Localization often comes as an afterthought for many modern services and products. Even large companies sometimes prefer to invest their resources into other areas of their operation. Which is unfortunate, because approaching localization with a more serious attitude can often bring many benefits to the table. No matter the size of your company, localization is something that can improve its performance on multiple fronts.
Why Is It Important for Business Growth?
Expand to New Markets
One of the most obvious benefits of localization is that it allows you to immediately expand to new markets that were originally beyond your reach. You don’t have to invest too much in your initial localization to see some great results.
Localization – Why Is It Important for Business Growth?
As long as you pick a few popular languages and have your product localized in them as a start. You’re already unlocking multiple new territories all over the world. If you have detailed statistics about your users and market situation. You can get a good idea of which territories you should attack next.
Leverage Your Existing Presence in New Ways
You don’t even need to move into new markets to see the benefits of localization. You’ll get access to lots of new potential customers in your existing markets and you won’t even have to adapt your current marketing in any way. You’d be surprised by the sheer number of clients you already have in your existing markets, just waiting for you to make your product more accessible to them.
You don’t even need to move into new markets to see the benefits of localization.
Many companies don’t even bother spreading out into new markets for the first few months of their localization efforts, as the volume of new customers in their current markets ends up sufficient. But once you’ve gone through that initial phase, you’ll definitely want to look into the additional opportunities that localization provides you with – many of them should not be underestimated, especially if you’re planning to grow global one day.
Develop a Better Relationship with Your Customers
Your customers will appreciate you going through the effort to localize your products for them. And this will show in the way they interact with your business. You’ll see your reputation on the market strengthening, and people’s perception of your company will improve. Even if your business is already in a good state, don’t underestimate the potential benefits of strengthening your relationship with your customers with the use of localization services.
Localization – Why Is It Important for Business Growth?
This can extend to things like customer support too. Those details can add a lot to a customer’s perception of your company. And offering a fully localized package that covers every aspect of your operations can significantly strengthen the way people perceive your business on your market.
Strengthen Your Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns can be difficult to run on the international market. Even if people understand English, your message might still get lost in translation. It’s always better to approach this with unique marketing materials specifically prepared and adapted to the markets you’re trying to break into.
Marketing campaigns can be difficult to run on the international market.
And if you’re still not investing too much into your marketing, this can be a great opportunity to step up your efforts and spread your message to new territories. Working with a competent localization specialist is always important if you’re producing marketing materials or anything similar. You might be able to get some level of exposure even without that kind of help. But your overall performance is going to suffer.
Improve Your SEO Performance
On a related note, you’ll also be able to step up your SEO game. If you’ve delved deeper into SEO, you are probably well aware that it’s not just about hitting the right keywords and arranging your materials in a certain way. Each language has its own intricacies that have to be accounted for. And it’s impossible to do proper SEO with just basic translation.
On a related note, you’ll also be able to step up your SEO game.
Having a localized product will allow you to adjust your SEO efforts around a proper translation. Which can go a long way towards ensuring that your message has the intended effect. Depending on the specific language, it might turn out that you need to approach the problem in a completely different way than what you’re used to from your English SEO campaigns.
In some cases, you might need to work with additional specialists experienced in optimizing content for your target language specifically. Localization is a good first step, but it’s occasionally not enough to get the job done fully. Talk to your localization specialist and see if they can’t refer you to SEO experts familiar with the languages you need.
Outperform Your Competitors
Localization is a great way to gain a competitive advantage over other companies in your corner of the market. As we mentioned above, it’s something that a shockingly low number of companies are doing at the moment. You can exploit that fact and move into certain parts of the market before your competitors have been able to expand in that direction.
Outperform your competitors.
Being first has many advantages in these situations, and you should not underestimate the potential of outperforming your competitors through the use of localization. Even if they ramp up their localization efforts later on. You’ll still benefit from the opportunity to take some of their potential customers and bring them over to your side.
Minimize the Risk of Misunderstandings
One small misunderstanding can sometimes have a drastic impact on your relationship with your customers. It’s not just about the language itself, there are also cultural differences to consider here. If you aren’t careful about how you’re structuring your communication, you may easily find yourself in a situation where people get the wrong idea and end up disappointed by your company.
Localization services.
We’ve seen it happen enough times to know that it’s a serious problem that remains underestimated by many companies on the market. You have to craft your messages with a lot of attention to detail. But that’s impossible when you don’t have a good command of the corresponding language. Localization services will help you avoid that and ensure that every bit of your communication with your customers works exactly as intended.
Closing Thoughts
Underestimating the importance of localization for your products and services is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If you’re trying to succeed in today’s global market. You can’t afford to ignore the effects of internationalization. Even if you don’t believe that your product has any potential on any new markets.
And in most cases, it ends up being a small investment with potentially huge returns. If you have been putting off exploring localization due to concerns about your budget. You might be surprised by how little it actually costs compared to other aspects of your marketing.
