A Content Localization Strategy to Succeed Globally
“When localizing your brand, you will adapt products, content, and user experiences to a specific geographic region. You’ll be addressing local culture, consumer preferences, measurement units, currency, legal requirements, and more.”
What is Localization?
Localization (L10N) is the process of adapting your product, service, and content to the foreign language version of the global target market. The goal of localization is to give a brand the look and feel of having been originally created to the specific culture, native language, and geographical location.
To successfully deliver your products and services to your specific global markets, a product, such as websites or software applications, must be localized and adapted to the target market’s native language, cultural conventions, and environmental and technical requirements.
The objective of a successful localization strategy is to provide a great user experience, which may be achieved by the following content localization steps:
Steps to Content Localization for Global Markets
1. Select your target Market
The first step to a successful content localization strategy is to identify your target market(s). An in-depth understanding of your target market will guide the rest of your localization strategy, and help make some very important decisions, such as the local target market’s native language(s), cultural conventions, and technical requirements.
2. Translate your Content
Develop a translation workflow that includes native translators, editors, and in-country reviews to translate the content into the local market’s target language(s). The right translation process will ensure your brand message, marketing collateral, ad copy, social media, and website content is culturally appropriate, maintains brand integrity, and invites your multilingual customers to engage with your brand in the global market(s).
3. Localize your Content
Adapt websites, marketing communications, and e-learning systems, according to specific global markets’ native languages, cultural conventions, and environmental and technical requirements. As well as adapt images, photos, and other visual content to the target market’s requirements.
4. Quality Assurance Review of your Localized Content
A quality review of the localized content will consider terminologies, grammatical and syntactic accuracy as well as the appropriateness of style, and any possible omissions. As with other steps, it’s important that the stakeholders are kept in the loop every step of the way. The review must build confidence that the content has been well-localized and is ready to engage with your target market.
5. Test, Monitor, and Continuously Improve
Test the performance of your localized content with data. For instance, are your localized keywords showing positive results (high CTR), how is your audience engaging with your website, what is your engagement rate within your market, and the list goes on and on. Monitor your content performance and seek feedback from local customers and users, and update when it improves the global users’ experience.
At Global Link, we strongly believe that a well-planned and high-level localization process is the number one factor in an organization’s success in a global market(s).
Our global team will adapt your web content, interactive media, and printed documents in accordance with your international locales’ cultural, linguistic, business, and legal requirements. Your multilingual content and communications will be linguistically and visually appropriate to your international target markets.
