The Top 3 Trends to Create a Globalized Content and Consumer Engagement Strategy with Smartling

I'm picturing in my head the days when people actually walked through doors and sat in chairs and all that kind of stuff, and we were at a podium. And yeah, maybe I'm thinking, uh, optimistically towards the future. Maybe that's it.

But that's it. This time next year, hopefully.

That's closer, closer in time at this point, right? So yeah, give everyone until, um, One more minute, maybe. Yeah, we can get started since I know we have a 20-minute time slot. Again, hello, welcome everyone joining. We'll give everyone another 30 seconds or so and kick things off. Okay, I think we can get going. Anyone else that files in, you'll just catch on late, but we'll just get going with the agenda and start going from here. So welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Appreciate everyone's time. We're here today to discuss the top 3 trends we're seeing in the marketplace for companies that are managing a global customer engagement strategy. My name is John Rogler. I'm the VP of Sales at Smartling. I'm joined by my colleague, Ashley Nolan, who's our Director of Customer Success at Smartling.

Hi, everybody. Happy to be here.

So today we're talking about content, specifically 3 key trends that are incredibly important when addressing the global marketplace. However, before we dive in, we figured we'd maybe just give a brief explanation about what Smartling does, just so you have some knowledge on our expertise. And I'll keep it super, super short, of course, so we can get down to the topic. But we're a company that essentially exists to translate the world's digital content. We're powered by both software services and language services to enable our customers to translate any type of content in any language combination that they need to support. Content ranges from websites to support documentation to apps to legal agreements, e-learning videos, and really everything in between. So as you can imagine, we work across various different departments in various different verticals and industries as well. So primarily tech and SaaS is probably one of our largest, especially in the past few years with the growing COVID environment and people more and more virtually moving to a global environment. So as we talk through these three trends, those being video, user reviews, and language translation, we'd like to keep the audience thinking here about their global users and how they manage their global content. So keep that in mind as we walk through the presentation and feel free to bring up some questions and we can open it up for discussion at the end. So let's dive in. Aisling, please feel free to take over.

All right, okay, so happy to be here today. I hope we can impart some wisdom on you guys. I'm looking forward to any questions that you might have at the end as well. All right, so kicking things off, life is lived through words. So, you know, me certainly, when I think about words, my mind kind of typically goes to think about books. But these days, you know, I certainly spend most of my day looking through a screen, whether it's a phone, tablet, laptop, or monitor. We're all reading and engaging with people, products, and businesses every day. What does that mean? It means that the landscape for content and consumers is increasingly digital. As a result, global expansion is happening much faster. So we all need to be ready to meet and communicate with our customers wherever they are. And our global audiences are coming to expect this even more. So with that said, when it comes to creating globalized content and building a consumer engagement strategy, these are the 3 big trends centered around words and language that we're, that we're seeing across the board, no matter what type of industry you're in. As John mentioned, we have video, user reviews, and language translation. So for the first trend, video. Video is a must for your global content and consumer engagement strategy. I found it amazing to learn that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. 1 billion hours of YouTube videos are consumed every day, which is actually more than Netflix and Facebook combined. I never would have thought that. In addition to having a global reach, video is quick and effortless to consume and makes up to 80% of internet traffic. We use it day in and day out. We have Generation Z who create videos that get millions of views every day across different platforms such as TikTok and various other mediums out there. They aren't just being watched by people who speak the language that they were created in. If you think about the Kardashians, would they be there, would they be where they are today without the endless selfie videos and makeup tutorials that they do? I think not. It's a big chunk of the pie. Moving on to kind of B2B and B2C. We see video as an important medium for both of those areas. B2B software companies frequently create videos for product demos, social content, and online webinars. It's a really snappy way to get content across through in a format we are accustomed to. If you're thinking about the budget, time, or effort that might be required to start creating video content though, it doesn't have to be high production or a feature film to be successful. Obviously, if you're going for high production, that's going to be high budget. But really, video content can be anything from animated graphics, text, movement, sound, or selfie videos. So what I do at Smartling, I run the customer success team, and we have a global customer base. So from a personal perspective, our customer success team have actually seen really great success engaging with our global customers via personalized videos that take the form of a 2-minute personalized GIF video where our team are able to provide quick tips and tricks to our global customers, and it's been really successful. When you think about engaging with a global audience and video content, you will need to put some time and thought into the language and culture of your global audience and whether video content is suitable for them. Think about where your video content is being created. So for example, if you're a larger company and maybe you have a marketing team in your headquarters, they're probably investing some money in creating higher-budget videos. That are really going to be really good quality. So you should ensure to invest something in transcribing or translating the words in those videos for captions so that your global audience can read them and understand them in their native languages, or even invest in something like dubbing. If you have more local teams, you may want to be able to take a more personalized approach. People in your company who speak those languages actually create video content in their native languages. To suit your target audiences. At the end of the day, it should always come back to cost and value and the goal of the video content, as well as where your consumers are, where you're trying to reach. Alright, so the next trend. The next trend we've seen is user reviews. So in terms of user reviews, it may not be something that you put a lot of thought into as part of your overall global engagement strategy. But we really feel it's something that you shouldn't be ignoring for your business. They're really essential for conversion. I believe there was a G2 session earlier today. If you attended that, you will probably understand what a huge resource G2 Crowd have been to the software community. G2 has, amazingly, 5 million monthly viewers who come to their site in search of software reviews. That's serious traffic to a site to hear, to simply read other customers' reviews. Looking at some stats here, so 72% of buyers actually wouldn't make an online purchase without reading reviews. So if you think about that and think about a consumer, you know, if these reviews are often being written in English, what if a consumer is in a different country and they can't read or understand the review? That could cause them to walk away, which is why reviews need to be considered like every other piece of content. Making sure that your buyers can read the reviews or any piece of content is really crucial to show empathy and understanding among your customer base. So if you're thinking about how to make sure your users' reviews, rather, can be understood and provide value to a global base, this is where something like machine translation can be a great asset. User reviews can actually equal a lot of content depending on your product, and using something like machine translation is a very fast and cost-effective way to ensure those words resonate with your global audience. And on that note, the next trend is language translation. So we're going to hand that over to John.

