Building a globally recognisable brand that utilises translation is what online success looks like today. Being remembered for your ads and recognised in an instant is any marketer’s dream. But where do these brands begin? And how do they achieve this international recognition through translation despite cultural, geographical and language barriers?
Why is it essential to become a global brand?
Today, most global brands build their strategy around their customers. This means understanding who they are and where they are in the world—then offering them content with translations. Content they’ll love in their native language.
These brands pride themselves on being able to quickly repurpose their content with translations to serve their customers better, regardless of their location or native language, and they reap real benefits because of it.
What’s in it for global brands?
Localised and translated content is not just a marketing term; it’s a content strategy. It’s a practical approach to reach global customers locally.
If you want to capture your audience’s attention, meeting them halfway and giving them content with translations to their native language is key to showing your customers that you care about their support.
- Increased audiences
Most audiences scroll with sound-off on their mobile phones, and beyond that, most of them are only interested in seeing content from their local community. So not only could they be missing your content because they’re sound-off, but they could be skipping over content that doesn’t have translations and is non-native to them.
In fact, when compared, 86% of localised campaigns produced more click-throughs and conversions than English campaigns with no translations did. And, most marketers find that when they translate and optimise their content strategy for local and mobile audiences, the engagement on their content increases, too.
- Less competition
The reason why most businesses don’t expand globally is that it is challenging to do so. But the ones that leap into the unknown reap the benefits of building a community in a new market ahead of their competition thanks to translation.
So when brands begin to invest the resources into expanding globally with translated content for more markets, they often discover untapped regions where demand for what they’re offering is incomparable.
- Improved ad targeting campaigns
Brands who localise their content enjoy more profitable returns on their ad campaigns– and for a good reason.
When choosing between similar products, 75% of the population will choose whichever one provides them with information in their native language or translations to their native language.
Understanding your customers’ unique interests and pains in every location helps brands to localise content to suit specific personas in different international markets.
When businesses optimise their ad efforts through content with transitions available with the aim of targeting local users, they'll have an easier time growing their audiences.
What holds most brands back?
Luckily for the most well-known global brands, they have world-renowned translation companies and advertising teams working tirelessly to generate dozens of variations of one campaign for every market. In reality, most of us don’t have that and are far from having the budget to have that sort of support.
- Most brands don’t have international translation teams
It seems easy to generate business in new markets when your team is already in that market, speaking that language, understanding that audience without translations. But when you’re new to a market, the challenge of knowing where to begin is often the most laborious.
So brands either postpone their expansions due to a lack of skills within their team or a lack of budget to hire translation experts.
- Traditional and manual translation companies are expensive
On the other hand, brands who enter new markets allocate large budgets towards complex workflows with external translation agencies to support their content localisation strategy.
Unfortunately for most brands, working with traditional manual translation experts to localise their content becomes like a game of ping pong rather than a score in the goal. Their content loses its meaning and excitement and becomes another time-consuming and resource-heavy chore that teams have to look after.
- Different countries have buyers on other platforms
One of the most interesting yet overlooked reasons why brands struggle to access global markets is that not all online audiences exist on the same platforms. To simplify, just because you’re shopping on Facebook, a customer in China might not be.
And this poses the question: how do you optimise content for these ‘other’ platforms? This is a crucial point to consider because once you find a way to add translations onto your content and optimise content for ‘other’ platforms quickly, you can reach your international audiences with more ease.
How the most successful brands overcome these challenges
Devising a successful global content strategy doesn’t have to be complicated because all the automatic translation tools are out there to make it uncomplicated.
Localised content can drive conversions and increase international brand awareness without extra costs, all thanks to simple tools for automating translation.
Subtitling and translation platforms like Subly help brands because it allows them to devise a global content strategy with a localised approach that feels unique to every new market.
TIP 1: Create translated content to reach more audiences
You may have seen influencers post duplicate captions to avoid relying on auto-translations missing the point of their post. Or, YouTubers adding translated descriptions below their videos to target more audiences via the YouTube search engine.
While this may seem simple, especially for multilingual creators, this tactic can work wonders for brands, too.
Translating your content or providing easy access to accurate translations can help you find more audiences worldwide. Just think about it; one piece of content with an English caption and a translated Spanish caption suddenly widens your reach from 5 English-speaking countries to another 20-Spanish speaking countries.
Pro tip: Simple way to do this is to transcribe your content and automatically generate translated texts to share with your audiences.
Tip 2: Simplify team collaboration to save time
When creating a global brand, a lot of factors need to align. One of them is how your team creates, edits and ensures high-quality content output. For example, if your team members work across various platforms to create content, streamlining your workflow into fewer channels can help save time on editing and generating translations to create more time for making content.
This can significantly help your content strategy if you’re leading an international team that can support projects at different stages. By sharing optimised content and proofreading translations, teams can streamline what is often a 17 step process down to a 5 step process.
When teams begin to collaborate on global content in one editor, it makes editing and translation not only easier but faster and your review and approval process more streamlined.
Today, thanks to the magic of technological advancements, automatic translation is enabling businesses globally and helping them create reliable and accurate translations in one place with the whole team to create global content and capture an audience.
Start saving budget with one tool for automatic translation, transcription and subtitling for all your video and audio content today. Discover more about Subly Premium here.