cloudwords perspectives - a book for the global marketing professional

Cloudwords PerspectivesJanuary 2014

Copyright 2014 Cloudwords, Inc. All right reserved.

Cloudwords Perspectives | January 2014

Welcome to the first edition of Cloudwords Perspectives, a collection of our most reshared, retweeted, and viewed posts from the Cloudwords blog.

This particular edition of Cloudwords Perspectives covers critical aspects and best practices of taking your marketing content global. Here are the blog posts featured in this first edition of Cloudwords Perspectives:

• Have you cracked the code to going global?• 4 Essentials for taking your content global• Best Kept Secret? Only 20% of Global Marketers Know What

“Translation Memory” Is• Quantifying the Importance of Global Customer Engagement• You are so global, you don’t even know it!

We are looking forward to sharing more Cloudwords Perspectives with you every quarter.

Best,

The Cloudwords TeamHeidi Lorenzen

Chief Marketing Officer

Michael MeinhardtCo-founder and Chief

Customer Officer

The Authors



Have you cracked the code to going

global?

We are all keenly aware that the global economy is interconnected and depen-dent on the strengths and weaknesses of the countries that trade with one another. More so, trade and related activities are greatly impacted by government policies. Obviously, during the 2008-2009 financial crisis that affected this country and also shook most ofthe world, globalization weak-ened due to significant declines in trade and foreign investments. Beginning in 2010, once global economies began to improve, globalization increased as international trade and investment flows picked up, and since then we’ve seen global orga-nizations continue to expand and benefit from opportunities abroad.

However, according to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “Why Global- ization Is Going Into Reverse,” the global-ization upswing has stalled. Based on a study conducted at IESE Business School in Barcelona, the article states that while globalization was picking up momentum

following the global financial downturn, the “depth of globalization” slowed down again at the end of 2012. The main culprit? Poor economic and trade policies put into place following the financial crisis.

Even so, we know the potential for increased global revenues still exists, particularly within emerging

markets, such as in Brazil and Africa. According to the McKinsey Global Insti-tute (MGI), the num-ber of global consum-ers today is about 2.4 billion people, and MGI projects this figure will nearly double by 2025 to 4.2 billion con-

sumers (out of a global population of 7.9 billion), at which point MGI estimates annual consumption in emerging global markets will increase to $30 trillion, up from $12 trillion in 2010. Clearly, reaching these global markets is critical to drive growth.

In the Bloomberg Businessweek article, the IESE study’s authors argue that globaliza-tion would continue to rise “if multinational corporations learned to ‘crack the code for

By Michael Meinhardt

According to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the number of global consum-

ers today is about 2.4 billion people, and MGI projects this figure will nearly double by

2025 to 4.2 billion consumers.



competing in emerging economies’ where growth is strongest.” In other words, com-panies could increase revenue and further strengthen a growing global economy if they could successfully reach potential consumers in emerging markets. Bingo.

So what is the secret “code” to unlocking global revenue potential? Localization is surely a key element: organizations that develop and implement global strate-

gies to expedite the delivery of product information, sales materials, customer experienc-es, marketing content, etc., in a market’s local language, using culturally relevant references and images, are more likely to engage consumers and convert them into customers.

Our customers know the value of localizing materials to reach multilingual audiences, and, prior to using the Cloudwords application, were all too familiar with the challenges traditional approaches to the localization

process entailed. Marketing on a global scale requires collaboration among grow-ing numbers of stakeholders, communi-

cation among globally-dispersed internal teams and departments as well as outside translation vendors, and seamless manage-ment of sky-rocketing amounts of content that is created, stored and delivered in a variety of business applications (Web CMS, marketing automation, etc.) in a plethora of languages.

We recognize both the challenges to local-ization and the benefits of localization, and since Cloudwords’ very inception, we’ve worked to develop a very user-friendly application that takes away the complexities of going global and enables customers to optimize the translation and localization process more easily. By automating the globalization process with the right technology tools, our customers reach global markets up to 60% faster.

Regardless of whether globalization trends are reversing, smart companies recognize potential opportunities for revenue growth still exist in global markets—both emerging and otherwise—and know how to crack the code. Do you?



4 Essentials for taking your

content global

Marketers worldwide are leveraging content to engage customers, build thought leader-ship platforms, and drive demand for their companies and offerings. In fact, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing as a key part of their marketing mix. It must be working: marketers are spending a full third of their budgets on content marketing and more than half plan to increase that amount.