Great, thanks, Aisling. Some interesting stuff there. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, I mean, I'll respectfully say that I'm biased because we work in the language industry, but we think lastly and most importantly is language translation to all these aspects. I've been in the industry only 13 years, which may seem like a long time for some, maybe not that long for others, but I've seen it evolve in just that short amount of time from a very manual process of clients emailing files to project managers, project managers handing files back and forth to translators, to now what is a very highly automated, streamlined, technology-driven process. And it's very well integrated into nearly every company doing business globally. It's, uh, the industry's grown double since I've joined the industry, and nearly every company sees the, the, uh, the importance of language translation and how this can help drive ROI and enter entering new markets. And the data really speaks for itself, as you'll see on the next slide and as you saw on some of the stuff that Ashley just spoke to. So this data is from a company called CSA Research, which is an independent market research company. They focus on the global content specifically and language services markets exclusively. And in this article they titled "Can't Read, Won't Buy," they state that 65% of consumers prefer content in their own language, reasonably so, even if it's in poor quality, surprisingly enough. 73% of consumers want product reviews in their own language. Language also seems reasonable. I would as well. And then 40% of consumers will not even buy if products in other languages, not in their language, in other words. So these numbers are only increasing as consumers have a growing and stronger preference to having language content. Every year we see these numbers creeping up and up and up higher every year. And translating your core content really gives you the ability to speak to all your customers. You're not immediately shortening your customer base by 40%, as you saw on the last slide. And really what this involves is just a few simple things, one being having a centralized hub for all your translation. For example, using an industry-leading TMS, translation management system, that allows for automation, reuse, and integration with tools such as a CMS or an LMS, content management system, learning management system, or any other type of document repository system that you've built. Industry-leading TMS like ourselves that we offer at Smartling It has built various connectors, integrations with proprietary tools, makes things very seamless with the document repository. And essentially, it builds technology into your internal program to allow you to quickly deploy new content and to quickly maintain and update new content on the fly. So, of course, key to the equation is having a fully vetted, qualified, and trained translation team that makes sure that the content is handled and managed properly in-country, and then the quality's there and the accuracy and the terminology of the market is there. The last increasingly popular trend is AI-powered workflows, and this comes in a variety of different ways: automation, machine translation, machine learning, neural machine translation, etc. You've probably heard all these buzzwords going around over the years, and they've been growing more and more impressive and in more user cases. One user case that— or excuse me, one use case that Aisling suggested earlier was user-generated content. MT is a very good use case for user-generated content when there's a high amount of volume and you're really trying to gather what experience is the consumer having with the product versus how well they typed or grammatically spelled something. User-generated content by design is less focused on quality and grammar, and there's typos and slang words all the time and those types of things. So machine translation is a very good use case in that example. For example, one other example is when speed is more important than quality. One of our life sciences clients is excuse me, one of our life sciences clients translated 90,000 projects in 5 months with machine translation. Each translation job was turned around in 55 seconds, which accelerated their time to market to get the COVID vaccine they were working on approved, which is now out on the market and saving lives. So another use case where speed really trumped quality, and they were trying to track adverse events and get on top of them very quickly and mitigate and get to market approval, which we all lived through ourselves and probably saw on the news every day. So that's another good use case for MT. A couple key takeaways, just to sum it up, is that really video is a must, an ever more popular growing medium. Everyone seems to be wanting to move towards video and a way of marketing themselves through video. User reviews are a crucial form of content and they have a huge impact on consumer buying. I know for myself in particular, that's the case. And as the data proved earlier, it's the case across the, across the globe as well. And language translation is really just essential to your consumer engagement strategy. Those are kind of the 3 takeaways that we wanted to present today. So with that, I'd love to open it up to some questions. I think we have some extra time, 5 minutes for some questions.

