely stored, managed, and orchestrated in one place with the help of a visual editor. Depending on your campaign setup, changes can be high and frequent, as your campaign will be run on multiple channels. This could involve omnichannel publishing to:
- Website (Landing Pages)
- Web apps
- Mobile apps
- Smart devices such as smartwatches, voice assistants, and VR/AR
- Messenger services
- Retail screen displays
Then you have Lokalise as your one-stop centralized localization and translation management platform. Paired with Storyblok’s content management system and publishing capabilities, push your content, start your localization and translation workflows with local editing for your marketing teams with Lokalise.
When your content is localization-ready, push it (export) back to Storyblok easily to always have your content in-sync and up to date for your marketing campaigns.
Here are some features to look forward to using Lokalise:
- Collaborative translations
- Localization workflow management
- Localization process automation into delivery workflow
- Translation quality assurance
- In-context editing – see real-time how changes in translations look on web or mobile
Key takeaway
Localization is not a one-time thing and requires constant revision as your market, audience, trends, and consumer habits changes.
However, you can bet that incorporating localization into your marketing strategy will enable you to not only tap into new brand attributes and markets but will evolve to become a part of your brand’s identity as you keep growing.
Lokalise integration with Storyblok is a step into staying ahead amongst a competitive market existing both locally and globally. Storyblok’s modern headless CMS gives you the flexibility you need to embrace the future of omnichannel publishing for your marketing strategies.
As Nelson Mandela famously said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language that goes to his heart.”