However, marketers are dis-covering that reaping the benefits of content on a global scale is a daunting challenge. Organizations that operate globally have to create content for multiple markets, which means localizing the content to the languages and nuanc-es of regional audiences and customs, and delivering large amounts of content across an even more complex array of channels. Developing and implementing a com-prehensive global content strategy and operational plan is necessary to scale to this degree.

The upside is worth it. When done well, marketers can connect their businesses with more customers worldwide and increase company visibility, growth and

revenues.

I recently had the opportunity to share my insights on global content operations during a webinar discussion with Pam Didner, Global Integrated Marketing Manager at Intel, moderated by

Clare McDermott, Editor -in-Chief of Chief Con-tent Officer magazine. The event was hosted by the Content Marketing Institute.

One portion of our dis-cussion focused on the development of a global

content strategy to accelerate the creation and delivery of impactful and engaging marketing content to global audiences. Based on my years as a global marketer, with more than 10 years spent overseas, here are four core elements I recommend fellow global marketers consider when ap-proaching global content operations.

1. Think global first, not as an after-thought. This seems ridiculously obvious, but it’s not yet common marketing practice. When building a marketing strategy and

In fact, 93% of B2B marketers use content

marketing as a key part of their marketing

mix.

By Heidi Lorenzen



the content plan to support it, consider all geographies at the outset. I’ve witnessed too many talented marketers focus first on the headquarter market, with the (flawed) intent of rolling out campaigns and content to international markets later. This leaves untapped opportunities for revenue on the global table. It’s important to focus on markets where the highest growth potential exists for your product or service and prior-itize those. Trying to tackle global markets after you’ve already launched in headquar-ters’ market causes tension among global and regional teams, and creates huge op-portunity costs in both untapped revenue

and competitive disadvantage.

2. Integrate your global content strategy worldwide. By this I mean, ensure that all geographies and business units are represented from Day One. Creating a Global Content Council is one way to do this. Being well

integrated also means stopping the proverbial pendulum from swinging

to extremes of either centralization or decentralization of control of marketing

content. This is a huge topic in and of itself,

but for now, let me summarize by saying that it’s vital to balance the business-driv-ing needs of the regions with the strategic priorities of corporate teams.

Breaking down silos across teams, especial-ly between corporate and the field, manag-ing brand consistency, economies of scale, AND the local relevance, creates the best outcomes.

3. Develop an audience-centric strategy – global-style. Marketers are always laser- focused on the personas they are targeting. That’s not a new concept. However, what has become challenging is applying that same discipline to the global elements of personas. Besides adapting your content map to your general personas, as well as the points in the buying cycle you’re trying to affect, your campaign themes, and the place in the customer lifecycle, it’s critical to overlay that with the languages and other considerations of the regions and cultures you’re trying to impact. And, again, to do this at the outset.

4. Build a technology infrastructure designed to scale globally and accelerate global deployment of content. This forms



the very foundation of an organization’s entire global content strategy. It’s what makes execution possible with the speed, agility, and quality the markets demand, with the efficiencies your resources require. This infrastructure should include your web CMS, your document and digital asset

management systems, your marketing automation systems, as well as newer technology that streamlines the entire globalization process and becomes the hub for taking all your other technologies global. The Cloudwords application was designed specifically for that purpose. It sort of becomes the marketers’ ERP for their content factory, if you will, delivering faster time to revenue while significantly reducing the costs and time associated with taking your content global.

Cloudwords Marketing Globalization Platform



Best Kept Secret? Only

20% of Global Marketers Know

What “Transla-tion Memory” Is

Cloudwords recently surveyed nearly 500 global content marketers to learn about the processes they use when it comes time to localize their marketing copy to reach customers in international markets. One of the questions we asked was whether participants were familiar with the term “Translation Memory” because this is such a valuable asset for global organizations.

In a nutshell, Translation Mem-ory is a database of a company’s previously translated words and phrases. It’s valuable because if you’ve translated something once, you should never have to pay to have it translated again.

To our surprise, only 20% of global marketers are familiar with Translation Memory. Keep in mind, these are marketers who are already translating content to reach multilingual audiences—in fact, on average, they’re translating content into eight differ-ent languages, some more, some less. That means a whopping 80% are unfamiliar with a tool that can tremendously reduce their translation costs and save significant time when it comes to getting their content to market.

