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Thanks to lockdown measures established to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the growth of eCommerce soared, reaching an unprecedented evolution. E-sales are at their all-time high due to this accelerated mass adoption of eCommerce in 2020, boosting years of development in just weeks.
Although everyone is online today, there is a key differentiator between the brands that managed to position themselves as leaders of their industry and those that didn’t: customer experience. Brands prepared to offer their customers a completely immersive experience are the ones that managed to stand out and position themselves as game-changers in this era of mass-digitization and tailored customer experiences.
The first step to do so is as simple as speaking the native language of your audience. And the more languages you speak, the more audiences you captivate.
In this post, we’ll uncover the perks of a multilingual website approach, how to properly design your website language localization strategy, and who’s the right fit for the work.
The Perks of Localizing a Website for International Markets in 2021
Many thought that this turn to virtual channels had an expiration date. Once the pandemic ended, everything would return to “normal”, but once customer behavior evolves, it rarely reverts.
So here, the strategic move is to adapt and go forward. Becoming a brand with a strong online presence and capable of providing personalized content and tailored customer service will make your business stand out from the crowd.
This includes a series of features that you can find in any online platform of such companies (from Shopify to Ikea and Amazon): user-focused interface, fast and hyper-personalized customer attention, and culturally-sensitive crafted content.
And guess what? In part, those are achieved thanks to the magic of Website Language Localization.
Essentially, Website Language Localization is the process that goes one step further than translation. When you translate your website you’re just replacing the copy from the source language to the target languages.
In localization, a professional translation and localization agency will put a team of native-speaker translators and expert desktop publishers to work on every tiny detail of your website, from text to every image, icon, and symbol. Even the layout color palette will change to make your website appear locally crafted in the eyes of your targeted audience.
The main goal is for the final output to be culturally sensitive to your new audience so that your brand’s message resonates deeply within them.
So, should you care about localization? Well, here are 3 useful global marketing facts:
1. English no longer reigns in cyberspace. Only 25% of internet users prefer English. The remaining 75% prefer to surf the web in their local language.
2. Quickly, India and China are stepping into the virtual sphere. There are 738 million online users in China daily, followed by India, which is home to 462 million online users. None of these countries speak English as their first language.
3. eCommerce has gone mobile. Thanks to the massive adoption of smartphones, 43% of its users use theirs to buy online, and they do so in their native language.
So why does creating real and meaningful connections with your audience matter so much? A solid online strategy can enhance your brand’s image as much as a poorly crafted strategy can demolish it. And the main vehicle of this strategy is your online platform, your website.
Let’s take a simple example. You are carrying out a marketing campaign on your website because Christmas eve is approaching and it’s a good opportunity to make your brand visible.
At the same time, you’re targeting the Japanese market, but this country’s culture doesn’t give so much importance to Christmas but instead focuses the attention on New Year’s eve. Creating a Christmas-themed landing page for your site will not only confuse your Japanese customers, but it will also show that you don’t quite understand the Japanese market.
A localized version of your website and localized content show that you understand and respect the cultural nuances of your target market. By localizing, you’ll build bonds with your audiences that will boost your engagement rates.
And since we are talking about Japanese, this is a perfect example to discuss how website language localization actually works. Japanese is a left-to-right language, so the entire layout of your site should be mirrored. Website language localization takes into account the specific characteristics of the foreign language you’re targeting and puts them into practice so that everything seems locally created, familiar, and easy to interact with.
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6 Reasons to Think About Website Language Localization
It’s now clear why designing a tailored consumer experience is so important and how website localization services can help you do so. However, these 6 reasons to localize your website can be of great help:
- Increases your customer base’s trust: a website that reflects cultural and linguistic nuances concretely and visibly shows that your company knows and respects the different markets in which it operates, generating higher trust levels among its customers.
- Creates interactions loaded with meaning: what you consume greatly influences your daily life. This includes what you see on social media and the sites you visit. Ensuring that your website is in your target audience’s language generates a bigger attraction towards your message.
- Reinforces your brand’s consistency: expanding the linguistic accessibility of your website guarantees greater control over the message you are sending to cyberspace and how you interact with your audiences. By doing so, you can align your brand’s message with your identity and the cultural interests of your target audiences alike.
- Improves segmentation: high-end website language localization solutions greatly facilitate the personalization of messages to different types of potential customers. You will keep tighter control of what message to send to which audience (local, regional or national), which will expand your brand’s digital footprint.
- Enhances the workflow of in-market teams: making your website culturally and linguistically accessible is not only good for your audience, but also for the internal functioning of your business. Especially for local sales and customer support teams. A well-localized site not only highlights the uniqueness of each market but complies with specific regulations and provides useful information to each local team to continue expanding your company even further.
- Boosts your SEO strategy: Search engines love the specific; they’re detail-driven. The localized version of your website doesn’t just focus on readability. With the right website language localization solutions, everyone in the world can find you and your content. From images, multimedia content, webinars, social media content, and even keywords and metadata, everything can be localized to enhance your potential customers’ online search and lead them to you.
Top 3 Language Pairs to Start Your Website Language Localization Project
To successfully localize web content, one needs to be as strategic as possible. If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. Let’s take a look at the numbers.
According to Statista, Chinese (19.4%), Spanish (7,9%) and Arabic (5,2%) are the three most widely spoken languages online after english (widely considered as the lingua franca of the internet)
In the case of China, 2019 was the beginning of a golden era of eCommerce where it represented the third part of its GDP. On the other hand, it’s not a minor fact that the eCommerce Sales rate of the Asian Giant surpassed those of Europe and the United States combined. And as if that were not enough, currently China has the largest online consumer population worldwide (710+ million people).
Moving to the second place, the Spanish-speaking market is incredibly promising for brands and businesses that want to operate in it. Every day, over 300 million Spanish-speaking users are online. And in Latin America countries alone, online stores reported 1.4 billion daily visits. So if you want to start expanding culturally and linguistically, Spanish website translation services are a solid option to go.
And last but not least, the Arab markets are more open than ever, recovering gloriously after a relapse thanks to the outbreak of COVID-19. Arabic-speaking markets host a population of 300+ million online daily users, creating unprecedented business opportunities for those who know how to adapt to its vibrant and unique cultural nuances.
If you’re in need of Arabic Website Translation or Arabic Translation Services, look no further. We are a UAE based translation and localization agency specialized in delivering top-notch Arabic websites and content localization.
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Choose the Right Partner & Expand Your Customer Base Today
If you stumbled across this post searching for translation services that can offer you the ultimate eCommerce website localization solutions, or you’re a translator in training hoping to discover the wonders of website language localization you can check out some of our Website Localization Best Practices.
Thanks to our highly-trained native-speaker translators and the right mix of the latest translation technology, we, at bayantech, design and carry out top-notch, end-to-end website language localization to our clients in the MENA region and beyond.
From Website Translation Proxy to market research translation and content localization, we’re here every step of the way so that you don’t have to face the challenges of website language localization on your own.
At bayantech, we specialize in tailoring high-end website language localization projects.
You’re just one click away from contacting your new project manager and start engaging with new and unique communities today.
