Business expansion is a process that is often arduous but necessary for many enterprises.
It involves several considerations on the part of the business owner, but one thing at the center of it all; is expanding to new markets. These markets, which can either be the nearby local market or a larger part of the international scene, all depend on your business scale and objectives.
Due to the perilous nature of these times, most crucial business decisions need to be based only on the essentials in order to manage scarce resources.
But how do business owners balance cost savings and business expansion expenses as they enter into new markets while trying to keep their enterprise afloat?
In this post, we take a look at content localization and actionable ways to crush it on a limited budget.
Why you need to localize your content
There are a plethora of reasons why businesses expand their ventures into new markets. It could be to gain additional visibility, more market share, or something in-between.
Whatever the reason may be, the present digital era requires that your business overcome language barriers by adapting your content to your specific target locality.
Well, this is basically what content localization is all about.
You may be wondering why you need to go through the hassle of localizing your content.
For starters, you do so in order to stay competitive. Yet again, data suggests that 75% of consumers prefer to buy products that are in their native language. By adapting your content and products, you are already appealing to this demographic majority.
How do you carry-out localization on a budget?
This is sort of the elephant in the room. We already mentioned earlier in the article how tricky it is to balance operating costs and localization expenses, but how about some pretty actionable tips on reducing the costs of localization.
- What does the data say?
Data, as we know, does not pander to sentiments, and it helps make better-informed decisions.
As a business owner, you should always be on the lookout for data-backed insights.
What is the data trying to tell you about your target demographic? What segments are they (target audience) interacting with the most? Adopting analytics can help trim localization spending by only focusing on aspects that bring the most returns for your business. Since just like in translation, not all information on your platform needs localization.
- Always align localization plans with your business objectives.
Haven already established your business objectives, it is only logical to formulate your content localization plans around said objectives. Doing so makes it easier to dissociate one’s business from the clutter involved in entering into new markets. You end up localizing only the essentials and doing away with localizing content that does not necessarily contribute to fulfilling your business objective, which leads to saving costs associated with localization.
- Review content before submitting for localization
The act of reviewing content before localization further reinforces the first two points. Take a critical look at the content you are sending in and objectively determine if it needs localizing.
Does your LSP have that section saved in translation memory? If the answer is yes, why are you taking that particular content for localization and incurring additional fees?
Your review should adopt a tunnel vision approach in order to place attention on segments that are yet to be translated and are only beneficial to your enterprise.
- Incorporate MT wherever possible
As we have already established in our last post, machine translation helps LSP’s to save costs, which also trickles down to the clients. Although contextual and nuanced information may involve the human touch, ensure that other general information adopts machine translation. This helps to save time associated with the entire localization project, which also translates to lower localization costs.
- Negotiate but be realistic
Truth be told, translation is an expensive process. Most LSPs would consider a volume discount but keep in mind that this applies for an ongoing collaboration and not for “one-off” project. Keep in mind that
Wrapping up
Content localization is a crucial aspect of market entry. But our present realities call for business owners to re-evaluate expenditure in order to remain operational. Despite the importance of localization, enterprises require ingenious ways to keep its cost at the minimum without losing any form of effectiveness.
At Translationsinlondon, we provide multiple communication channels with our clients to provide all the necessary information required to make the most financially responsible business decision.