Regardless of whether you need to trans-late marketing materials, website pages or product copy, global professionals can no longer afford to have Translation Memory kept a secret. In fact, they need to own it, access it, and leverage it.

Consider this: the two largest cost drivers for localization projects are the number of words you need to translate and the amount of time it takes the vendor to finalize the document. Cost per word varies depending on which language you are translating to, but if you didn’t have to translate a portion of your words because you’re re-purpos-ing previously translated copy, that’s fewer words you have to pay to translate again, and less time it takes for the translation vendor to finish the project. That is, IF your translators are leveraging your Translation Memory, and if they are, whether they’re passing along the savings. When multiple translation vendors are being used, there is no shared leverage among them.

As you can see, global organizations have had little opportunity to manage and use their own of Translation Memory data-base well or even at all. Cloudwords is the only content globalization application that hosts a cloud-based Translation Memory




database for each customer to own and manage. Cloudwords’ OneTM stores a company’s words and phrases that have already been translated and keeps them updated within the database. A customer’s OneTM is accessible to any vendor that the

company chooses to contract with.

By enabling all vendors to access their client’s

OneTM, brand and message consistency are greatly increased because everyone is working from the same set of up-to-date, approved termi-

nology. Such improved

collaboration processes ultimately leads to an overall higher quality of translated materials. All the while, reducing the costs and time needed to complete each project.

If you didn’t know about Translation Memory before you read this post, you’re clearly not alone. But now you know, and we hope that if you’re not already a Cloudwords customer, you’ll reach out to learn more about how to take advantage of your own OneTM database, as well as experience all the additional benefits our world-class application provides.



Quantifying the Importance of

Global Customer Engagement

Engaging customers successfully on a global scale requires a fresh approach to localization – namely, thinking about it as a strategic piece of your global go-to- market strategy, and tackling it as the complex business process it is.

Customer engagement is the holy grail of marketers

Whether you’re in the B-to-B realm or marketing directly to consumers, the importance of authentic customer engagement can’t be overstated. Is it possible to put a dollar value on customer en-gagement? You bet.

According to a Gallup study of thousands of B2B customer relationships, for example, fully engaged B2B customers accounted for a 23% increase in share of wallet, profit-ability, revenue, and relationship growth relative to average customers, whereas actively disengaged customers actually cost companies 13 percent along these same benchmarks.

However, only 13% of B2B customers are fully engaged, according to the study.

The reason may surprise you. Analysts at Gallup noted that many B2B companies focus on price, speed, and efficiency when they communicate with their customers. Instead, these companies should have been establishing an emotional connection with their customers in order to engage with them successfully.

Engaging customers on a global scale is inherently more complex and challenging

Mastering this connection requires speaking their language – literally and figuratively. After all, if

your words are (ahem) lost in translation, you’ll fail across the board. As the Gallup study illustrates, getting engagement right is obviously vital, but also an enormous challenge. It’s exponentially more difficult for multinational companies to engage effectively with customers who speak other languages and have completely different cultural frames of reference from themselves — and each other.

By Heidi Lorenzen

Fully engaged B2B cus-tomers accounted for a

23% increase in share of wallet, profitability, rev-enue, and relationship

growth.



Using local language is an absolute requirement for business success

A Common Sense Advisory study found a strong correlation between the num-ber of foreign languages appearing on a company’s website and the company’s measure of business success as represented by its score on leading rankings of company revenue (Forbes), brand value (Interbrand), or website traffic (Alexa). The top-ranked companies consistently offered greater language support to their global customers than companies occupying the lower positions on these rankings.

Here’s where the proverbial rubber hits the road: Another study of Fortune 500 companies shows that those which translated content to keep up with or gain an edge over their competitors were more than 2x more likely to have an increase in profits and 1.27 times more likely to generate increased earnings per share (EPS).

But let’s consider localization from the perspective of the consumer we are trying to engage:

• 56.2% of consumers say that the ability to obtain information in their

own language is more important than price in making a purchase decision, according to Common Sense Advisory

• 72.4% of consumers would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language

• 72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time on sites in their own language

Clearly, any way you look at it, overall success in global customer engagement (as measured by revenue growth and P&L) can only achieved by looking at localization as a critical business process to be optimized. Doing so will translate (no pun intended!) into bottom-line benefits too powerful to be ignored: shorter go-to-market timelines, faster time-to-revenue, and zero chance for the competition to sneak in and steal your thunder.

