Standing out in the global marketplace isn’t easy, but you can give yourself a head start by making sure your content is ready for it in the first place.
There’s no single formula to getting ahead in the global marketplace. There are countless, interconnected strategies that help organizations achieve their goals on a global scale, but it’s not one-size-fits-all.
The internet has taken a vast world and brought it to our fingertips. Global accessibility to rapidly growing terabytes of information is faster than it’s ever been. This growth trend will only continue to accelerate. The acceleration of content creation is only increasing, thus content strategy is more crucial than ever before.
Creating your content with a global audience in mind will prepare you to reach a burgeoning network of potential readers and customers. Among the many ways to prepare your content for the global marketplace, translation and localization are extremely important.
Content Without Borders
It might sound like our regular refrain, but content deployment starts with content planning. More specifically, content planned for global distribution comes primed for global distribution. Regardless of whether you’re going to deploy globally right away or not, preparing for it is just smart.
No matter your product, chances are, you want to expand your market to new segments and new regions. Don’t be reactive. It’s prudent to plan for this expansion, whether you predict this shift will come next week or in two years. Planning for your content to be globally accessible is vital to getting ahead in the global marketplace and good translation drives accessibility in a variety of ways.
Structured Content Is Organized To Go Global Faster
You don’t have to be translating your content right away to be prepared to do so.
You might not know what languages and global audiences are most prone to engage with your product, let alone your content. This, however, doesn’t mean that you should develop content without considering future translation.
Translation isn’t an easy task, but there are methods of content development that make translation and localization much easier, quicker, and cheaper. Adopting a structured content standard like DITA XML is a great way to create content that is much easier to translate down the road.
Having your DITA content organized in components that can be combined to make a document is a much easier way to plan for translation. After all, what’s easier: translating a book at a time or translating a chapter at a time? With structured content, you can more accurately choose exactly what you need translated and what you don’t.
When your content is organized like this, translating it is easier when you’re ready.
Preemptive Strike! Know Your Audience and Study Them Thoroughly
Your unique advantage is knowing your audience.
This jumps off the organizational content development strategy of structured content from the last section. You already know your target audiences and simple tools will help identify where they are across the world.
This gives you the time and knowledge to research geographies and languages that would be most useful to your current audience.
Add Your Voice To The Existing Body of Industry Knowledge
Expertise in your industry is worthwhile in every language.
It’s important to be an industry voice that people trust. Having a trusted voice that people read, share, and vouch for is vital to your organization’s brand. It communicates that you care for educating people, not just peddling your product.
This is a prime place to build a global base. Educational content that can be effectively localized and translated is much more valuable than having it in only one language.
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Translation and localization have historically gotten a bad rap for being expensive, complicated, and inconsistent, but the modern content landscape isn’t built to be limited to one locale. The technology has since evolved, too. With structured content and translation memory, you can set your organization’s content up for success in whatever locale you desire. Getting started isn’t difficult and well worth the initial effort and investment.
Don’t take it from me, one of our Heretto experts can take you through the whole process and show you exactly what I’m telling you and much, much more.
