Global marketing demands that your product information is localized for every market you cover; this includes brochures, labels, brand names, local websites, etc. But consumer preferences are changing rapidly, and the general trend is away from the web toward social media apps -- especially messaging apps that enable private, real-time communicating. On Facebook alone, the number of private messages is now five times the volume of wall posts. Private messages also have a higher response rate, and the conversations there are, on average, longer than those on wall posts.
For B2C marketers, user-generated content can
make or break a brand.
Experts believe that we must carefully monitor everything that is said about our brands.
Here are three important solutions that ON TARGET Translation can help with:
1. Translate questions from users quickly
Twitter or Facebook are sometimes used as a customer service platform, and potential clients expect a response to their questions. If you keep silent, it could reflect badly on your company. Our SOLUTION: with the help of your regional employees, your company can build a list of the questions most often asked in a given language, and we will translate them for you. Then, once we have your answers, we can help you prepare a localized FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) in each language pair.
2. User-based reviews of your products are extremely important, even the negative ones.
Again, keeping silent about a negative review is not a good policy. The same holds true for raves and high praise of your products; these reviews should absolutely be localized and shared, and ON TARGET is here to help make that happen.
3. Labelling requirements differ for each country
This is not a marketing tactic, it’s the law. In Canada, for example, every product must bear a bilingual label (English and French). The Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act is a criminal statute relating to the packaging, labelling, sale, importation and advertising of prepackaged and certain other products. ON TARGET Translation collaborators in Canada have worked with multinationals throughout the years to adapt their labels for the Canadian market. Give us a call.
TIP: Compared to English content, French is 10-13% longer, so you should brief your graphic designer accordingly.
Finally, we can help you know your audience better by translating consumer survey answers
All too often, answers to open questions in localized surveys are understood by the local marketing team but not necessarily by the global marketing team, because of subtle nuances in languages or specific local usage. That’s where ON TARGET comes in: we work with a native speaker and regional translator to adapt the content, not only “transcreating” it but also making parallels between the survey’s respondent examples and the global marketing audience locale. As an example, for a retail message, we would find stores or point-of-purchase equivalents, so that everyone is on the same page.