William Yates
If you’ve been following this three-part series on rapid and effective local language e-export website development, you’ll know that the aim has been to roll out sites that resonate effectively and quickly with target market audiences in order to deliver rapid ROI.
While we know this process can rapidly expand your market reach in a very short time frame and be highly efficient in generating higher business volumes, everyone needs to keep a close eye on marketing expenditure levels.
Re-writing history
Working with clients who are either in or planning export operations, we always develop online content and digital assets with translation in mind. This means home language content developed by us on our client’s behalf already contains key phrases that will readily translate into search-optimised local language content.
But if e-exporting and local language websites are new to you this need not be a barrier. For example, if you are planning to repurpose a video, rather than simply translating it, why not use your target market research, and fit the local language narrative to your new cultural understanding of that marketplace?
Talking touch points
But if you have already invested the time and energy required to deliver the sheer power necessary for highly persuasive and engaging audience impact, this impact can surmount cultural difference, and there may be no need for a cultural shift in messaging.
When this is the case, your domiciled website video content with home language narrative can simply be repurposed by the introduction of local language narrative and this can be done very quickly to cover any number of newly deployed local language sites.
And it’s quick and easy. We do this frequently, using our online translation vendors to translate narrative, and working with them and selected, native voiceover artists online, we lay down a new voiceover in real-time as the artist synchronises directly to the running video visual.
The power of silence
This process is so efficient, we can manage to produce anything up to four languages in a morning. If you have a competent digital agency, this process can also allow you to make adjustments to the narrative in real-time, by your being looped in on the session, and involving yourself in narrative direction.
An alternative and even more cost efficient route to local language messaging is to remove home language narrative entirely. This can be replaced with local language captions, and if the messaging and creative execution are conceived well, this can be of equal power to re-recording local language narrative.
Targeted cultural transitions
The slick transition of video to cultural alignment is probably the most complex process you will have to consider, but other digital assets such as downloadable PowerPoint presentations and PDFs are of equal, critical importance in maximising local market competitiveness.
Again, as with video presentations, all visual assets can remain in place while the textual content is translated and re-focused with local market research findings, and their communications dynamics in mind.
Looking good, looking local
By following the carefully defined roadmaps described in this e-exporting series, and delivering cultural alignment in your target markets, e-exporting doesn’t have to be hard, or prohibitively expensive. In any marketing campaign, return on investment is key to success.
That said, employing an experienced transnational digital marketing agency will make deployment much easier, with fast-track roll out. As someone once said, ‘if it was easy, everyone would be doing it’. Well it is, and they’re not. So there’s your opportunity.
This post was originally published on the Novacom blog.
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