06 70 33 24 905
News
How Banks Stay On-Brand in Multiple Languages
2017.04.01

Global marketing equals complexity, speed, and scale. Those three words sum up the challenges global marketers face today. The digital age is the source of these challenges. In the past, marketers dealt mainly with TV, radio, print media, and billboard advertising. The production formats were fairly fixed and the distribution channels limited.

Today, the number of channels has increased to mobile and web. Text and images need to be more concise and eye-catching to cater to a generation suffering from information overload. They have to flex to different layouts, hardware, and software since access could be either via desktop, tablet, or mobile. They could also be displayed on proprietary websites, third party sites, or social platforms; all with different specifications.

Producing videos has also become more complex. TV ads have fixed timings, resolutions, and lengths. Most videos produced today are displayed on-demand over the Internet, on display screens in branches, third-party outdoor displays, embedded in digital publications, etc.—all with different technical and design requirements.

Marketers cannot afford to ignore these challenges. For instance, many industry surveys found that videos are increasingly important for marketing as a new generation grows up on short video clips on social networks rather than reading. More are also accessing the Internet from mobile devices and the trend is set to grow even more.

Localization Facilitates Global Business

As marketing complexity grows, the tools required to managing it have also become increasingly diverse and complex. Add multilingual into the equation and the complexity of a global marketing campaign multiplies. Why?

  • Different languages vary widely in text length when translated. This makes flexing the layout to suit different devices even more challenging. Sometimes the translation of a word requires a phrase in another language in order to convey the same meaning. At other times, “transcreation” instead of a more direct translation works better.
  • Even as global marketing teams demand a consistent branding and message when content is localized, cultural norms and sensitivity must be taken into account. Images used should be appropriate and sensitive to local religious and social norms.
  • Banks face regulatory issues more than most other industries. Financial regulations also differ significantly from country to country. Marketing materials must be approved by the local legal and compliance staff of each country in which they are used.

To help global marketers navigate modern digital marketing, there are many technological solutions available to help the process of content creation and translation; for example, Content Management Systems (CMS), Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), and Translation Management Systems (TMS).

These systems are the bedrock of multilingual programs and help optimize efficiency and streamline the workflow, and are also increasingly being integrated and packaged together as a suite by big service providers catering to their big global marketing customers.

How does a global marketer make sense of all these? What are the latest tools and techniques available to banks and financial institutions to manage marketing at this level of complexity and scale?

How to Market Global and Manage Local

1. Choose an appropriate CMS.
A good CMS is the starting point for any global digital marketer. There are many choices out there today, all with very attractive pitches. Discussing the features of a good CMS and how to choose one would go beyond this article’s scope and length.

Building a good and professional looking website that can display effectively on desktop, tablet, and mobile requires a certain amount of knowledge and experience. Apply that to a financial institution that requires multilingual and multi-user support, and the necessary complexity and expertise increases exponentially.

Marketing managers should make the decision based on the advice of an experienced, unbiased digital marketer who can choose the best CMS

This means that marketing managers should make the decision based on the advice of an experienced and unbiased digital marketer who can choose the best CMS based on the needs and budget of the organization. Start with the wrong one, however, and your problems in digital marketing will grow and compound.

2. Involve local stakeholders from the start.
With the right tool in place, the right team comes next. While brand and message strategy should come from the top via a global team to ensure consistency, localization input and execution must involve local stakeholders right from the start to avoid costly errors. This is especially important in the financial industry where each product is closely regulated with different rules in different countries.

3. Stick with one localization vendor.
With the right IT solution and team in place, the next most important thing is to work with the right external language services partner. Even the biggest banks with in-house localization teams will require outsourcing to stay nimble and flexible in terms of production capacity and cost.

A lot of time and money can be saved by maintaining a centralized translation memory and terminology database

However, a lot of time and money can be saved by maintaining a centralized translation memory and terminology database. The best strategy is to choose one long-term localization vendor with appropriate experience and skills rather than pick and choose from the best quote for every single project. Selection should also take into account the vendor’s experience and technical capabilities in handling large, global localization projects.

New Tactics for Better Global Marketing

Digital Decoupling
Digital decoupling refers to separating the occasional and one-off creative work from routine content production work. The former is more suited for advertising agencies strong in brand strategies or design work. The latter is given to specialized content marketing vendors to produce regularly.

Digital decoupling can also entail outsourcing or offshoring the maintenance and operational work associated with digital marketing, such as where talent is expensive or lacking in home countries; for example, IT infrastructure support or data mining and analytics. This helps lower costs and improve efficiency by segregating related marketing functions into different parts and having it done where it makes the most sense in terms of cost and efficiency.   

Cloud Hosting
Modern cloud hosting services, such as those provided by Amazon or Microsoft Azure, are reliable and secure and cater to the needs of global financial institutions for marketing purposes. More importantly, they are low cost and easy to scale up or down.

There is really no need to maintain proprietary hardware and software unless regulations or proprietary secrecy truly requires it

There is really no need to maintain proprietary hardware and software unless regulations or proprietary secrecy truly requires it. Some case studies of banks that have successfully used the cloud include ME Bank, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank, and National Australia Bank.

Secure Translation Automation in Banking
Some banks are already finding success in adding machine translation (MT) to the localization of websites, marketing materials, and other MT-ready content. Professional MT can significantly improve translator productivity and manage costs, and service providers like Welocalize offer sophisticated and secure MT solutions tailored to the global business needs of banking clients.

MT engines are trained to understand client brands and accurately use key terms in the banking and financial service sectors. Combined with post-editing, MT can offer an ideal solution to managing large content volumes while retaining high-quality outputs.

Source: www.slator.com

Languages

Hungarian, English, German, Russian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Czech, Serbian, Danish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovakian, Polish, Romanian, Slovenian, Flemish, Belorussian, Catalan, Dutch, Turkish, Albanian, Ukrainian, Greek, Bosnian, Catalan, Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Irish, Maltese, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese

1x1 Translations Ltd.

1DayTranslation.com

Phone: +36 70 33 24 905

Email: info@1daytranslation.com

Skype: onebyonetranslation

All rights reserved | 1x1 Translations ©
Website made by: