February 28 , 2011 Multilingual Marketing Content: Growing ... · Brand and marketing managers,...

Outsell’s Gilbane Services: Content Globalization Practice Research Report

Multilingual Marketing Content: Growing International Business with Global Content Value Chains

by Vince Emery Karl Kadie Mary Laplante

February 28th, 2011

Advancing the business of information

Page #Table of ContentsResearch Sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Why This Topic? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Research Highlights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Three Business Forces That Drive Multilingual Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

External Business Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7The Desire for Consistent Customer Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7The Shift to Digital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

The Current State of Multilingual Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Marketing Priorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Fractured Marketing Functions within Enterprises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11Challenges from Marketing Content Itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Marketing Content Technologies Are Evolving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14Current Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Multilingual Marketing Content: No Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17Defining “Best Practices” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17Introducing Global Content Value Chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18Content Value Chains for Global Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Identifying Best Targets for Fast Improvements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26Working with Service Providers and Partners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27Leveraging Metrics and Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28Managing the Executives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Essential Actions for Global Marketing and Localization Managers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Adopt a Global Content Value Chain Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Develop Global Content Strategists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34Leverage the Wedge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Conclusion: Maturing the Global Content Value Chain for Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37Related Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39Sponsor Acknowledgement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Page #Table & Figure TitlesFigure 1 . Most Commonly Cited Business Drivers for Multilingual Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Figure 2 . Relative Importance of Multilingual Marketing Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10Figure 3 . A Global Content Value Chain Impacts Business Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18Figure 4 . The Infrastructure for Multilingual Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19Figure 5 . Components of a Global Content Value Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20Table 1 . Global Content Value Chain Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20Table 2 . Global Content Value Chain Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21Table 3 . Values of Multilingual Marketing Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22Figure 6 . Multiple Creation Sources, But Only One Gets Localized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Figure 7 . Incomplete Global Content Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24Figure 8 . The Black Box and the Black Hole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24Figure 9 . Multiple Unconnected Marketing Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25Figure 10 . The Sweet Spot Is Where Product and Marketing Content Overlap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26Table 4. Sample Communications Goals and Efficiency Goals for Multilingual Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30Figure 11 . A Value Chain Diagram Is a Tool for Improving Multilingual Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34Figure 12 . Map Content Globalization Practices to Global Business Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36Figure 13 . Job Roles of Marketing Content Respondents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39Figure 14 . Number of Languages Used by Respondents for Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Research SponsorsOutsell’s Gilbane Services gratefully acknowledges the support of these sponsors of the research informing this report . This work would not have been possible without them . Please see the Sponsor Acknowledgement section for descriptions of these providers .

Multilingual Marketing Content: Growing International Business with Global Content Value Chains ©2011 Outsell, Inc . 4

Why This Topic?Today’s marketing and brand management groups are on the front lines of business mandates to grow international revenue, increase worldwide market share, and strengthen the impact of global brands . Businesses reaching for such goals face an environment of unprecedented pressures . How are companies dealing with the demands of multilingual marketing? How are marketers handling new online media and swelling volumes of content? How are they providing consistent customer experiences across dissimilar languages and cultures? How are they controlling costs? What obstacles prevent the alignment of multilingual marketing content with businesses’ larger goals? Which investments deliver the most impact?

To help global businesses address these questions, Outsell’s Gilbane Services conducted research on the state of practices for managing global marketing content . The resulting report, Multilingual Marketing Content: Growing International Business with Global Content Value Chains, is to our knowledge the first study ever to focus specifically on managing multilingual marketing content.

As the only analyst firm with a dedicated organization focusing on content globalization, Outsell’s Gilbane Services provides unique resources to help businesses improve their international marketing operations . Multilingual Marketing Content is based on original primary research that aggregates the real-world experiences of organizations that compete in multinational markets . The report describes proven approaches to increasing the value of content as a key component of strategic brand management and marketing communications, citing examples of how industry leaders have succeeded and failed . Brand and marketing managers, business executives, content strategists, and language professionals will gain new insight into how to improve their global content operations, determine which investments generate new competitive advantage, and bring their practices in line with larger business goals .

Research HighlightsOur investigation focused on strategies, practices, and infrastructures used for the market-facing multilingual content that positions an organization to its customers . Some examples of such content types are branding, corporate and product messaging, brochures, advertisements, marketing videos, marketing e-mails, and content created for websites and other online media, such as social media . Within the context of this study, marketing content excludes product content . (By product content, we mean content that enables customers to use products and services, such as engineering specifications, documentation, training, and customer support information . For more on multilingual product content, see our report Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices into Global Content Value Chains .)


Based on in-depth interviews and online surveys of managers of multilingual marketing content and localization managers, this research finds:

The strategies, practices, and infrastructure for multilingual marketing content are relatively •immature. Within a single enterprise, strategies are often more mature for globalizing product content than for globalizing the same company’s marketing content . The infrastructure and practices for marketing content globalization are very much in their formative phase .

