Your company may want to scale to a new local market or better connect with your current multilingual audiences. How companies communicate with target audiences, especially through marketing, shapes how customers view their brands and how much companies can grow.
Like every part of business operations, the process matters. Marketing translation workflows should be efficient and consistent and should connect with audiences.
But that's easier said than done.
Accurate translations are almost impossible without the right strategy, workflow, and tools. Without these, you'll have to deal with thousands of hours of labor and high costs in addition to accuracy challenges.
Thankfully, companies can leverage innovative translation management solutions and AI-powered human translation services to create high-quality marketing translations that scale with company growth and connect with audiences in their native language.
Together, we'll explore how you can establish an efficient, consistent, and affordable marketing translation system for your global marketing efforts and reap the benefits of an improved localization strategy.
Marketing translation is when a business translates marketing messages, like ads, marketing campaigns, blog content, and more, for a global audience. This process helps companies communicate and connect with audiences from different cultures in their native language. Companies that adopt a successful marketing translation approach can market to multilingual audiences, which increases their success rate and sales.
When businesses adopt effective translation strategies, they can anticipate several benefits:
Unfortunately, not all marketing translation projects are equal. Results can vary dramatically when it comes to the translation process and the final product.
Without an effective translation strategy, companies face considerable challenges:
As you prepare for a better marketing translation process, it's critical to consider the different types of marketing materials you’ll need to translate for your overall localization strategy.
While every type of business has marketing commonalities, B2B and B2C brands in particular may need to consider different marketing translation mediums and strategies.
B2B marketing translations often focus on education, insight, thought leadership, and practical industry takeaways. If companies want to maintain and grow their brand authority and credibility, they need to ensure that they can translate these materials accurately. Common B2B marketing materials include:
Translated content should not only accurately communicate the source message but should also emotionally connect with the audience. Businesses can produce better results by emphasizing emotional pain points in the translated text that prospects throughout each marketing campaign and across all content types can identify with.
While B2C companies provide essential, valuable material to customers, they also entertain and encourage positive emotions through engaging marketing experiences. Their strategies primarily involve social media translation and interactive marketing touchpoints.
Naturally, these kinds of interactions often require different types of marketing mediums and platforms. Common B2C marketing materials include: Videos
How exactly do you create and improve upon your marketing translation system?
It's essential to simplify the process. Many companies make mistakes by juggling different apps and working with inconsistent or unqualified local translators.
With that in mind, the best solution is to adopt an all-in-one translation management solution. A platform that also provides professional local translation services is even more beneficial since you can then use a single translation partner for your entire process. This approach guarantees consistent, high-quality translations and helps your company build an optimized workflow.
Your translation workflow is essential for providing effective localized communication. Oleg Segal, CEO of DealA, a global online coupon company, provided Smartling with his experience in improving the process for a local culture:
“The effectiveness of translations directly impacts our customer connect[ions] and conversions. Investing in professional localization, not just literal translation, has taught us the importance of subtleties in language and culture. […]
“Translating marketing materials isn't always about being linguistically accurate—sometimes, it’s about being culturally correct. For example, idioms and phrases which make sense in one language may not have the equivalent meaning in another. […]
“A common pitfall [for us] was overlooking the cultural contexts initially. Once we translated an English catchphrase, it turned out to be offensive in a certain culture. […] To overcome this, we started involving native cultural consultants in the translation workflow, aiding us in preventing similar missteps in [the] future.”
By recognizing each target culture’s nuances and incorporating efficient translation and localization processes, Segal successfully produced more effective translations. ![How to create a better marketing translation workflow]
(//images.ctfassets.net/a8pkciehvm1g/1otfqtqEGfNiOlYzg3RCSZ/13c4d4b0ad385b7c5c4e1e72acf4e5b6/marketing_translation_workflow.png) *Follow these simple steps to improve your translation process.*
There are many more ways to enhance your localized marketing approach. As you develop your marketing translation plan, consider the following steps to get started:
How many pieces of marketing copy and content do you need to translate? Do you already have translated materials? And if so, do they meet the local audience’s standards? These questions are essential to understanding your present condition and getting started.
You can start the process by focusing on core marketing materials. By identifying the highest return on investment marketing activities, you can improve your output by prioritizing the most important tasks within each marketing translation project.
During this process, you can also build a vision and goals for improving your brand’s presence in each multilingual market.
The proper translation management solution helps you speed up the process, increase accuracy, and lower marketing translation costs.
Translation management platforms make your localization strategy scalable. You don't have to limit your vision for marketing expansion. Instead, you can use translation technologies to manage translations, translate billions of words with neural machine translation tools, and communicate with local markets without barriers like low speed and high costs.
If you want to scale worldwide, you need to combine technology with human experts. At Smartling, we believe in the advantage of AI-powered human translators. You can get fast, affordable, and in-context translations by combining advanced AI technologies with local, native-speaking expert translators.
These expert translators rely on technology to translate foundational source text. By doing so, they can spend more of their time on complex cases and ensure that translated content authentically and accurately represents your brand. After all, no one can communicate better with a local audience than someone who knows them and speaks their language.
Translation management software and an expert localization and translation team can consistently monitor and perform quality assurance on your translation process. If you continually tweak and optimize translations for each target language, you can continue to grow and scale by better connecting with target audiences and local markets. Enhance your workflows with Smartling's solutions
With Smartling’s translation management system, you can grow your business faster by translating content for and communicating with more local markets. You can also assign content to translation workflows, notify users of new content, monitor translation progress and costs, and upload and optimize linguistic resources. It’s the perfect solution for a ready-to-go translation system.
Additionally, marketing teams can take full advantage of Smartling’s professional translation services. Smartling provides native-speaking expert translators who partner with the latest AI technologies. With these AI-powered, high-quality human translations, brands can serve their markets with confidence, knowing that they are communicating using the best possible translations.
Smartling also includes state-of-the-art machine translation technology so you can translate billions of words in seconds at the highest possible quality. Using these, as well as Smartling’s other critical technologies and localization services, you can confidently reach your target markets.
Smartling has the tools and services to win over your target audience and make the sale. Watch this five-minute demo to see how you can leverage Smartling’s AI-powered translators, translation management system, and localization services to craft high-performing marketing translations.