In Part 1 of this Blog Series, Vocalink Global’s CEO, Amelia Rodriguez, discussed the never-ending battle between the need for speed and the demand for quality, and promised to share some tips for working with your marketing team to speed up the process of creating a global marketing campaign. Amelia asked me to tackle this topic for you.
An amazing brand, product or service often won’t yield the returns you desire without an equally amazing global marketing campaign. As Amelia mentioned in Part 1, you have more control than you might think on how quickly you can take a marketing campaign global.
Here are four key ways you can help speed up your time to market by creating collaboration between your marketing and language solutions teams:
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Let Go of Tradition
Traditional marketing consists of using an omni channel approach for communication with a target audience. Often, a marketing message is first created and then gets translated into the language of the target audience. Consideration of the language spoken by the audience is typically an afterthought. Other qualification metrics such as age, gender, and economic status usually take priority. However, if you follow Vocalink Global’s blogs regularly, you know that translation without consideration of cultural nuances does not cut it when it comes to taking a brand, product or service into a new market or into a different culture. Idioms don’t translate, colors mean different things, images might have different meanings, pop culture references change, and the list goes on. So, the first thing to do when speed-to-market is important in your global campaign is let go of the traditional marketing idea that language and culture are afterthoughts! Determine to put language and culture at the forefront of your global initiatives (in the upstream). The Upstream includes the marketing strategy, continuous content development, design, digital, social media, SEO, mobile, PR, and transcreation.
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Integrate Language and Marketing
As discussed above, the traditional method of transposing a marketing campaign from one cultural demographic to another – “develop the campaign first and then send it to be translated” – has a lot of problems when it comes to cultural accuracy. This, of course, slows down getting the campaign out to the world. The best way to combat this slow down is by embracing Transcreation. So what is transcreation? I like to think of it as the translation of intent. It’s more than just translating words or meanings. A successfully transcreated message evokes the same emotions and actions from the target audience.
Transcreation typically begins with more than just a source document in the source language. Rather, the marketing team shares its ideas, concepts, goals target audience personas, and the like (often in a “content brief”) with the language team, along with the campaign content in the source language. The transcreation team takes this material and “transcreates” the campaign into the target language, not constrained by the source content’s words, but rather with its intent.
Integrating your language and marketing functions will maximize opportunities for transcreation. It allows your language team to act as subject matter expert consultants at the beginning of the process to suggest ways to create the original ideas, concepts, etc. to ensure the campaign can be easily transcreated for other target audiences. For example, your language team might advise you to avoid baseball or football analogies if your target audiences are in parts of the world where soccer is #1.
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Localize Your Brand Voice
Your brand has a voice. You’ve probably spent time, effort and funds to make decisions on your preferred tone, word choices, fonts, colors, imagery, and other factors that help communicate your story and values to the world. A primary goal in global marketing is to preserve your brand voice across language and culture. Meeting this goal can take quite a bit of time. However, localizing your brand voice to align with the languages and cultures of your target markets up front can help speed up your global marketing initiatives. Consider creating brand guidelines, glossaries of preferred translations of unique words and phrases, and style guides to guide your translation team and ensure your brand voice is not diluted.
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Embrace Technology
Consider for moment today’s content: text, images, video and/or audio that’s printed, broadcast and/or streamed on television, on paper, on your website, on social media, on billboards and maybe even on the side of a bus! As mentioned above, today’s marketing is omni channel, and your content must not only resonate with your target audience, but fit each unique channel. You frequently need several different versions of the same concept so you can say the right thing in a 15-second video on Facebook, a 280-character Tweet, a 60-second television commercial, a full-page ad in an industry magazine, and beyond. Doing this across multiple languages creates another layer of complexity. Keeping your speed up in this environment means one thing: embracing technology.
Ensure that your marketing team partners with a translation solutions supplier that uses state-of-the-art technology that automates processes. Great systems used by translation providers that get it automate the typically manual processes related to foreign language content creation, including transcreation, and archives them in a single, cloud-based platform, which speeds-up time to market. When you have powerful technology in your corner, things move faster.
Take Control of Your Global Message
When language and culture is considered in parallel with campaign ideation, your global initiative can finish sooner and more accurately. So, take control of your speed-to-market for global campaigns. Ensure your marketing team – whether internal or external – works together with your language team to streamline the process in the upstream. Insist on technology that automates processes. By ensuring synchronicity between linguistics and the marketing workflow, you can maintain your brand voice and gain speed-to-market, too.
Vocalink Global’s The GlobalBrand solution is uniquely designed to bring your marketing team together with our subject matter specialists. Combined with our state-of-the-art technology to automate processes and maintain your multilingual content in one place, we stand ready to help you take control you’re your speed-to-market. Want more information? Connect with us today!
