Why Localization is Important for Your Holistic Business Strategy

Communicating correctly with your audience is critical in staying relevant in a global market.

Localization ensures that your business and content are ready for a new market. Glossing over important details of localizing content can result in a lack of consumer engagement, loss of revenue, and a poor reputation. Such pitfalls are why localization is so important. Prioritizing this aspect is key in developing an effective holistic business strategy when breaking into a new market.

Ineffective Localization: The Potential for Error

Taking a holistic approach to a business strategy involves considering all parts of the business to help everyone work together as one. Each counterpart of the strategy is critical in benefiting the company. Developing a firm strategy and ensuring content is translated to the highest potential is how companies can achieve success in other countries. Their geographical location no longer limits a buyer’s journey. This evolution presents many opportunities for companies to expand their product to international markets. But with expansion comes the potential for error. Localization is about translating every detail, from cultural nuances to tag lines, but the process also ensures content resonates with the buyer. Many companies will “cut corners” in developing a localization strategy, and they mistake translation for localization.

Translation vs. Localization

Expanding to a global market may cause you to question the difference between translation and localization. Localization ensures that any content a consumer uses to learn about your product or service is translated to resonate with the target market. The translation process is taking words from one language and conveying the same idea in another language. While localization includes translation, it goes far beyond to ensure content feels organic for consumers in a specific local market. Internationalization and globalization may also be common terms heard when developing a strategy. Internationalization is a set of methodologies and best practices in product design and software development that facilitate localization. The process is technical, but localization and internationalization are necessary for your product’s success in international markets. Globalization involves the overall strategy. This process entails choosing target locations, evaluating regulations in various markets, and deciphering product demand and timing. Internationalization involves preparing for a market launch. Globalization should come first in preparing a strategy as it acts as the company’s pathway to new markets, while internationalization is the product’s path. The right localization management platform can help distinguish these key differences to simplify processes and guide your business strategy.

Why Localization is Important

Companies must establish the proper infrastructure for managing their localization project to prevent silos that impact performance. Localization means the legwork is already complete, any potential issues are resolved, and your company will know what to expect moving forward. The process becomes predictable and repeatable, allowing easy scalability. A strong localization process from the start will make the transition to new markets later much easier.Augmenting your holistic business strategy with localization can provide many advantages.

1.   Wider audience reach
2.   Increased top-of-funnel customer base
3.   Customized content
4.   Secured reputation
5.   Organized workflow free of errors

The holistic business approach helps managers improve how they communicate with their teams. The result is less about an increased ROI and more about employees working together, their drivers, and the consumers. Where localization comes in is understanding where your product or service fits into the customer lifecycle. What are their needs? Taking key details into consideration will result in a successfully localized product. ‍