These days marketing starts even before a product hits the shelf. With the right marketing plan and assets in place, you can build excitement for a product before it even launches. While good marketing can make a brand/product successful, bad marketing can lead to complete failure.
Imagine putting so much time, effort, and money into building the perfect marketing campaign only to have it lost in translation! It’s a marketing nightmare that can be avoided by localising your marketing assets.
What are marketing assets?
Marketing assets are digital materials a business creates to promote and market its products or services. Businesses use marketing assets to attract leads, build relationships and create brand awareness. Examples of marketing materials include brochures, emails, newsletters, websites, product packaging designs, case studies, presentations, ebooks, white papers, industry reports and even videos.
They play a crucial role in how a company is perceived and how potential customers interact with it. That’s why it’s vital to ensure these assets are correctly localised when expanding into new markets.
Why should you localise your marketing materials?
In any business setup, localising marketing materials is crucial as it helps you build trust with your clientele. Localising also helps to ensure that all your marketing messages are relevant and meaningful to your target audience, no matter where they are located. The key is to develop content that resonates with local customers and speaks directly to them.
Localised marketing materials have been proven to increase customer loyalty and trust, which translates into increased sales. Localised materials are more likely to be shared and talked about by potential customers.
Additionally, it makes your marketing and sales team much more effective. With the help of localised assets, they’ll be able to develop customer relationships and build trust with potential customers quickly.
How do you localise your marketing materials?
Localising your marketing materials can seem complicated. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are some steps you can take:
1) Conduct a thorough market research
Before you step into any market or take an additional step in it, start by conducting market research. This way, you will get to know your target audience’s culture, language and behaviour, which is crucial in creating effective localised materials. The best way to gain insights into a local market is to talk to local industry experts, utilise secondary government data, and conduct online surveys with your target consumers as the participants.
2) Pick a way to localise your marketing assets
Once you understand the local market, you can localise your content. This includes re-writing copy for different markets, considering the cultural and language nuances. Here you have three choices:
a) Machine translation
This is the fastest and cheapest way to translate your materials. However, quality can suffer if you don’t have someone to check for accuracy and consistency. Even with QAs in place, there is a high risk of errors. While the technology might improve in the future, it’s far from what human translators can do – at least for now. So, we highly recommend you opt for human translation services to ensure quality.
b) Creating a localisation team
The roles you might fill for this team include a project manager, content writer/copywriter, designer, SEO specialist, proofreader, QA reviewer, editor, etc. If the requirements are not big enough for a full-time team, you can also consider hiring freelancers for a few roles. This is a brilliant choice if you continuously need to create and publish marketing content extensively and have a big budget.
c) Outsourcing the localisation
If you don’t have the resources to build and manage your own team, consider outsourcing to an experienced localisation agency. The benefit of outsourcing is that you can get your marketing messages out quicker, as the process will be taken care of by professionals who already know the language, culture and customs. Working with an outside agency for localisation also gives you access to experienced professionals with a deep understanding of the local market.
At Translate By Humans, our translators are not only native speakers, but they have 5+ years of experience in translating and localising in the particular industry for companies of all sizes. A project manager will be assigned to you to ensure all your requirements are taken care of and that you get the highest-quality translation with a quick turnaround time. Are you curious how much that would cost? Get a free quote now.
No matter which option you choose, always review all materials before launching them in your target markets. Remember that localised materials should not only feel local but also sound like it! Check for grammar mistakes, spelling errors, cultural differences and even how different words can be interpreted by people from different regions.
3) Don't forget the visuals
It’s not enough if the material sounds local – it should also look local. You should change visual elements according to the target market. You could even localise your website or app design to look relatable in the respective markets. Imagine seeing a real estate ad trying to sell you a perfect family in their ideal home pitch, except the family looks nothing like yours. It won’t strike a chord with you, right? That’s why it is important to also pay attention to visuals, images and graphics.
4) Have a workflow in place
If localisation of marketing materials is going to be a regular affair for your business, then it’s best to have a workflow in place. This will help you keep track of assets, manage translation deadlines and monitor quality control. This will also be beneficial for you for scaling localisation efforts and maintaining consistency across different markets.
Creating marketing content that resonates with your target audience involves more than just translating copy. It’s essential to consider cultural and language differences, visuals and design elements, as well as have a workflow in place that allows you to plan and execute localisation strategies quickly and efficiently.
With Translate By Humans, you can rest assured that all your localisation needs will be taken care of, along with the best translation quality in the market. Get a free quote now and see how we can help you take your business to new markets!