People who manage global marketing content focus on • tactics. They worry mostly about their tasks at hand. They focus on day-to-day tactical issues rather than big-picture strategic improvements. As a result, many investments are siloed and deliver a narrow set of efficiencies that often have little or no impact within larger content globalization operations .

Manymultilingualmarketingprojectsare,ineffect,experiments.• Multilingual marketing tasks today often involve new activities or new media, and are implemented as experimental projects with no clear definition of how they will deliver business value.

The connections between their daily activities and the strategic goals of the enterprise are •often not well articulated by the people who work with multilingual marketing content. Most managers we interviewed were aware of corporate goals . However, we discovered that the people responsible for multilingual marketing often cannot explain how their efforts contribute to achieving these corporate goals .

Aburningneedtoimprovetheglobalcustomerexperienceispullingmarketerstoimprove•multilingual marketing content operations. In every industry, executives are realizing that improving the global customer experience is a life-or-death matter for their business . This urgency at the highest levels of organizations is driving recognition that bottlenecks caused by language issues are real risks .

Businesses that improved their • marketing content globalization results quickly and cost-effectivelyhavedonesobyleveragingtheinfrastructurealreadyinplaceforproduct content. Existing infrastructures for globalizing product content are typically more established, more integrated, and more mature than marketing content infrastructures . Companies looking for the biggest, fastest route to improvement find overlaps between their product and marketing content infrastructures, and then exploit those overlaps for faster results than their competitors .

Three Business Forces That Drive Multilingual MarketingAll companies interviewed for this research describe acceleration in their multilingual marketing activities over the last year, with more projects, a greater volume of content, and/or an increased number of languages . Although companies gave different explanations for why this is so, their reasons tend to fall into three categories: external business trends, the desire for consistent customer experience, and the shift to digital .


ExternalBusinessTrends

Several business trends are pushing companies to increase marketing efforts for international audiences .

Some businesses are expanding their marketing into new geographies because of worsened economic conditions in their base regions. Others find that they need to increase sales from existing regions or roll out new products globally . Government actions open doors for some businesses when free trade agreements are signed or regulatory barriers to sales are lowered .

In most cases, customers prefer to communicate with a company that speaks their own language, so all these business trends require a company to achieve better results from their communications with customers in many nations .

TheDesireforConsistentCustomerExperience

A three-year study of more than 40 Fortune 500 companies by the research firm Peer Insight found that companies focused on customer experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by a 10-to-1 margin . This is only one of many recent studies echoing the business benefits of managing the customer experience. Executives are increasingly attracted to invest in global customer experience improvements to increase sales and create sustainable differentiation.

In the midst of initiatives to optimize the customer experience, improvements in single-language marketing can be offset when improvements are not available in all languages . As companies’ international business increases, managers see that inconsistent customer experiences across languages frustrate their customers . Beyond the individual customer experience, inconsistencies in interactions also produce inconsistent business results . A campaign executed successfully in one region may fall short of expectations in another, for the fundamental reason that it varied in some unintended way due to inconsistencies in the localized experience .

Because initiatives to provide a consistent customer experience across languages often receive high executive visibility, multilingual marketing managers are under constant pressure to improve customer experiences quickly .

The Shift to Digital

Spending for online marketing continues to grow . Online is becoming the dominant marketing channel for many industries . Spending for online marketing saw a 10 .5% increase in the UK over last year, and in the US a 9 .6% increase to 32 .5% of total marketing spending, according to the Outsell research report series Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010 by Chuck Richard and Sheila King .


This shift has radically affected marketing teams. We routinely poll audiences at conference sessions dealing with multilingual marketing, asking if attendees have jobs that did not exist 18 months ago . A consistent response is that more than half of people raise their hands . Within many organizations, digital marketing is in its relative infancy, with on-the-job skills development and first-generation digital marketing practices .

Online marketing makes it easier for customers to buy products from merchants anywhere in the world, and at the same time is less expensive for companies to market across more regions . The rise of online marketing combined with these two factors has led to a corresponding rise in multilingual marketing .

However, online marketing also makes regional inconsistencies in branding, messaging, and content quality glaringly visible to customers. These inconsistencies inflict pain on marketers as they rush to create the infrastructure (people, processes, and technologies) their business needs to speak across borders with one voice .

The combination of these three business influences—external business forces, the need for a consistent customer experience, and the shift to digital—are leading many companies to accelerate multilingual marketing initiatives and to ask for more from the teams who manage marketing content . These factors are creating an environment in which global marketers and the localization teams who support them can only focus on just getting their jobs done .

The Current State of Multilingual MarketingIn an ideal world, the processes for marketing content would be owned by a centralized marketing group with clear authority over branding, messaging, and content . Marketing would create the brand content (text, images, videos, other file types), manage it, and publish it, all within integrated systems that handle all aspects of creation, localization, workflow, and metrics, including reporting business results to senior executives .

But that is the ideal world . We discovered that it doesn’t exist for almost all of the companies we interviewed. These companies described many real-world differences from the ideal. What differences? What real conditions influence the ways companies actually create, manage, and deliver multilingual marketing content?

