How to improve your localisation strategy

Localisation is the adapting of products, services, and content to make them suitable and culturally relevant for a specific region or locale. Beyond just translating texts, it encompasses various aspects to ensure that a product or content resonates with the local audience you want to interact with. It adheres to their customs, culture, and regulations.

In marketing, localisation is important as it helps your brand to connect and cultivate relatability with your target audience, maximising your chances of success.

A localisation strategy is the action taken to ensure that your product is personalised to the liking of your target audience. The end result is seeing your product’s consumption increase among your target group.

In detail, here is a guideline on localisation strategy; what it is, and how to make it work for your business.

What is a Localisation strategy?

To have a good localisation strategy, you will first need to have a deep cultural understanding of the audience you are trying to connect with. The best approach is to study their language, trends, cultural practices, and the performance of similar products. Taking these into consideration when localising your brand will help immensely in the success of your product in that market.

Here are a few tips on achieving a successful localisation strategy.

Top 8 tips and examples for a good localisation strategy

1. Understand the market trends of your target locality

Market trends are things like fast-moving products, current market needs, the buying habits of the people within the locality, etc. By simply understanding these, you are able to tell whether your product will be a hit or a miss.

2. Use Effective Translation and Localisation Tools

Most translation tools have been modeled with the help of native linguists; making it easy to capture even the slightest pronunciation rules. Even more advanced is the use of both machines and humans to translate and localise your content.

Human translation comes in when you need to give the final output a natural, emotion-filled outlook. Also, a combination of both machine and human translation on the same platform saves you the time and money spent to source individual experts.

3. Work with native localisation experts

A native expert will help you cover all the aspects of localisation. Be it the appropriate image or salutation, nuances, and cultural appropriations. Auris AI combines both machine translation and native experts to achieve timeless error-free localisation for any given product. We work in over 16 different languages and are capable of localising as per the requests of our customers.

4. Study your competitor’s localisation strategy

Studying your competitor gives you ideas of what might work and what will not. These ideas as a baseline give you an easy time navigating the target market. You might not understand why the competitor went with option B but at least you already know that it is doing much better and that is all that matters.

5. Transcreate images/videos used in marketing

Graphics draw attention much faster than words. You therefore want to rethink people’s first impression of your brand. Some people associate images with racism, violence, or taboo regardless of the message. Understanding these will save you the hustle of having to explain the “conflicting images” in your brand.

6. Use local keywords for SEO

In one of our articles, we talked about the importance of multilingual SEO to the success of your brand expanding to a new locale. The purpose of localisation is to reach all the target audiences in their preferred languages, and in a way that is relevant to them.

For instance, an Italian or Indonesian is not likely to search for keywords in English. In such cases, if your brand is trying to reach non-English speakers, it is key that your website is properly translated to the different languages, with relevant keywords in the different languages.

The internet has various keyword search tools that can help you generate the possible words used for searching a given product in its locality. Using these strategically in your website increases the chance of appearing in the search results of your target consumers.

7. Encourage and incorporate feedback into your localisation strategy

The only way to ascertain the effectiveness of a strategy is by interacting with the end consumers. Creating a feedback channel helps you to improve on the weaknesses of your strategy and even gives you other ideas not considered at the design stage.

8. Test the strategies used to ascertain the effectiveness and revise as needed

As trends change, so do the strategies for localising your business. A better way of staying relevant is by constantly reviewing your most recent strategies and ensuring they are at par with the market trends.

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Be reminded that good things take time. A working localisation strategy is not an overnight success. You may have to substitute or restructure some of the ideas or even rely on user feedback to acquire new ideas.