Do you want to expand your consumer reach to cultures outside your own? This is where content localization comes in.
Content localization is the practice of adapting your content to suit different cultural markets, and it goes beyond translation. Content localization looks like changing references within your copy, adjusting visuals, and tweaking design elements to be more appealing or relatable to other markets. This broadens your audience and expands your company’s reach.
The best time to localize your content is when you start a business. The second best time to localize is now, so let’s dive in.
Why Localize Your Content?
The content localization process can be long, especially if you’re a business that works with a lot of content across various channels. The benefits of the transformation may outweigh the time and other extra costs associated with content localization, though. Here are just a few:
- Expand consumer reach: If you’re only marketing in one language, this automatically makes your content inaccessible to most of the world. Adding another culture or two can double or even triple your consumer reach.
- Broaden brand recognition: You have a bigger audience when more people know about you. Broadening your brand recognition makes your business more well-known and more likely to be seen as an authority in your industry. This authority is great news for your SEO and has the bonus of growing your audience as well as helping with faster product adoption.
- Avoid misunderstandings: Since words can have different meanings, content localization ensures no translation misunderstandings if you expand your marketing sphere. For instance, if you’re an American company dealing in French fry toppings but want to market to the UK, you might call fries “chips” to avoid confusion.
- Outrank competitors: We all want to be the best of the best. Since good, effective content localization takes time, many businesses must pay more attention to it. By localizing content, you’re standing apart from your competitors and guiding your shared industry’s audience toward your brand.
- Marketing cost efficiency: Sure, there are costs associated with localizing your content, and it’s a delicate balance when you first get started, but having twice your normal consumer reach without creating any new content is ultimately a win. This gets even easier once you have a feel for what tweaks you need to make to your content to optimize for your target audience.
Language, Dialect, & Culture: Why Is Content Localization So Challenging?
When you’re marketing in a way that’s authentic to your brand, there’s naturally going to be an influence from your culture. Everything we do is steeped in our culture because our culture shapes how we view the world.
Content localization is successful because it’s not just translating but also an understanding of the culture you’re marketing to. This understanding takes time, especially since there’s only so much available time to study your target audience.
In addition to the extra time it takes for content localization, it’s also very easy to miss something in your research when you’re crossing language, dialectical, and cultural lines. Missing an important cultural understanding may mean your marketing comes across as insincere and off-putting.
There are ways to avoid these pitfalls, but they should always be top of mind when working out your content localization strategies.
How To Localize Content: 5 Ways To Overcome Content Localization Challenges
Content localization can come with challenges. While you’re brainstorming your strategy, you’ll want to keep these roadblocks in mind—here are some ways to do so:
Strategizing Content Choices
Ideally, you’ll be able to localize your content to your target audience, but that may not be feasible for several reasons. When starting, it’s especially crucial to figure out which content will be localized successfully and what content you can skip for now, having a content management system (CMS) can be really helpful to sort this out.
Take note of the popularity of different relevant keywords in your target audience. Also, consider which marketing materials don’t have region-specific quirks, as these may be easier to localize.
Understanding Dialects
Just because the language is the same, it doesn’t mean that words mean the same thing.
Without using the proper dialect, you may also come off as misunderstanding or trying poorly to imitate a culture, which may be offensive. Do your research and talk to a professional about your target audience’s dialect to avoid misunderstandings. Just like translation entails a lot more than just translating word by word, which can even be done with artificial intelligence nowadays, still, you’ll want to get the insights of a professional to help you convey the right intention behind the phrase.
Dialect shifts will be most noticeable in video marketing, so keep pronunciation and verbal grammar in mind if you’re updating this to be the same language as your target audience. Having a professional voice dub actor with lots of experience speaking that language and dialect will go incredibly far when it comes to sounding natural and authentic.
Working With Professionals
Professionals who are experts in your target audience will be able to help you in ways that Google searches, videos, pictures, and brief visits may not be able to. Like the dialect issue, someone who knows the culture inside and out will help you avoid missteps.
Consider having a consultant look at your website and your marketing tweaks for social media, email campaigns, and anything else customer-facing. In addition to this, pick their brain for trends in your target audience. Having this person involved in your marketing strategy meetings, chats, or email threads is a good idea so that you can keep your finger on the pulse.