One of the first differences is that in the real world of multilingual marketing, the lines between centralized and regional authorities are constantly in flux. Regional decision-makers play a much larger role in content creation and localization for marketing content than they do for non-marketing content, because marketing content is directly in the path to their revenue . Regional resources tend to have a great influence on, and often outright control over, creation and localization processes. Even in very large organizations, regions can opt in and out of using content from centralized marketing groups . Regions also create and publish their own local-language content, which they may consider more suitable and compelling for their markets than corporate content. Regional staffers do what it takes to get their jobs done, even when the results are dissimilar or contradictory to the branding and marketing messages emanating from headquarters .


In the ideal world, managers never worry about budgets . In the real world, managers do worry, and they told us there is no uniform structure for who pays for localizing marketing content .

At some companies, funding decisions are made by each line of business (LOB) manager or individual product marketer . This can cause infrastructure problems, because these managers tend to focus only on their individual LOB or product, not on improving multilingual marketing content operations overall . Similarly, at some companies individual regional vice presidents or country managers make funding decisions . Again, they tend to focus only on the marketing needs of their individual countries, not on overall corporate needs such as localization process improvements . They lack a global vision .

In companies where the chief marketing officer or another marketing executive holds the purse strings, funding decisions tend to be made one of two ways . Funds are allocated either by reviewing the potential sizes of markets in different regions to calculate how much content might be profitable to create for a potential market, or by determining how many products and campaigns will be launched and what resources will be needed to achieve launch targets . A marketing executive who controls funds and is educated about the business impacts of multilingual marketing is able to make decisions that result in cost efficiencies and revenue impacts from global marketing operations.

Marketing Priorities

In a series of questions designed to tie business goals and objectives to marketing investments, we asked our interviewees to describe the primary business drivers for their organization through 2011 . (Please see the Methodology section at the end of this report for survey population demographics .) Almost all the managers and executives involved in multilingual marketing content with whom we spoke were aware of their companies’ overall business goals, such as increasing customer satisfaction and opening new regions, as illustrated in Figure 1 .

Figure 1. Most Commonly Cited Business Drivers for Multilingual Marketing


Improve global brand consistency

Reduce time to market/achieve simship

Improve ef f iciencies

Open new regions

Increase revenues f rom established regions

Increase revenues f rom emerging regions

Implement new e-media outreach

Increase customer satisfaction

Introduce new product lines

Base: 12 enterprises; multiple responses allowed.Source: Outsell’s Gilbane Services 2010 Multilingual Marketing Content Survey© 2011 Outsell, Inc. Reproduction strictly prohibited.

The most commonly cited drivers placed emphasis on new initiatives (such as reaching audiences in new ways, introducing new product lines, and opening new geographic regions) as well as on traditional business concerns (such as increasing customer satisfaction, improving efficiencies, and increasing revenues from established regions) . We note that results are somewhat biased by our survey population comprising marketing managers and the localization teams who support them . This balanced mix of drivers reflects the fact that major global economies are undergoing recovery after the 2009 recession, and companies are expanding business activities rather than contracting them or putting them on hold altogether . Other drivers mentioned less frequently included increasing revenues from emerging regions, reducing time to market and simultaneous shipping of new products, and improving global brand consistency . Although important, these issues do not appear to be as urgent in 2011 as other drivers cited above .

Most of the managers we interviewed are also aware that in general multilingual marketing content contributes toward their company’s initiatives to reach its goals .

However, few managers were able to articulate clearly how their efforts contribute to achieving the strategic corporate goals . When we pressed them to do so, we frequently heard explanations of solutions to isolated issues and descriptions of what their team did in day-to-day tasks . Most people who manage global marketing content focus on tactics. They worry mostly about their tasks at hand rather than big-picture strategic improvements .

This disconnect is borne out by responses to our follow-up question to larger business drivers . We asked interviewees to identify the current multilingual marketing initiatives that supported their enterprise goals and objectives and to rank their relative importance . Figure 2 shows a summary of their answers .

Figure 2. Relative Importance of Multilingual Marketing Initiatives


0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Meeting regulatory requirements

Increasing multilingual content volume

Single-sourcing/content reuse

Localizing marketing content

Controlling brand consistency

Better cross-functional collaboration

Improving content consistency, quality

Improving sim. launch of products, campaigns

Critical/very important Important/fairly important Not important

Base: 12 enterprises; multiple responses allowed.Source: Outsell’s Gilbane Services 2010 Multilingual Marketing Content Survey© 2011 Outsell, Inc. Reproduction strictly prohibited.

The initiatives rated the most important are tactical concerns: simultaneous shipment and campaign launch, content consistency and quality, and brand consistency . So while top strategic objectives might include new types of outreach programs, most multilingual marketing and translation professionals focus on conventional concerns such as simultaneous shipment . This particular point is telling: achieving simship (simultaneous shipment of a new product in multiple countries) ranks relatively low as a strategic objective, yet it is ranked as the most critical activity by interviewees .

