Global Means Going Local In Today’s Digital World
Companies have been expanding their global footprints for years, but now more than ever, globalization is becoming more mainstream. Companies of all sizes are looking to grow their businesses across multiple continents. While global expansion represents great opportunities for retailers to grow their brands and drive more revenue, it also poses several logistical and technical challenges. A company's website is the core of its brand, especially for e-commerce and B-to-B companies. It's where the conversion begins. So for companies going global, one of their top priorities — and challenges — is globalizing their websites.
Website globalization is a strategic, high-priority initiative for retailers spanning multiple vertical markets, and one that directly impacts site engagement, lead generation and revenue. However, successfully deploying your website in multiple countries throughout the world doesn't mean a simple native translation of an organization's primary site, but rather the development, deployment, localization and regular maintenance of many distinct sites with regionally specific content.
These responsibilities fall largely into the hands of marketers — those responsible for generating compelling content, driving sales and maintaining a unified brand presence globally. They're responsible for not only integrating campaigns and promoting their brands across multiple channels, but also for managing multiple sites in multiple languages and including custom content that's unique to each specific region.
Website globalization is a complex process and daunting to many retailers. In fact, research shows that many are facing challenges doing this successfully and have struggled to globalize their websites because they lack the human, monetary or technical resources needed to effectively manage multiple international sites. Fortunately, there's sophisticated technology today to make this process more seamless than ever.
Managing Multiple Regional Websites
Website globalization is the process of launching an adapted, multilingual version of a company's core website into different regions throughout the world. A regional website is an adapted version of the company's core website whose content has been translated and/or altered to match the region that it serves. In a recent survey of chief marketing officers, 92 percent said they currently manage regionally focused sites in addition to their main corporate site. About one-quarter manage three to five regional websites, nearly 30 percent manage six to 10, almost 20 percent manage 11-20, and about 15 percent manage 21 or more.
Language isn't the sole differentiator between these regional sites. For the majority of companies, at least half of the content on their local sites — e.g., whitepapers, case studies, video, etc. — is region specific. Translating content alone can already be a challenging process, so why are marketers adding another layer of complexity to globalization by localizing content? In order to engage audiences with content throughout the sales cycle, content must be relevant to them — and what's relevant to an audience will vary by country.
While some content should be consistent to ensure a unified brand, content marketing should be localized in order to provide a more targeted experience, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. By making content region-specific, marketers are seeing significant improvements in site engagement, lead generation and revenue.
Despite the fact that marketers are publishing regional websites with local content to help drive conversions, managing these multiple, disparate sites remains a major issue. More than half of surveyed marketers said that between 20 percent to 60 percent of the content on their regional websites is out-of-date at any one time. Many cite a lack of technical resources to build, maintain and enhance regional sites. The good news is that the technology exists to make the process of managing these regional websites much easier.
Essential WCM Capabilities to Address Globalization Trends and Challenges
Web content management (WCM) solutions are the foundation to a successful digital strategy. The right WCM platform can provide an agile environment for marketers looking to effectively globalize their websites. There are many factors marketers need to consider as they evaluate WCM platforms for their globalization strategy, three of which are absolutely critical: multisite management, translation workflow capabilities, and ease of use.
Multisite management: To enable the efficient development, deployment and maintenance of multiple regional websites, marketers require WCM solutions that enable multisite management from a single platform account. The ability to publish, reuse and update content from one platform account to multiple online and mobile domains reduces the chance of error, ensures brand consistency, and requires far less time and staff resources. Business logic, template functionality, design elements and content can be developed once and used across many sites, enabling marketers to launch new websites easily, quickly and cost effectively. Marketers can make each site look as unique or similar as needed, enabling them to efficiently address regional differences, yet ensure a unified brand presence.
Translation workflow capabilities: Translating multiple websites and managing the content and changes can be a challenging process, but a powerful WCM solution can make this process as efficient as possible. First, to support truly global publishing, a WCM platform must be able to support any language it encounters. This includes support for advanced character sets used for Asian languages, as well as right-to-left character entry for languages such as Arabic or Hebrew.
Second, a WCM platform must be able to create relationships between the original content and translated version, as well as provide workflows to help editors and translators understand what has been, or needs to be, translated. By organizing multiple language versions of specific content together in a single, seamless workflow, marketers can more easily publish regional content as needed.
Ease of use: To manage a successful digital brand strategy, marketers must have the ability to readily publish and update content without relying on IT intervention. SaaS-based WCMs empower nontechnical users to more quickly and easily implement and manage websites, freeing marketers to more efficiently handle globalization and localization of content than their on-premise or non-SaaS cloud counterparts. Furthermore, SaaS WCMs are always universally accessible from any web-enabled device, so teams from central and regional offices can readily share and update content.
The growth of global online commerce and the increasingly competitive worldwide market make it imperative for retailers to expand and improve the globalization of their websites. As more companies deploy regional websites to drive sales and promote their brands, they need to carefully consider which WCM solution they'll leverage as the foundation for their global digital strategy. To streamline the deployment and maintenance of multiple sites, ensure brand consistency, and greatly reduce the time and effort required to create and update multiple sites, marketers must have the ability to easily publish and reuse content across one or multiple online and mobile sites, as well as manage multiple language translations.
Noah Logan is the general manager of Clickability at Upland Software, a SaaS web content management (WCM) system.