Commerce Leaders Must Pivot from Global to Multi-Local Experiences | Smartling

The trend is clear: Consumers seek and prefer brands that reflect their personal values. As a result, leading brands have to adapt their digital marketing strategies to make local beliefs, preferences, and regulations a priority – especially because more than half of online adults agree that they are willing to try new local brands.

How can you ensure that your brand is resonating with your customers’ values? By getting ahead of the disruption and evolving your digital experience program with multilocal execution.

This webinar led by Sonja Keerl, Global Head of Product Marketing at Contentstack; Ryan Soos, Customer Success Team Lead at Smartling; and Eli Finkelshteyn, CEO & Founder at Constructor, covers:

• Why moving from global to multi-local experiences is both urgent and critical for future success
• How to empower local execution
• Ways to leverage the latest technology to accelerate your journey across: Content Experience, Translation and Localization, and Insights-driven personalization.

Please fill out the form above to watch the webinar on-demand.

Trends & Urgency: Moving from Global to Multi-Local

In localization programs, many of us focus on streamlining processes, product rollout, content marketing on a global level, and so on and miss the nuances big and small when we talk to our local audiences.

Today, being local matters to your audience more than it did before. The pandemic has rekindled a trend in consumers to want to shop local. 54% of the US adults online say they would prefer to buy products made in the US after the pandemic. 42% agree that they would rather shop at small local stores than big national chains. Consumer habits have changed, and that is how they want to be approached by brands today.

These stats could be frustrating if you’ve been working hard for years to build a global brand. After all, it is not realistic for all of us to be that local brand. But what we can do is to understand and behave in local ways. And there exists an opportunity: 71% of Italian online adults agree that companies should focus on improving local communities, and 53% of UK and US adults online agreed that they are always willing to try new brands.

How to Go from Global Mindset and Enable Local Trust and Autonomy

• Be open to a truly global mindset
• Create opportunities to make global connections
• Empower local execution through trust and autonomy
• Iterate and innovate your local brand with a localized product portfolio
• Embrace agility with small multidisciplinary and cross-functional teams

How to Close the Global Digital Marketing Gap

• Use digital to sync local offline and online experiences
• Invest in insights-driven personalization
• Activate emotional content that adapts to consumers’ local touchpoints

“Monolithic digital commerce applications cannot support the agility and flexibility needed to support fast-moving digital business. Organizations will need to move toward composable commerce to keep up with the pace of change in customer demand.” - Gartner Research

New Way of Localization and Translation

In order to hyper-localize or approach with a more multi-local strategy, consider:

• Transcreation allows your linguists to have more creative freedom when taking the content from one language to another. Typically, transcreation is utilized best with creative pieces such as marketing materials, branded content, CTA, slogan, ads, etc., where you have to keep the source text’s original intent and impact rather than the literal meaning of the text.
• Quality Translation - Quality can be subjective. Three people might say three different things to mean one thing. As a marketer, when you’re thinking about words you want to put out there in your digital content landscape, you need to ask yourself who you’re targeting and how you want to speak to them in order to produce quality translations.
• Linguistic Assets - You can create unique style guides for each locale to let your translators know what tone and audience you are trying to hit for those specific locales. For example, how is your Spanish-speaking audience in Spain different from those in Argentina? Your linguistic assets such as style guides and glossaries can help convey how you want to communicate your message to those audiences in different locations.

How to Pick Up the Pace in Translation Processes

Utilize the Translation Management System

• Translation Memory
• Machine Translation
• Transcreation Tool
• Linguistic Assets

Work together with your LSP

• Service Level Agreement with LSP
• Set Expectations
• Constant Communication

When working with an LSP, transparent communication is key. They will likely not get the translation perfectly right the first time, but the idea is to have an open feedback loop throughout the translation process. That way, you can make revisions throughout the translation process and optimize results.

To learn more about Smartling's Contentstack integration, please click here.