Some executives are aware of this distinction. One said his team was busy “pumping out more stuff instead of improving the process.”

Another said that “in marketing, it’s not so clear—[marketing is] trying to do too much with too little and not looking at the long term . We do a lot of education of marketing people . Their focus is too much on tactical actions.” He said that the cost, turnaround, and quality impacts of multilingual marketers’ tactical distractions don’t always sink in .

In addition, many multilingual marketing projects are in effect experiments. Multilingual marketing tasks today often involve new activities or new media and are implemented as experimental projects with no clear definition of how they will deliver business value. They are often stand-alone projects, not integrated with other marketing programs or initiatives . Because no measurable value is established as a goal, no metrics are used to demonstrate how projects contribute (or fail to contribute) to strategic initiatives, further clouding multilingual marketers’ visibility into how they could help achieve strategic goals .

By focusing on the urgency of small-picture chores, the people who manage multilingual marketing compromise the contributions they could make toward improving their infrastructure to better meet corporate goals .

Fractured Marketing Functions within Enterprises

Almost every enterprise with a global presence has multiple marketing functions . A typical company has a centralized corporate marketing department, but also regional operations with local, in-country marketing teams—sometimes several of them in important countries. These local marketers often create marketing content for local use . A common complaint by corporate marketers is that they have no idea what is created by regions and struggle to determine what is done in the field today.

In large enterprises, line-of-business managers may also have dedicated marketers for each line of business, with objectives unrelated to those of the corporate marketers . Some companies address their existing customers with separate marketing teams from those reaching for prospective customers . Some companies have separate marketing departments that create tools for their sales teams .

In addition to the marketing content created by diverse in-house teams, content is also created by external sources: advertising agencies, PR firms, video production houses, online marketing firms, etc. Dozens of firms around the world are commonly involved in creating new content for a single large enterprise .


These diverse internal and external sources of marketing content are often unconnected and geographically dispersed. Brand oversight becomes a challenge, and it is difficult for management to see what is happening within individual pipelines, let alone create a cohesive, integrated picture enabling centralized management of global marketing .

Challenges from Marketing Content Itself

All types of multilingual content are challenging to create, localize, and deliver, but marketing content has unique characteristics that raise additional operational considerations . Our interviewees described the following qualities that distinguish marketing content in their operations .

Marketing Content Consists of Lots of Tiny Parts

A marketing project that needs to be localized can be as small as a single web banner graphic, a one-paragraph e-mail message, a three-line Google AdWords advertisement, or a 140-character Twitter tweet . Or it can be a worldwide campaign combining hundreds of these elements, plus many others .

Contrast that with the bulkier quantities of non-marketing content needed for a typical product: instruction manuals, service guides, support information, specifications, etc. Product content typically involves bigger pieces of content, but fewer of them . For example, one company we interviewed releases between ten and twenty products globally per quarter, each release involving millions of words of content . The same company localizes about a thousand marketing projects per quarter, but each marketing project is much smaller in size .

The sheer quantity of an enterprise’s worldwide marketing projects and the number of assets required to execute them introduces complexity into marketing content localization, management, and evaluation .

Marketing Content Changes Frequently

“Shelf life for marketing content is much shorter [than for other types of content],” explained one global marketing executive . Campaigns and promotions are ephemeral, ending their usefulness in a few weeks or a few days . For many companies and products, their go-to-market messages this year will be different next year. Change is a predictable constant for marketing content. The executive called these frequent revisions “content churn.”

Non-marketing content can remain more or less identical for years, but “if you aren’t changing your marketing messages,” one executive said, “you’re not doing your job.” Whether caused by late-breaking press releases, new company positioning, acquisitions, updated branding, or promotional campaigns, the effect on marketing content is the same: keeping it constantly fluid. Managers who do not take these more frequent changes into account communicate with regional customers using content that is out of date and out of step with corporate goals .


Marketing Requires Many Content Types and Specialized Tools

Websites, e-mail messages, online catalogs, partner marketing, newsletters, sales training materials, mobile media, videos, trade show exhibits, content for internal marketing, Facebook pages, eBay offerings, demo CDs, landing pages, in-store promotions, Flash animations, search engine optimization—the list of marketing content types seems endless. Each tends to have unique characteristics that require specialized skills and tools. Webcasts, for example, differ from video. Yet both can be essential components of a global marketing campaign . Adding to the complexity is the growing popularity of marketing use of social media and other types of user-generated content to engage online audiences .

The support of such a range of different content types demands increased agility on the part of marketing and localization teams . This diversity of types also introduces complications into the operational environment, as the number of skills and tools used to create content for marketing is greater than for other content purposes . A typical marketing initiative requires several content types to be assembled into one project, even though they were generated from diverse creation tools . Assembly can introduce further complexity, especially with the additional overhead of synchronizing the localization and translation of all these elements .