Yeah, we do.

Thank you guys.

I know one is in here, so I'm going to start there. So as someone new to localization and globalization content, what should be their top priority?

I mean, really the top priority, I mean, strictly from an ROI perspective, is focusing on the markets where you see the biggest opportunity or the markets where currently selling and haven't translated yet, that's probably the first priority. Next would be the ones where you see the biggest opportunity or the markets that you're planning to enter in the short term or long term, or the ones that you're trying to advertise and gain interest and, and extend attention from. Really understanding the culture, the laws, the language, and the best ways to target each unique audience across the world should, should pretty much be the top objective. And usually that's focused on where you're going to see the ROI. But it's dependent on each company, so that's not the overlying rule.

Yeah, I would just add to that, I think they're really good points, John, and the only thing I would add is once you've kind of done that research and you've kind of decided on your market and, you know, the country and the laws of that country to get into it, I think something I've seen from some customers of ours is that they think, okay, now I have to translate all of my content. And that can be a pretty large effort if you're just starting out. So I would also recommend to actually then look at your content types, look at like really what is the most important, what's going to provide the most value to you as an organization. You know, whether it's getting leads on your website or, you know, whatever else it may be, focus there first, start slow, and really think about the cost, quality, kind of speed quadrant of all of those different content types as well, rather than just kind of immediately diving in and thinking you have to translate all of your content types at once for that target market.

Yeah, great.

Perfect.

And based on that, translating, like you said, is when people have video content, do they need to be required to translate it into other languages or can they just do subtitles? What would you guys recommend there?

I mean, I guess yes, yes, and yes. Definitely need to be translated. I mean, dubbing, voiceover is typically more expensive because you're using, you know, studio talent to go in and do some voiceover and dubbing. However, you know, those approaches can be very useful if you're trying to keep people's attention and not have them reading subtitles, for example. But, um, you know, I think I feel like more and more when I watch movies that are subtitled, it's a little more authentic hearing the speaker in Spanish or Portuguese or Russian and reading the subtitles. You can see their lip movements and all all that when it's dubbed over. So it kind of depends on what you're going for, but essentially, yes, dubbing or subtitling is very highly recommended. You know, on an e-learning video, for example, dubbing might work perfectly fine because you want people focused on the content on the screen, and just hearing it in their native language, they can focus a little more. But if you're going for an authentic movie or commercial experience, maybe subtitling is the way to go. And subtitling does tend to be more cost-effective as well because it's more or less just building a script translating and then syncing and timing, whereas studio adds another layer on top of that, of voiceover and studio work. So on top of a script. Yeah. So bottom line, yes, video should be translated. Absolutely. Yes. Otherwise you can't—

Yes. Across the board.

Yes.

And yes.

Yes to that too.

Make it, make it digestible for everyone. Another question for you guys. How do you measure the success of these types of investments? As we talk about yes and yes for subtitling and being digestible by everyone? How do you measure that success?

