Unique is one of the most moth-eaten terms in B2B marketing, right up there with world-class solutions and out of the box thinking. But when it comes to localization marketing, unique might just be the best way to describe the dilemma marketers face.

From a professional marketing perspective, localization marketing is a bit like a duck-billed platypus. It just doesn’t look like anything else.  

On the one hand, providers of language-related products and services are part of a highly specialized industry that markets to sophisticated buyers with deep experience in translation and localization. On the other, practically no one outside of the language industry has a clue what localization, internationalization and globalization services actually are.  

It’s an issue that localization marketers need to understand and address. In a world where more than half of the B2B buying process is now done before any direct contact is made with the seller, how can you reach and convey your messages to everyone involved in the purchasing decision when most people have no idea what you do?

Story time.

Speaking in Tongues

A few years ago, I got a taste of what it must be like to provide language services. I had a client who was the VP of marketing for a $250 million tech company. We were building five foreign-language versions of the company’s website, including one in French.

For the French site, we couldn’t get anyone on the client side involved in the process early on. I warned my client that without input from the French marketing team, we had no guarantee we were adapting our messaging accurately for the specific needs of the francophone market. But because we were under a deadline, we went ahead and managed the translation process ourselves.

Fail.

Putting it nicely, the French team said the translation was terrible, which was not only embarrassing for both our client and us, but also damaged the entire marketing team’s credibility.

The point? When I tried to explain how intricate and subjective the translation process can be and that we should have involved the French team from the very beginning, the client said, “Words are words. Whatever the word is in French should be the very same word as it is in English.”

Well, excusez-moi, but that’s just not the way it is, as anyone who speaks more than one language knows.

The misfire happened, primarily because our client knew nothing about language, and we were marketers, not LSPs, with very limited experience in managing localization projects.

In this case, no one with buying authority had enough knowledge to correct translation errors before they happened, or to understand what the team really needed from a language services provider. This is the scenario that LSPs who sell to small and mid-sized firms face on a regular basis.

On the flip side, global companies that have localization expertise internally are often looking for solutions that require people, technology and processes with very specific knowledge and capabilities. This is the scenario that language companies face when the goal is to sell multilingual solutions to the world’s top brands.

In the next blog in this series, let’s discuss how marketers for language-related products and services can reach and engage both novice and mature buyers successfully—even when potential buyers don’t even know they need localization services.

In the meantime, do you have any questions regarding localization marketing we can answer now? Drop us a line here. We’d love to hear from you!