Marketing Generates Nuanced Content

Managers told us that for technical content, accuracy matters . But for marketing content, persuasiveness matters .

This means that localization of marketing content must correctly convey persuasive nuances, some of which are implied by the content and never stated explicitly . Keeping true to these nuances is a challenge .

“Our new branding strategy is to deliver more personal, more emotional band content. This is more complicated to translate,” one manager explained. For marketing content, the manager had to “give the translator leeway to pass the same message without making exact word-for-word translations.”

Managers told us that to ensure the nuanced nature of marketing content is localized correctly, they created special review workflows for some or all types of marketing content. Reviews of localized marketing content can involve more reviewers and take longer amounts of time than reviews of other content .

One company hired local employees in its field offices whose primary job responsibility was to review localized marketing content and ensure that nuances were correctly conveyed in local idioms . Another company created a separate review process for localizing search engine optimization (SEO), because, a manager said, successful SEO requires “more of a sense for details, and more local knowledge.” After the localized SEO review process produced good results, the manager also created a separate process for Google AdWords—an example of how management awareness of the need to convey marketing nuance can generate creative ways to improve the results generated from multilingual marketing .


MarketingContentIsAffectedbyDeviceProliferation

For decades the only physical devices used to deliver marketing content were radios and televisions . Today’s marketers deliver content on those older devices, plus new ones as well: PCs, Macs, Linux computers, mobile phones, tablets, kiosks, game players, MP3 players—a bewildering jungle of devices, with new ones added every year, each available in several incompatible flavors.

The agility to accommodate different devices is a new requirement for marketers, especially multinational marketers. To make marketing effective, they must deliver content tailored to the different devices used by customers in diverse places, such as countries where computers and televisions are rare, but mobile phones are common .

The resulting need to create content tailored to deliver effective experiences on a variety of devices introduces significant low-level production work within marketing departments. Until standards facilitate the interchange and reuse of content across devices, marketing organizations will need to deal with redundant processes and translation costs caused by device proliferation .

Marketing Content Technologies Are Evolving

Content technologies for marketing are undergoing a period of rapid evolution .

Web content management systems are morphing into digital marketing platforms that bring • together applications for campaign management, online catalogs, social networking, multi-channel publishing, search engine optimization, web analytics, and customer relationship management. (See our definition of engagement hubs in the white paper entitled Content, Context, and Conversation: The Three Kings of Consumer Engagement .)

Authoring tools are becoming more simplified so that everyday business users can keep online • content fresh and relevant, eliminating IT and webmaster bottlenecks .

Video content is now fundamental for marketing outreach in consumer markets and in many B2B • markets. Two years ago, who knew that YouTube would be an essential element of marketing campaigns for certain demographics?

At the same time, translation technologies are also advancing and becoming more accessible to global 2000 companies at lower cost; machine translation, for example, has matured to the point of viability for some types of marketing content, such as social media .

As a result of technology evolution, marketing and localization managers have a rich landscape of solutions from which to choose . In addition, the time and money required to implement big systems in-house is driving companies to consider alternatives such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and cloud-based solutions. But the opportunity is not without challenge. Maximizing the benefits of technology investment almost always requires process redesign; in fast-paced environments like global marketing, this can often be viewed as burdensome, or worse, an obstacle to be skipped altogether for the sake of getting today’s work done . And when new technologies are adopted, they are often constrained to a silo and not integrated with other processes and functions . This limits the impact of the investment on the organization’s larger content globalization strategies and practices .


Current Technologies

Several classes of technologies are used within content globalization practices .

The companies we spoke with use dozens of different software tools for creating marketing content that will be localized: Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel (for catalog information), Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe products including Flash, Quark XPress, content management systems, web content management systems, XML authoring systems, social media authoring tools, home-made systems . Few companies among those interviewed use term management or translation-oriented authoring tools when creating marketing content; most apply such tools only after source content has already been completed . Few companies integrate their marketing content creation tools with their workflow and localization technologies. Most marketing content is still created with localization as an afterthought or a post-process .

Consistency of branding and messaging across global markets is a frequently voiced concern of marketers . The most common technologies used to achieve consistency are digital asset management (DAM) systems for managing graphics, video, and audio files, and terminology management systems (software for collecting and managing an organization’s common terminology for product names, features, brand tag lines, and so on, for the primary purpose of ensuring consistency of term use) . Almost all companies interviewed use both kinds of systems . Mostly these are implemented as software packages run in-house or by external language service providers (LSPs), but sometimes one or both systems are implemented as software-as-a-service offerings accessible to users over the web. Companies also enforce consistency through low-tech methods: corporate/product branding guides and corporate style guides .

