April 20, 2021 / by Margarita Núñez Estimated read time: 8 minutes
One sure way to gain more company sales is by tapping into international markets. Translating the app, the company's website, and any marketing materials needed to promote it, is the fastest way to reach a wider range of potential international customers.
Here are 3 tips on how to achieve greater market penetration:
1. Translate Your Offering
Bear these 3 facts in mind when making decisions on where to spend your venture capital dollars:
- 75% of consumers prefer to shop for products in their language.
- 60% of people with a native language other than English rarely or never buy from websites that are only available in English.
- 80% of marketing decision-makers feel that localization is essential to successfully break into new markets.
Armed with such insights, you should make translating your software or service a top priority this year if you want to grow your business fast and achieve the milestones agreed with your investors.
[Fortune 500 companies who increased their translation budgets were 1.5 times more likely to report an increase in revenue than other companies who did not.]
2. Select a Professional Language Services Provider
Language Service Providers (LSP), offer an efficient way for startups to work toward their goals regardless of industry or niche. They can offer you advice on best localization practices to translate your product efficiently, the latest tools and technologies that will make your translation project run smoothly, and whether or not machine translation is the best option to translate your project.
The localization industry was projected to grow by 2.5% in 2020 to an estimated $55 billion globally. At a time when many sectors are facing significant economic contraction, this is a potent indicator of the value of the translation industry.
"[O]ne thing is clear: that our industry as a whole plays a key role in saving lives and advancing knowledge and communication in this global phenomenon. The pandemic will have lasting effects on the way clients consume language services and will affect industries, the players in our industry financially, until the pieces of this new puzzle are reorganized." - Renato Beninatto, CEO and Co-Founder of Nimdzi.
With such an important role to play in both good times and bad, it is no surprise that translation and localization services remain a top priority for many growing businesses.
3. Target the Right Languages for Translation
While there are 254 million native English speakers in the US, which comprises by far the majority of the population, there is also a significant number of people who speak the following languages:
- Spanish (43.2 million native speakers)
- All forms of Chinese, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and others (2.9 million native speakers)
- French and French Creole (1.3 million native speakers)
If you are only interested in growing your customer base in the USA, then choose from the language list above.
If you are interested in selling your offering to an international audience, then the next most commonly spoken languages in the world are as follows:
- Mandarin Chinese (1,117 million native speakers)
- Hindi (615 million native speakers)
- Spanish (534 million native speakers)
- French (280 million native speakers)
- Arabic (274 million native speakers)
However, when deciding what languages to target for localization, your company should not look only at the number of speakers in the world. This is not a good indicator.
From these statistics above, you can deduce that accessing the Chinese market alone would nearly double the number of potential customers. So, Chinese Simplified might be a good language to start with, but only if your company has plans to break into the Chinese market; otherwise you could be wasting your money.
And while there are 615 million Hindi native speakers, and you might think that this is a good language to translate into, the reality is that most people in India also speak a second language and also understand English. So, Hindi might not be the best language to pick for translation either.
If you want to know what are the top languages your company should target for translation, SimulTrans can help. Reach out today.
