Think Local…Act Local!
This guest post was written by Christian Arno, founder and Managing Director of global translations company Lingo24. His company has operations across four continents and translated over thirty million words in 2009, covering clients in over sixty countries and every industry sector. Their turnover in the twelve months to September 2009 was $6m USD.
With the advent of the Internet era, the smallest of home-based business can effectively ‘go global’. There is, of course, a lot of countries out there and knowing what geographical regions to target takes a bit of research to begin with.
You’ve probably heard of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – referred to as the best countries to place commercial focus given that they are fast-growing, developing economies – emerging markets, in other words.
But an emerging market is ANY market that is currently untapped. This can be a particular demographic within your domestic market just as easily as it could be a number of Eastern European countries, the US, Scandinavia…anywhere where there is a growing demand for a particular product or service.
Your key target markets depend very much on your service offering – there’s little point spending a lot of money targeting the BRIC countries only to find later that there’s no demand or, indeed, your entire approach to these countries was wrong from the start.
Take Apple for instance. One of the best known consumer brands in the world, with the ubiquitous iPods, iMacs and perhaps the daddy of all gadgets the iPhone. Pretty much universally applauded in every market it has been launched, Apple unveiled the iPhone to China in November 2009 but the reception has been fairly muted so far.
Apple has been widely criticised for not localising its all singing, all dancing device for Chinese consumers – in effect, they failed to consider specific local consumer trends within China.
For example, people in China tend not to like entering into long contracts – they prefer charge cards because it’s less hassle and it’s easier to track their spending. Similarly, Chinese consumers love the newest technology, but because Apple took so long to release the iPhone in China, many local consumers had already procured ‘cracked’ versions of the phone – so in effect, most people who really wanted an iPhone already had one.
Throw into the equation poor marketing – many of the posters didn’t even mention the name ‘iPhone – then it’s perhaps easy to see why they have shifted little over 5,000 handsets at the time of writing.
Of course, your small to medium sized businesses won’t be trading anywhere near the level of Apple. But this helps to demonstrate the importance of knowing your international markets – much in the same way as you do with your domestic markets.
So how do you identify which markets you’re going to target? First of all, you must recognise a demand for your wares in a specific country. It doesn’t have to be too painstaking either, simply check for other companies operating within your industry in each country – check how long they’ve been going for, try and find as much information as you can about them. If they are thriving, then there’s every chance you can too – however, be wary of market saturation, as too much competition doesn’t bode well.
Now that you know what countries you are going to target, you can begin the process of building an online presence in these countries – and this process is two-fold. First, you must have a fully localised website in the language of the target country, then you must optimise it so that it stands out from the crowd.
The process of translating your website is reasonably straight forward. You have to ensure that the person translating the website is a professionally qualified translator who’s working INTO their native tongue. Any translation company that’s worth its salt will only hire translators who translate into their native tongue, so ensure that this is the case. If they translate into a language that they are simply ‘fluent’ in, there is likely to be subtle mistakes that will be spotted by local consumers.
Similarly, if your service or product has some highly technical terminology attached to it – for example, if you’re a B2B company that sells electrical components, you’ll need to ensure that the linguist on the job has experience of your industry. Again, translation companies should record areas of expertise against each of their translators so they should be able to identify someone who fits the bill.
You also need to consider the local dialect of the country your targeting. It’s easy to lump France, Belgium, Switzerland and French-speaking Canada into one category under ‘French’. But there are many dialectal differences between the markets. In Canada, they tend to use literal translations of English terms for many phrases, such as fin de semaine for ‘weekend’ (literally, ‘end of the week’), whereas France tends to import English terms directly – they use le weekend instead.
There are many such examples between the various French, German and Portuguese dialects of the world. Even closer to home, the differences between US English and UK English are substantial enough to merit individual marketing campaigns. Though for the sake of ease, it’s probably best to stick with one English language website and just ensure there are no colloquialisms that might not be understood in all the English-speaking countries of the world.
From an optimisation perspective, rather than translating your English keywords, you will need to research your keywords for each market. A literal and correct translation of a keyword may not be what people use to search for a product/service locally – they may use any number of variations of the phrase, including abbreviations, colloquialisms or something else entirely that means the same thing. Be sure to choose a translation company with knowledge of the SEO process, as they can help identify keywords and phrases for each of your target markets.
Armed with your fully optimised foreign language website, you may actually find that you rise a lot quicker through the ranks of in-country search engines such as Google.de, or Google.fr than you did on Google.com or Google.co.uk – simply because the saturation of the search terms is nowhere near what it is on the English language Internet.
Ultimately, don’t get lazy like Apple did. Treat each of your markets as a separate entity, don’t assume that because something worked in one country, it’ll automatically work in another. Localization is the name of the game and is at the very heart of the internationalization process. Don’t think global…think ‘local’.
It’s been almost exactly 2 months since I had my little run-in with Toktumi tech support, cancelled my service, then heard immediately from the CEO with an apology and an offer to give things another try. You can read my original post and the excellent response from the Toktumi CEO here: 
