(Image credit: Gerd Altmann / Pixabay)
Setting up your company in a new country offers a range of exciting possibilities to expand your business. However, your business will not be able to capitalize on new opportunities without a localized marketing campaign and without a strategy to tackle language barriers.
Customers prefer to read reviews in their native language, buy products from websites that speak their language and read information that they comprehend.
On top of that, your business needs to function in the new environment, which necessitates dealing with hiring, accounting and other processes in a new language. Ultimately, your business needs a way of handling translation on a holistic, centralized level.
While artificial intelligence for language translation is a powerful tool to create efficiencies within your business, it’s absolutely crucial for building trust with consumers. The kind of language a brand uses defines the customer-brand relationship and also establishes a long-term connection.
Successful businesses are using an integrated approach that uses existing tools, such as machine translation, in combination with human editors. This approach can improve organizations’ marketing strategies and processes. It also can help businesses understand and communicate more effectively with new audiences, grow customer relationships and increase brand credibility.
AI translation can assist with frontline communications
When considering expanding into a new market, companies should understand the language of their new customer base well enough to generate new leads. One tool that is quick and efficient as part of a marketing strategy is the chatbot.
Chatbots act as the frontlines of communication without requiring the full localization team to be online at all times. When new customers browse your site and need help, or if they’ve been looking at the same product page for more than a minute, chatbots can reach out to the customer and answer any questions or concerns instantly.
Conversational commerce – which means using online customer service and chatbots to offer personalized shopping experiences and drive sales – exploded in the e-commerce industry because of its ease of use.
You can take it a step further by implementing an AI translation layer. Through AI, chatbots will be able to answer questions and upsell products to potential customers in any language.
Another way of incorporating AI translation technology is by collecting customer questions to the chatbots, along with the appropriate responses, to create comprehensive FAQs for the website, which can then be made available to customers in different languages.
AI translation provides marketing nuance
As your business expands to new markets, you need to build marketing campaigns that appeal to your target audience’s preferred tone and style. The use of an AI translation solution provides a nuanced approach to language and can help you avoid a big marketing faux pas.
You also can use AI translation to understand how a native target audience reacts to an ad campaign. Other possibilities include conducting surveys and polls to glean data about the new market, and translating these insights to improve the messaging for your social media platforms, content marketing and ad campaigns.
Large corporations like Mastercard, Deloitte and Credit Suisse already use AI marketing tools to automate content creation, which allows them to boost productivity by creating content in less time. The Associated Press uses AI to write corporate earnings reports, freeing up reporters to do more in-depth reporting. You can apply an AI translation layer to the marketing tools you already use to quickly and efficiently write content that appeals to the new market, in a tone and style that is sensitive to the preferences of native speakers.
AI translation streamlines processes
With market expansion, it’s difficult to communicate with a range of potential new stakeholders within your company, whether they are new marketing employees, PR people, or sales representatives native to the market. Use of machine translation tools can lead to a holistic approach for multilingual businesses, streamlining internal processes to ensure alignment with stakeholders, particularly when it comes to your business messaging and strategy.
There are many examples of marketing use cases where AI translation can be employed. It can be used to translate and maintain product catalogs, product documentation, price lists and other sales collateral for sales representatives.
Also, if your company’s communication team is drafting a media announcement, they can have it translated quickly for outreach to all targeted publications in their respective languages – while ensuring the messaging is sensitive to the target group’s preferences.
A translation tool also can facilitate the creation of detailed briefs for product managers in their own languages to help them gather, manage and prioritize market and customer requirements. The list of ways to aid your marketing efforts by integrating an AI-based translation layer is a long one, and the tool can be employed wherever there is content to be translated.
Meet customer expectations
Note that AI translation doesn’t replace the marketing function in a business; rather, it advances the efficiency of the marketing team. When businesses set up shop in a new country, the usual approach is to employ large and unwieldy localization teams that only scale based on how many people are on the team. Incorporating a small team of human editors to refine an AI-based translation will help you conserve your resources.
Using an AI-based translation layer, marketing teams can easily target and attract new customers, because marketers are able to focus on crafting new strategies without being tied down by the translation aspect. As AI improves, customer expectations increase accordingly. You can ensure your marketing campaigns are ahead of the curve by leveraging AI technology for fast and efficient translation.
Vasco Pedro is the co-founder and CEO of Unbabel, the AI-powered Language Operations platform that helps businesses deliver a multilingual customer experience at scale. Vasco is a seasoned expert in AI and language technologies. After a degree in language and knowledge learning, Vasco went on to develop his master’s degree and doctorate around language technologies. He then worked at both Siemens and Google, where he helped develop technologies to further understand data computation and language.
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