Consistency—as well as cost reduction and faster time-to-market—is also a key motivation for marketers’ widespread use of another technology: translation memory (a software application that stores existing translations in a repository, enabling human translators to reuse them) . All companies in the survey population except the smallest use translation memories for multilingual marketing content . Few have separate translation memories for marketing and non-marketing content . Most companies have multiple translation memories—the largest have hundreds of them inside and outside the company—and are consolidating them into a smaller number, both to reduce expenses and to increase consistency, which in turn can improve a company’s customer experience . One marketing executive gave a real example of how having too many unconnected translation memories directly hurt her company’s customer experience and its profits. Customers in one key country bought newly launched products because an in-country translation of marketing content promised a specific function as a key selling point. When customers received the product, the documentation—translated by corporate line-of-business translators—used different words to describe the same function. To the customers, “the important function didn’t seem to be there, so they sent [the product] back.” In large numbers . All because of inconsistent translation .


When it comes to multilingual marketing content, another common technology is often deployed but not in any uniform way: content management systems . Many variants exist . DAM systems are among the most frequently used for marketing content, but web content management systems are also common . Marketing content is also managed with document management systems, product life cycle management (PLM) systems, XML management systems, or other variations . Few companies use social content management solutions, reflecting the experimental nature of most social media projects conducted for multilingual marketing . XML content management systems manage content at the component level instead of the old-fashioned way of managing entire pages or documents . With a component content management (CCM) system and a dynamic publishing engine, components are assembled into completed pages, documents, and files. Each component can be tracked both individually and as part of assembled pages or documents . CCM systems dramatically simplify marketing content localization, reducing localization costs, improving time-to-market and consistency, and enabling changes to be made more quickly than conventional content management systems . (To learn more about component content management systems, please see our report Smart Content in the Enterprise: How Next-Generation XML Applications Deliver New Value to Multiple Stakeholders by Geoffrey Bock, Dale Waldt, and Mary Laplante.)

With one exception, all companies we interviewed use multiple content management systems for multilingual marketing content . They are rarely integrated with each other, and often are not integrated with translation memory systems beyond a basic level, even when the software for two systems comes from the same vendor . Other systems involved in the marketing globalization process are also typically not fully integrated. As a result, one marketing executive told us that his team survived by making “a lot of cut-and-paste operations.” Another manager explained of his systems, “They are integrated manually. They are islands.”

A core technology for multilingual content of all types is a translation management system (TMS), software that enables centralized management of all required translations needed enterprise-wide . A translation management system integrates other localization technologies (including translation memories and term management tools) and also streamlines project management, workflow automation, process control, deadline monitoring, cost control, and quality assurance . About half of our survey population had deployed a TMS for marketing content . However, not all of those organizations had implemented their translation management systems across all marketing activities and groups; deployed systems tended to be in silos, used by specific groups for specific projects.

Unexpectedly, we found only a few companies with formal processes for localizing the metadata for marketing assets, especially for videos, images, and sound files. Many companies never localize their metadata, which means that customers who speak other languages cannot find the assets. This is especially surprising because metadata tags are extremely brief, so they are quick and inexpensive to localize .

Few companies surveyed use machine translation—also referred to as automated translation—for marketing content . Adoption is held back by two factors: a perceived lack of quality of automated translations, and a lack of understanding of how to select a pilot program to test the technology . We saw two areas where automated translation of marketing content is beginning to catch on, one to get the word out, the other to bring the word in:


Translating social content in near-real time into many target languages, which inexpensively 1 . provides additional content in languages spoken by customer bases too small to make human translations cost-effective, as well as a critical mass of content to increase web visitor traffic directed from search engines .

Translating social media postings and other content from native languages into a language 2 . that corporate marketers can read and monitor. “Our customers expect us to speak and listen in their languages. If we publish in Thai, we expect to receive customer comments in Thai,” said one global marketing director. “It has become more important to translate other languages into English [so corporate marketers know what customers are saying in other languages]. Machine translation is good for this.”

Multilingual Marketing Content: No Best PracticesIn our prior research for the reports Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative and Multilingual Product Content, our investigations revealed that a profound transformation of traditional practices for product content is well underway .

Product content is typically grounded in the technical documentation function, which is well-established and mature within most enterprises; after all, manufacturing companies have been creating technical content for many decades . Departmental functions are evolving into product content ecosystems, breaking down the walls between creation, localization, and publishing silos . Customers are embraced as part of the content life cycle . Value propositions for investments are tied to the top as well as bottom lines of corporate balance sheets . Content agility (through single-sourcing, reuse, and multi-purposing) is becoming recognized as a competency . Instead of functioning as cost centers, product content groups are evolving into centers of excellence . Service providers are viewed as strategic partners .

Where enterprises are organizing their resources and infrastructure for content operations, they are able to improve and evolve them by applying internal and external best practices . In this current research on marketing content, we specifically set out to understand how companies were applying best practices to globalizing their marketing content . We were somewhat surprised by what we discovered .

Defining“BestPractices”

We use the term best practices to refer to practices that are formalized and institutionalized . They are well documented . They are mature, and when properly adopted, they produce predictable, measurable results. Best practices are universal—any organization should be able to implement them and achieve outcomes that are consistent with those of other adopters .