Yeah, that's a good question. Ultimately, it's going to depend on the medium, what exactly it is that you're translating or you're kind of creating for a different target audience. But reporting is really critical. So, for example, if you're going into a target market for the first time and you decide to translate your website into X language, it's going to be really important that you don't forget about the measurement at the beginning and work with your vendor, your service provider, or whatever kind of experts you're working on to go into that target market on implementing good analytics and reporting. That doesn't always come kind of out of the box when you create a website in a different language. There's another layer of kind of technical work that would need to be done, so that's certainly critical so that you can actually do some reporting on the success of whatever it is. And then, you know, using a TMS, whatever TMS you would decide to use, it can— and the benefit of using a TMS can also be out-of-the-box analytics and reporting on various different factors as it relates to the translation process. So whether it's like, how much am I spending, how much am I saving, you know, how quickly are things getting done, there's a vast assortment of metrics that can be looked at to measure success. But ultimately, you know, you're going to want to look at kind of conversions and sales as well, and reporting and metrics on your own side, working with your own marketing teams are going to be really important there.

Yeah, so that's all I was going to add is usually the most impressive and strongest one, at least that goes up to the top level, is we spent $100,000 on translation and we got $3 million in sales in this market as a result. Those are the most powerful data-driven ways to measure things, but there's various other KPIs such as website traffic, website hits, downloads of case studies and opens of emails and all the other various things that you can track as well. We usually customize those and build KPIs with our clients and track and report on those with our business intelligence tools that are available in our TMS.

So, yeah, nice, nice.

Well, more on that. So kind of when you guys are talking about measuring the success of the investment, when, at what point in, in the company, or in terms of when you guys start going broader, do you think it's time to have someone specifically own a global content basically when to grow the team.

Yeah.

Referring to building a centralized localization team that the entire company uses to translate all their content, is that the question? Sounds like.

Yes. And on top of the fact that, you know, when is it time to have someone own that market if you're expanding into that market? At what point are you big enough to say that it's time to have someone there when it comes to content?

Yeah, no, that's a very specific question that would obviously depend on the company, but I would say once something reaches probably $1 million in the market or something like that, it's probably worth dedicating 1 to 2 heads to continue managing. I think of it from an account management perspective. I came up in my career in localization managing some of the biggest localization programs in the industry for life sciences clients and tech clients, etc. Once those clients were spending over $1 million, they usually had 3 to 5 internal people that they were hired, localization specialists or localization project managers or whatever their various titles would be. As those clients grew to $4 to $6 to $20 million, some of those teams became upwards of 40, 50 people. Um, so the localization department becomes a team of 40, 50 people, but I would say once the spend becomes over $500,000, it's worth having a dedicated point of contact in the company. That can go to and start learning the best ways to handle content, to prepare content for translation, all that kind of stuff. And then within market, similar approach, I would say, you know, that those probably revenue thresholds probably hold as well, maybe even a lower threshold. Once you hit a few hundred K in a market, you might want to start dedicating a specific resource to that market because you're obviously seeing some growth and some attention, and that 300K will quickly become 500K, and you want to be ready to capitalize on that as quickly as possible. So I don't know if that answers the question, but I think I tried to cover both angles there.

Yeah, I think it did.

OK, thanks.

Awesome. Do you guys have anything else that you would like to share with the group?

No, nothing specific. Feel free to pop over to the booth. I think Caitlin will share that as well. Say hi to Amanda. We'd be happy to talk with anyone more in detail about globalization consulting or preparing your content for localization if you're going into new markets or about to or the types of things that you need to think about if you're going to build your website in a right-to-left language like Arabic, for example, or a different character set like Japanese, for example, or Korean. We'd be happy to talk about all those implications and help with localization preparedness, is what we call it. And then if anyone else wants to talk more about Smartling, we'd be happy to continue the discussion.

Awesome. Thank you, guys.

It's been a pleasure having you, and we appreciate it. As always, guys in our group and watching at home, please feel free to stop by their booth. We've dropped it in the chat. For those who are watching on other, uh, mediums, feel free to just visit sasterenterprise.com and you can check them out in the sponsor hall. I know it's the beginning part of our day, so we have plenty other sessions. I hope to see everyone later.

Thank you again, guys. Thanks, everybody. Thanks