15 Localization Tips to Support Global Growth

When your company starts gaining traction in international markets, it’s time to celebrate. It is also a time to drive forward your globalization strategy to ensure you maximize every available market opportunity. If your products and services are reaching international markets, there are a number of localization considerations related to various content types that can help you increase your sustained growth around the world.

Localization tips to help you keep growing:

• LEGAL CONTENT: Patent and copyright translations need to be filed globally to be recognized at a local level and meet local regulations. You will need to protect your intellectual property everywhere in the world where you do business. Be sure you work with experts who specialize in legal patent translation and foreign filings, like Park IP Translations.
• PRODUCT DOCUMENTATION: Localize your product and support documentation. Your customers need to be able to install, operate, fix, and deploy that product in their own language as if it was created for them. They need to understand your brand and experience usability in whatever language they speak.
• LEARNING MATERIALS: Localize learning and educational videos and online courses for your service or product for all stakeholders in your value chain and supporting your product lifecycle. If you’re are trading internationally, you will need to train internationally too.
• GLOBAL BRAND AND DIGITAL MARKETING: Raise the profile of your brand and company profile in more one country by driving multilingual digital marketing strategies. Your marketing and sales teams have to “talk” to your customers in a language they understand and create a natural customer experience. This may involve “transcreating” key brand messages for local markets.
• INTERNATIONAL SEO: There are millions of potential customers who are searching the Internet in hundreds of languages, using a wide variety of keywords. Culturally adapting online marketing activities, for example SEO and keywords, will help you be discovered in your “local” markets.
• LOCALIZE WEBSITES: Your website traffic needs to grow internationally and you need to understand what drives local customers in your target markets. Similar to SEO and app localization, specialized localization skills are required to successfully reach global digital markets.
• INTERNATIONAL TRADESHOWS: If you’re attending events and tradeshows, prepare awareness campaigns, and appropriate regional sales activities in the right language. If you’re participating in a conference, make sure your company representatives can discuss client and business development opportunities in the native language.
• POINT-OF-SALE MATERIALS: If you’re displaying your product, service or brand at tradeshows or in-store, your point-of-sales materials need to speak to each culture and region as if uniquely created for them.
• USE OF INTERPRETERS: If you’re going setting up face-to-face meetings or conference calls with international suppliers and customers, communications can be enhanced using trained interpreters.
• HR AND EMPLOYEE MATERIALS: If you’re expanding your global footprint and staff, internal training materials, HR procedures, company guidelines, legal and financial compliance documentation will all need to be translated for each global office.
• FINANCIAL INFORMATION: Doing business internationally will generate volumes of financial information that will need to be understood by all stakeholders in more than one languages. Annual reports, tax reports, mergers and acquisition documentation, stock market analysis and more. You’ll also need all potential international investors to be able to read and comprehend how your company is performing.
• MANAGE LOCALIZATION BUDGETS: Your globalization and localization needs are growing so localization budgets must be managed if you expect to show your impact in using localization to grow and support the business.
• LOCALIZE APPS: Your apps have to be localized and go through rigorous linguistic and QA testing for each local market, to ensure a great user experience. Getting your app found in the main app stores can be tough but app localization can help gain more visibility online.
• CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS: You need to communicate with your staff and ensure your company vision, brand values and guidelines are understood across the world by every member of your team — wherever they are located.
• REGULATED INDUSTRIES STANDARDS: If you do business in a regulated industry, life sciences or finance for example, you must ensure all your procedures and practices meet the local standards and regulations to minimize risks for you and your clients. Each country has different auditing and taxation requirements and this means certain documents will have to be translated and culturally adapted to meet local requirements.

Globalization and localization touches every part of an organization. Developing a long term relationship with a global localization partner is important to help you develop a mature globalization strategy and manage localization activities across the entire organization.

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