In our research, we did not find best practices within most marketing content operations. Operations are less mature, with practices undergoing initial formation. Thus we say that while other content operations are in a transformative stage, most marketing content operations are in a formative stage .


We also discovered consistent and widespread evidence of language afterthought syndrome, first identified in our product content study. Language afterthought syndrome is the pattern of treating language requirements as ancillary post-processes rather than as integral to the end-to-end flow of content from creation through consumption . Companies that leave localization and other language considerations as afterthoughts to their content processes waste money, delay delivery, and produce inconsistent content of varying quality . By including language considerations in content processes from the very first stages—from planning and preparation before content creation begins—enterprises have reduced the costs, accelerated delivery time, and improved the quality of the multilingual content they deliver .

Both of these findings emerging from the research—formative practices as the current state of multilingual marketing and prevalence of language afterthought syndrome—present immediate opportunities for global companies to focus their investments and their efforts to improve and enhance the way they create, manage, and deliver multilingual marketing content .

Introducing Global Content Value Chains

A value chain provides a structural framework that enables managers to analyze business activities and increase their company’s efficiency and competitiveness by identifying the value that each part of the business adds for their customers and shareholders . The value chain concept is a well-established business strategy, introduced by strategist Michael E . Porter in his 1985 book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

In previous research, we extended this concept by introducing the concept of a global content value chain, a strategy for unifying the entire process of moving multilingual content from creation through consumption . The central premise of the global content value chain is that value can be added to content as it moves through the chain by applying elements of people, processes, and technologies at each phase .

Figure 3. A Global Content Value Chain Impacts Business Results


ImpactsRevenue growth

Geographic expansion

Audience engagement

Customer satisfaction

Brand consistency

Risk management

Cost reduction

Global content functions

Competencies

Content-driven

business value

Source: Outsell’s Gilbane Services© 2011 Outsell, Inc. Reproduction strictly prohibited.

Companies that do not operate with the type of strategy embodied in the global content value chain risk more than just the language afterthought syndrome discussed above and its resulting problems . Managers who do not examine the value chain as a whole are unable to prioritize improvements both to generate the greatest efficiencies in cost and time, and—especially in the case of marketing managers—to develop competitive advantages in customer experience, messaging, branding, and revenue generation .

Without chain-wide visibility and insights into chain-wide results, managers are handicapped by lack of knowledge about overarching business processes, and lack of ability to determine positive or negative outcomes that might be generated by changes to components of their globalization processes or resources .

The strategy of managing a global content value chain is supported by practices in disciplines such as content management and translation management .

The enabling infrastructure for the strategy includes the people, processes, and technologies that create and deliver content to multinational audiences . For example, the infrastructure for an enterprise’s global content value chain for marketing content might include those illustrated in Figure 4 .

Figure 4. The Infrastructure for Multilingual Marketing

The global content value chain comprises content globalization functions and core competencies . The functions are what companies need to do to move content from the point of creation to the point of use by the target audience . The core competencies are content-centric business activities that maximize the business impact and return on investment of multilingual content .


Processes

Technologies

People

Marketing managersBrand managers

Product managersWeb content managers

Web developersCreative professionals

Content strategistsLocalization managers

TranslatorsReviewers

TranscreationTemplate-driven designMultivariate testingDigital media managementSearch engine optimization (SEO)Social media managementCopywritingProject management

Web content management systemDigital asset management system

Web analyticsTerm management system

Translation memoriesSource: Outsell’s Gilbane Services© 2011 Outsell, Inc. Reproduction strictly prohibited.

Figure 5 illustrates a more detailed view of a global content value chain that is not specific to marketing content, showing the five global content functions and four cross-functional competencies, as well as business impacts .

Figure 5. Components of a Global Content Value Chain

Table 1. Global Content Value Chain Functions

Function Description

Create Creating content assets of various types (text, graphics, audio, video, etc .) in source language requires specialized tools and skill sets for different assets.

Translate and localize Translating and localizing content assets makes them relevant to specific regional audiences . Localization often requires more than translating words in one language into another to accommodate cultural sensitivities, local dialects, and so on . This component of the global content value chain includes translation and localization tools and services as well as the systems to manage those processes .

Manage and store Managing content includes a set of services and tools that go beyond simple storage of content assets . Library services provide check-in and check-out, version control, asset tracking, and metadata management . Integration services automate the flow of content across processes such as creation and delivery. Content management systems are specialized for types of content assets, such as digital asset management (DAM) for graphics, audio, and video; and component content management for structured content in XML formats (especially useful for product content) .

Publish and deliver Delivering content comprises publishing in multiple output formats (print, web, personal devices, etc .) as well as the process of assembling content for delivery, which can be static (content packages are assembled before publication) or dynamic (assembled at the point of publication; often, assembled on demand) . Metadata is essential for dynamic delivery .

Consume and contribute Consuming content (or putting it to work) is now within the flow of enterprise content strategies largely because social computing has broken static publishing models . Blog comments, reviews, and other types of user-generated content now enable bidirectional content flows. Audiences who consume content are increasingly likely to add new content or extend existing content . For marketing purposes, this audience-contributed content can require rapid translation .

