Making global expansion happen

Coca-Cola, Mitsubishi, Pret a Manger and Skoda.  These are just a few of the brands that have experienced the challenge of maintaining their brand promise when translating their propositions into local language, to expand into new markets. But to avoid any faux pas, what are the important factors you need to consider?  Here are our top five tips …

 1. Get to know your market. First and foremost, don’t overlook conducting your own primary research. Secondary research may also be useful if your brand is particularly well established in its sector and there are a number of reputable global brand equity and brand tracking companies.  Research will help you to understand your target market and how your brand is currently positioned and perceived.

2. Consider cultural differences and norms. Cultural boundaries can be barriers to communication. Mistakes here may damage the brand in ways that can be hard to reverse, so its best to make sure your content is culturally sensitive before it impacts your new market.

3. Exercise caution with your selection of words. Mistakes as simple as using words that have different meanings in different languages can lead to trouble. An example of this is when Honda introduced a new model into the Scandinavian countries, it then discovered that the word used for the model was a vulgarity in many Nordic languages.

4. Avoid the use of puns, idioms and slogans. A good translator will know that wordplay and idiomatic speech can be extremely difficult to transfer from one language to another. The same goes for brand slogans and straplines, which, being familiar to our ears, lose their literal meaning over time. In these instances, a skilled transcreator must change the literal text, while aiming to generate a similar impact on the target audience.

5. Utilise the services of a professional translator with experience in transcreation and expertise of your target market/s.  This can make a real difference to the impact and success of your campaign.

If you are looking to enter new markets and don’t speak the language or understand the cultural norms, talk to the team at TEMA Translation and TEMA Global Search.  With a team of over 25 in-house translators covering the main European languages and a global network of over 2,500 professional translators, we’d be delighted to help ensure that your marketing efforts are a resounding success.  E-mail: [email protected] for more information.

The importance of engaging with your audience and other sites and businesses is, as we know, extremely important in gaining not only a good SERP ranking but also a good reputation. One of the benefits to come from a good relationship with other sites and businesses is backlinks. Anything that helps to improve your status is worth working on!

When staging and conducting a new marketing campaign, it pays to acknowledge the benefits of local versions of international services. One good example of this is the more local versions of the major search engines. As internet users a lot of people around the world use and acknowledge the benefits of the major, global search engines such as Google and Yahoo! However good International SEO practice suggests that in order to make your campaign and site as visible as possible it is crucial to consider what other possible search engines different users and countries use. The popularity and relevance of the major search engines varies from country to country, hence the use of more local services. For instance: Chinese Baidu, Russian Begun and Yandex, Polish Netsprint and South Korean Naver.