Your content is an extremely valuable asset. Having accurate marketing and sales messages across every customer touch-point in every relevant language is crucial to the customer experience, and your com-pany’s ability to capture the global revenue your go-to-market plans are built to yield.



You are so global, you don’t

even know it!

Consider the following:

1. Starbucks coffee drank by a business man in Shanghai helps to feed a family on the island of Sumatra, the hills of Costa Rica and Western Africa

2. A selfless act in Tunisia sparks a social revolution on Twitter across northern Africa and Middle East

3. Products developed in Southeast Asia are sold to collectors in the United States through the help of Amazon.com

4. Kiva Microloans are disseminated throughout developing countries bringing pride, commerce and liveli-hoods to families

5. Life-saving vaccines developed in the United States by Eli Lilly prevent the spread of Polio in Africa and save the lives of millions

Global communication and collaboration is shaping the way we view different cultures, different people and provides a new plat-form for social empathy.

Our world is already pretty small and only getting smaller – I can jump on a plane at 12pm in San Francisco and land in London

at 7am the following day. I can jump on FaceTime, Skype or Viber and see my family in Boise, LA, San Diego, London and Dublin, Ireland all in a matter of seconds.

Organizations, individuals are constantly looking for new ways to connect, engage and communicate and the rate at which this is now possible is staggering. Think about it – email in its earliest forms was developed in the 1960s, the PC went mainstream in the 1980s, the Internet went mainstream in the 1990s, Social applications went mainstream in the 2000s and now as we enter the 2010s – world-wide communication is only accelerating as businesses continue to invest heavily in all things localization, translation and globalization – or put another way, all things multi-lingual; their products, collateral, and communication strategies.

Accelerating Global Product Usage and Registration

I remember working with a company called hi5 in 2004, one of the many companies pre-Facebook, that were trying to make a name in the “social media” space. I worked with them to identify their “tier-1” languages and we set out to localize their application into




11 languages – French, Italian, German, Spanish (EU), Portuguese (EU) Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish (LAS), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese and Korean. They didn’t have much content to localize, but they contin-ued to tell me “how big they were in Portugal” – which I thought was pretty cool. But when I asked why that might be the case, they responded

with “We have no idea! But we think if we localize our application everyone will begin to understand how to really use our cool features”. So, we localized their applica-tion, they loaded the translations into their system and turned it on.

In 24 hours the following happened:

• Application Usage was up 7x• New Registrations were up 10x• New advertisers around the world were

calling them to do business

Pretty amazing considering all they really did was adapt their offering to accommo-

date the growing global audience.

In short, localization is kind of like helping someone see for the first time – where once they were truly struggling to understand what you were trying to communicate, or worse, had no impression at all because they didn’t bother to check out your mes-sage, because it wasn’t in their language – the communication veil was lifted and they were now able to really begin to fully utilize all of your products cool new features and have a deeper understanding of the value of your offering.

Obviously enhanced global results will vary across industries, but one thing remains clear – people want to have an experience that is familiar, easily consumable, and enables deeper understanding.

The real challenge for the global orga-nization is to invest enough energy and resources into the experience such that their desired message reaches the targeted individual at the right time — and in the right language.

Content Operations on a Global Scale

Did you enjoy reading our Cloudwords Perspectives on taking your content global? In our new ebook - Content Operations on a Global Scale - we share specific ways to improve global content delivery and better align it with your go-to-market strategy. The new-found efficiencies and greater glob-al marketing impact will help you drive more growth and customer engagement in all the markets you serve.

Download the new ebook from our website at www.cloudwords.com.

NEWeBOOK

ABOUT CLOUDWORDS

Cloudwords has uniquely disrupted the localization industry with a powerful end-to-end platform created specifically to turbocharge the marketing globalization process. We’re not a translation vendor. Rather, Cloudwords is the first and only software to fuse workflow, collaboration, financial and project management, and analytics to streamline getting marketing content into the languages that resonate with a company’s target audiences.

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Cloudwords, Inc.400 Montgomery Street, Suite 1200San Francisco, CA 94104USAPhone: +1.415 .394.8000Sales: [email protected]

www.cloudwords.com

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