Content localization — creating content that is in your customer’s native language as well as culturally relevant — is critical to engaging your audience. In fact, almost 60% of global consumers say getting information in their own language is more important than price when making a purchase decision, according to research firm Common Sense Advisory (CSA). However, there’s more to the connection between ROI and translation for demand generation, and it may not be as apparent.
Over the past decade, marketing has become a revenue-generating center, not a cost center. Today’s marketing technology and advanced analytics allow marketers to track their return on investment and know which campaigns are working — generating demand and revenue — and which are not. Within the marketing budget, translation is usually a line item, and is often 1% to 3% of the budget.
Knowing that it takes 14 languages to reach 80% of the most economically active language populations, according to CSA, you can see how global enterprise organizations can easily spend $1 million annually on translation. However, you would be surprised to learn that many do not know what the ROI is on that spend.
In reality, translation is often overlooked as a revenue-generating process that can — and should — be optimized to increase collaboration among regional teams, speed time-to-market, and ensure regional sales teams have the tools they need to generate demand. Further, there is typically no concept of a “Chief Localization Officer” in a global organization, and translation of marketing content is usually a highly decentralized process. This creates inefficiencies in both time and money spent on globalization of marketing programs.
When companies launch campaigns in their headquarters’ market, but localized marketing and sales materials are not ready at the same time, regional sales teams are left to fend for themselves and create their own content to generate demand. The result is inconsistent brand and product messaging and potential revenue lost to competitors who create and deliver multilingual content effectively.
Aligning your marketing and localization strategy is key, but analysis of your localization process and spend should be a priority if you want to determine whether your translation efforts are paying off. Consider these questions:
- Do you regularly find yourself explaining to regional sales leaders that you don’t have the time or budget to localize campaigns and assets for their markets?
- How long does it take to localize a simple marketing project, such as an email campaign, for regional markets?
- Are you still using 1990s tools and processes (email, spreadsheets, FTP sites) to manage localization projects?
- Are valuable multilingual assets such as translation memory, style guides, and corporate glossaries being leveraged across all teams in your company?
- Do you miss deadlines for translated content due to bottlenecks in the process, such as delays in the review phase?
Most marketers are in the dark when it comes to insight into how much they actually spend on localization (including payments to translation vendors as well as employee time spent managing the projects); how efficient their process is when it comes to delivering content to market; and whether their investment in multilingual marketing is paying off. An inefficient localization process significantly impacts top-line revenue.
To get a better idea of how to measure your localization spend and ROI, consider the following metrics:
- Spend Metrics: such as spend per language, spend by content type and leverage of translation memory — storing the translations of words and phrases for future use; and
- Efficiency Metrics: such as project completion time, identifying bottlenecks in the localization process and evaluating each additional selling week for a campaign delivered earlier in local language.
To increase productivity and maximize investments in global demand gen campaigns, marketers need better visibility into their localization process. Leverage advanced analytics to monitor your localization spend, time-to-market efficiencies, and translation memory utilization in real time. Be sure to monitor your translation spend by content source, department, language, vendor and more. Once you better understand your translation process and its impact one demand gen, translation is no longer a cost center, but a revenue-generating center that can be leveraged to expand in existing markets and enter new ones.
Scott Yancey is CEO and Co-founder of Cloudwords, a cloud-based software company that aims to help businesses manage their global communications and localization processes. He was a key architect of the Salesforce platform and applications, and his technical leadership and expertise helped grow salesforce.com from 2,000 customers to an industry titan with 77,000 customers and $1.5 billion in annual revenue.
