One of the biggest challenges an organization can take upon is to expand its business to a global scale. The purpose behind this initiative is to attract new customers.
Acquiring new customers not only increases sales but also allows the management to experience foreign business cultures.
Despite the challenges of expanding into a new market, such as the language barrier, businesses can succeed by understanding and meeting the needs of their target customers.
Therefore, the real question is how one can break the language barrier.
Business and marketing experts around the world have only one answer to this question, and that is “Localization”.
Localization is the process of adapting the content specifically for the target market. This generally increases relatability for the consumer. And they are able to understand the message and proposition of the business more clearly.
This article will provide the ultimate guide to localization. And we will also discuss how the process of localization increases sales worldwide. But there are certain factors that one must understand and implement if he wants to expand his business internationally.
Content
Often businesses fail to capture foreign markets, mainly due to the cultural clash that takes place. Though expansion leads to higher sales, it comes with numerous risks as well.
Hence, some of the leading businesses that were able to successfully localize their business recommend that an organization should always start steadily.
Starting slow means that one should penetrate markets in those regions and states where they have prior experience or are somewhat familiar with the intricacies of the market.
After capitalizing on a familiar market, businesses learn from their errors and mistakes. Their mistakes give them the opportunity to learn and improve their strategies.
After learning from mistakes, the next step would be to penetrate into lesser-known regions to occupy the untapped market. However, research is compulsory before you do that.
Conclusively, you will be able to expand your operations and presence to new regions, one by one, with the help of localization.
Interdepartmental communication barriers often restrict global expansion. However, if localization is done properly, it reduces the chances of that ever happening again.
Management needs to understand that business expansion is directly related to the effective internal communication taking place between the departments. Hence, it is the responsibility of the organization to first seek what possible issues may come during global expansion. And ensure that they do not translate into the localization process.
If the problems being faced by the companies affect the external operations of the business, the customer will never accept your business operations.
People often limit the scope of the word “content’. They think that it only pertains to the written words on your website. This notion is not completely true.
Content also constitutes images and other mediums of media such as video and graphical representation. Undoubtedly, one cannot translate a visual image. On the contrary, an image can surely be localized. And not just image, but your entire media channels.
The thing organizations should understand when localizing their media is that they are targeting a culture. A culture that has its own set of values, language preferences, traditions, religious intricacies, and nuances.
Hence, the localized media channels should align with the target culture rather than offending or discarding their priorities.
The aftermath of localizing the media channels for specific regions is that it enables you to engage and charm your target audience effectively. Moreover, if you propose something that is alien to the target audience, they might not be able to relate to it.
This will leave a bad impression, and a negative word of mouth, which may eventually lead to you pulling off your business operations from that target market.
Hence, it’s imperative to improve your localization strategy so that events like this do not take place.
Though English is the lingua franca of the world, people always trust business offerings in their own native language. If you are unable to conceptualize this statement let’s review some statistics.
As of October 2021, there are 4.9 billion people who use the internet globally. That is around 63% of the world’s total population. Out of these, 26% of the total internet users constitute native English speakers. Whereas, 73% prefer surfing websites that are in their native language.
This is a crucial aspect that firms often misperceive. They believe that just because English is spoken widely, people prefer it over their local language. If that was the case people would not translate a webpage page via Google Translate into their local language.
This may lead to an inaccurate depiction of what you are trying to convey to your audience.
Therefore, if you don’t want a third party to translate for you, it’s better to do it yourself. This will ameliorate your global reach. However, the next question is, in how many languages one must translate his business website?
According to certain research, multilingual websites that offer content to their customers in over 14 languages have the potential to tap 91% of the eCommerce market. Moreover, if you increase the language portfolio to 17, you may be able to surge past the 91% mark. And reach 95% of the market.
If your organization is enabling localization initiatives, it will catapult the firm’s direction toward a robust company culture.
Company culture is essential for business expansion into foreign markets. Robust cultural integrity possessed by an organization in its home market will carry the same integrity in the foreign market as well.
The reason is people respect organizations that believe in and stand for something.
If the organization does not have a strong foundation, it will not be able to localize effectively.
A lot of firms were unsuccessful in their attempt to expand internationally just because of their poor organizational infrastructure.
The process of localization is a collective effort. Translators and the development team have to be in constant communication to ensure the right message is being conveyed to the audience.
Experts state that customer experience is what separates organizations from one another. Firms that are able to provide a more pleasing customer experience are prone to a better response from their consumers.
In the case of localization, the aim is to ensure that customer experience does not get affected. Hence, the translation should keep intact the human element within the content. That is the best way to offer your services to the consumer. Because if you don’t, it’s very hard to grasp the customer’s attention.
Shifting your strategy to make it more customer-oriented is the only way you could gain the trust of the new consumer market that you are penetrating. The first thing that needs to be considered is that the linguistic patterns and grammatical structure should be accurate.
Data shows that a lot of consumers avoid purchasing or subscribing to a website in which there is a grammatical or spelling mistake. Hence, writers need to be extra careful.
Apart from maintaining a good grammatical standard, localization should not offend your target market in any way or form.
Localization assists brands in attaining the respect of the audiences. If organizations respect the integrity of the audience’s culture and tradition, they will surely prefer you over your competitors. Hence, increasing your overall sales.
Localized products are often loved by consumers as they specifically target a niche. The consumer feels privileged and important. And that is the name of the game.
One of the biggest pros of localization is that it diminishes risks. The reason is localization is not just a simple substitution of content from one language to another.
Rather, it is the transformation of the entire technical, written, legal, and cultural aspects of the content. Once that is accomplished, the chances that people won’t accept your proposition reduce significantly.
In this competitive business environment, One has to diminish SEO competition to stand out from the crowd.
The fact that you are not alone in the struggle to occupy the eCommerce market share is something that every business has to accept. Once they accept, they can focus on targeting niche spaces.
If organizations are competing for wider market space, the competition is extremely high. Hence, it will require a lot of time, money, and resources to even persuade consumers to look at your proposition.
Moreover, the SEO competition will also be high, since, obtaining a higher ranking on search engines would be a hefty task.
On the contrary, if firms localize their content to a specific target market, they can attain immediate profiling on the local search engines. However, they will be competing with a smaller group of fellow competitors. But the chance to occupy a wider market share and increase sales would be higher.
There is no doubt that every organization adopts a different approach when it comes to the process of localization. But that’s totally fine, as long as they attempt to localize their business websites rather than refraining from it.
The concept is simple; think about your customer first. And if you do that, you cannot do anything but localize your content. The aim is to create content that is acceptable to the target market. And once the firm achieves acceptability, sales will eventually increase as well.