Using AI Tools
AI tools can be a real gift for localizing your content. AI allows you to transform copy instantly, outline localization ideas, and even research your target audience.
Using AI tools for content localization embraces the spirit of digital transformation, making your business stand out against competition in the same industry.
Targeting Regions vs. Countries
If areas of culturally similar regions contain multiple countries, you can target the region instead of the country. This shift in targeting expands your reach even further because cultures aren’t contained within country borders.
Targeting regions also gives insights into the different cultures making up a particular country (for example, the midwestern United States versus the Pacific Northwest), which can help you target different audience segments in your marketing strategy.
Content Localization Examples
In any business, there’s a lot of content you’ll need to localize, but here are some good places to start.
Website
The first step will be translating your website’s landing page, about page, product descriptions, and other pages you have. Don’t forget to have the option to change currency to the currency used in your target audience, and make sure you have an innovative web design that allows you to create content in different languages.
Translating and localizing your bottom of the funnel content, like blog posts and case studies to reflect cultural differences, will go a long way in making your brand more accessible to your target audience. It may seem tedious, and you may want to save the long-form posts until you’ve localized other facets of your website, but taking the time is well worth it.
Finally, don’t forget to localize your contact page. Keep international telephone codes in mind on pages for your target audience.
Customer Support
Offering customer support in multiple languages means that people won’t get overlooked or forced into an awkward language barrier situation if they need help with your product.
This practice may also help you zero in on issues that pop up more often in your target audiences, enabling you to take measures to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Holger Sindbaek, the founder of Online Solitaire, says, "In the realm of customer support, it's essential to recognize that every interaction is an opportunity to bridge cultural gaps. It's not enough to merely translate words; we must translate intent, emotion, and cultural nuances. To truly resonate with a global audience, invest in training your support team to understand the cultural context behind each query. Please encourage them to listen actively, empathize, and adapt. By doing so, you're not just solving a problem but building trust and loyalty in every corner of the world."
Legal Contracts
This is very important, especially if you’re planning on collaborating in any way with people from your target audience and there’s a language barrier. Making sure that legal contracts adhere to local laws as well as the laws of your target audience will prevent any missteps down the line.
This is one instance where you won’t want to rely on AI technology and, instead, bring a professional in.
Marketing Emails
Finally, don’t forget your marketing emails! Whether you have automated marketing emails or you or an email assistant are sending them, you can include people in your target audience as a customer segment to ensure they’re getting the correct emails.
It’s a great idea to run your marketing email localization ideas by a few people who are part of the target audience, especially when you’re first starting out. Then, you can tweak the copy or graphics accordingly.
Social Media
Social media content is one of the more tricky items to localize, but there is little that will instantly expand your reach, like a good social media campaign. You will want to create a new Instagram page for your brand that includes a reference to your target audience.
You may want to localize social media last to ensure it links back to your website and that email marketing will be available in your target audience’s language.
Content Localization Tools: Is AI Alone Good Enough?
It can be tricky to differentiate between AI tools and using human translators, especially when you’re just dipping your toes into content localization.
You can’t beat the human touch when it comes to anything cultural. Humans will understand nuance in ways that AI may not be able to replicate, and, as a result, your content will shine. However, no human is completely objective, so a professional’s take on a cultural trend may differ from how your audience interprets it.
AI has the benefit of being generally more cost-efficient and more likely to get answers and generate content instantly—especially if your target audience is many time zones away. The problem with an AI-only strategy is that AI can easily miss important cultural details, especially if they’re more subtle or nuanced. AI also may not easily deal with dialects, which can cause a language barrier between your audience and your content.
The best solution is to work with human translators (and other localization experts) in addition to AI. This way, you’ll have the best of both worlds—you can get answers instantly from AI, and then your experts can check over the AI’s work for quality.
Conclusion
Localizing your content can be time-consuming, but the payoff makes it a smart move for any business. Having a content localization strategy that avoids the pitfalls of localization can make all the difference in expanding your reach and converting all that new site traffic to real revenue.
About the Author:
Silver Stephens - Freelance Writer, Editor, and Social Media Manager
