Digital Experience Strategies that Work Around the World

Featured article by Peggy Chen, VP of Marketing, SDL

Many companies never anticipate the implications going global will have on their web presence. The sheer complexity of managing the content for multiple brands, products, digital channels and demands on a website is mind boggling – even before you multiply this complexity by the number of languages the site must be localized into.

Minimalist approaches fall short

To solve this problem, companies often resort to using the least amount of content that might apply to all markets and only translating the bare minimum. Because, let’s face it, translation can seem a daunting and expensive process. As a result, while the website may be a showcase of high-quality translation, it offers the customers nothing they actually want. It’s like going to Netflix and finding your only choices are subtitled Swedish crime dramas or Korean TV Shows.

Connect the dots

An increasingly popular solution is to streamline web marketing across all sites by selecting a system that can connect the process of creating content, translate it for global audiences and publish it to all global web properties.

With this approach, businesses can achieve greater control over the content their global audiences experience, deliver much richer content, while not increasing costs. Most companies struggle to do this because they view content management as separate from translation. However, without a tight integration between the two, delivering a web experience that’s personal to the customer and can scale to global volumes is impossible.

Content management + translation technology = global online sophistication

The benefits of connecting content management and translation systems are numerous. When these systems are combined, it takes less effort to manage multilingual sites since the web content can be automatically routed for translation, approved and published to regional sites all from within the website CMS (rather than copying and pasting from one system to the other). In addition, content reuse via componentizing content combined with translation memory, which ensures translations get faster and more efficient over time, can save significant translation costs per year. In addition, connecting technical support documentation management systems provides customers with an integrated information experience, amplifying local market presence.

For Content Delivery Network services provider Akamai, this approach proved to be highly successful.

“As a global company, it’s important that we not only communicate with our audiences in each country, but have the ability to do so consistently and efficiently,” said Rebecca Murtagh, Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Brand, Akamai. “With SDL, we have a CMS that allows us to more efficiently drive our digital marketing strategy across the globe while also reducing costs.”

Achieving success is about local relevancy

Companies with true global ambitions should focus on delivering local relevancy rather than just translations. Improving multilingual web properties is not a matter of the lowest per-word rate or providing the same information across every global site. Instead, it’s a matter of simplifying processes, tending to the details of building integrated digital capabilities for each marketplace and delivering the message and content audiences in each market are looking for.