Source: Outsell’s Gilbane Services© 2011 Outsell, Inc . Reproduction strictly prohibited .


Impacts

Revenue growth


Audience engagement


Brand consistency

Risk management

Cost reduction

CreateTranslate

and localize

Manageand

store

Publishand

deliver

Consume and

contribute

Enrichment with metadata

Content optimization

Cross-functional collaboration

Business metrics

Content-driven

business valueGlobal content

functions

Competencies


Ideally, the functions of the global content value chain are integrated . As in all business environments, integration is essential for automation that enables cost control and scalability .

The competencies for effective content globalization span the content functions. These competencies are the keys to building a global competitive advantage through multilingual content .

Table 2. Global Content Value Chain Competencies

Competency Description

Enrichment with metadata Enriching content by applying metadata for a variety of applications is a proven method for increasing content’s practical use in a variety of applications such as personalization and search engine optimization . Content enrichment spans several components of the global content value chain because metadata can be created at several points in the chain .

Content optimization Optimizing content includes testing, measuring, and improving its ability to meet business objectives . Common applications are web content analytics, which can be used to guide continuous changes to content so it produces the desired result (e .g ., conversions of visitors to customers or a retranslation to lower the cost of international support calls) and search optimization . Note that we distinguish content optimization from process optimization .

Cross-functional collaboration Increasing the ability of people (both inside and outside an enterprise) to work together across functions represents a significant opportunity for a company to reduce inefficiencies due to redundancies within functional silos. The challenge for most companies is creating new overarching business processes that link job functions and facilitate the flow of content in organized ways.

Business metrics Capturing business data that shows how global content impacts business goals enables managers to make smart investments in content globalization . Metrics can be inserted into business processes in many ways, such as service level agreements with translation providers or interactive dashboards for real-time decision-making .


In some ways, a global content value chain is similar to traditional supply chains:

Both chains convert raw materials into finished goods. In the case of the global content value • chain, the end-product is content in multiple languages .

Both chains are increasingly integrated, and connect, automate, and streamline discrete • processes with technology .

Both chains unite a confederation of multiple participants inside and outside an enterprise, each • with specialized capabilities .

Relationships between participants in both chains result in measurable business benefits such as • accelerated time-to-market, reduced costs, increased customer satisfaction, and quantifiable competitive advantage .

In both a supply chain and a global content value chain, participants not only transform raw • materials into finished goods, but also increase the value of the materials as they move through the chain .


The word “value” in the term global content value chain refers to improvements in content that differentiate it from competitors or reduce its costs, thereby generating competitive advantages. Table 3 identifies content attributes that impact value for multilingual marketing content. As explained above, people, process, and technologies, in various combinations, are the mechanisms that add these values to content .

Table 3. Values of Multilingual Marketing Content

Value Impact

Persuasive If marketing content is not persuasive in some way, it is useless . To be persuasive, it must deliver the right messages in the right languages for its audiences . The content must be culturally appropriate, complete enough for the audiences to make the desired response, and consistent with other marketing content . Improvements in any of these persuasive qualities increase audience engagement, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth .

Findable Multilingual marketing content must be findable, first by those who need to translate, localize, and reuse it, but more importantly, by customers . Marketing content needs to be available where customers will look for it and in the language they will use to find it. Enriching marketing content with metadata in local languages is one example of the techniques used to increase audience engagement and customer satisfaction by making marketing content more findable.

Timely Timeliness is crucial for multilingual marketing content in three ways. First, at different stages in the buying cycle, a customer needs specific marketing content before the customer will progress to the next stage in the cycle . The marketers’ goal is to deliver stage-appropriate content at the time when the customer needs that specific content. Second, the profitability of campaigns and product launches depends on making marketing content available in target languages on time . Third, customers expect timely response to their marketing-related questions, especially in social media . For multilingual marketing content, timeliness in all three ways is necessary not only for faster time-to-market, but also greater audience engagement and a superior customer experience .

Compliant Marketers expend great effort to ensure that multilingual content complies with corporate branding requirements, and they must ensure two additional types of compliance as well . Multilingual marketing must encompass compliance with the standards used to create and localize marketing content, and also those which are required for the consumption of content on dissimilar devices . Also, multilingual marketing content must be legally compliant, both to protect trademarks and copyrights and to meet the regulations that govern marketing in different countries.

Reusable Reusability is the key to the effectiveness of term management systems, translation memories, and content management systems . Reuse of multilingual marketing content makes possible much of the brand consistency, message consistency, faster time-to-market, and cost savings delivered by the global content value chain .

Cost-effective Simple attempts to calculate the cost-effectiveness of multilingual marketing operations, such as total costs per quarter or average cost per word, are often the first aspects that managers review . While management’s attention to cost control is important, too much concern can blind managers to the main purposes of multilingual marketing: increasing revenues and improving the customer experience .

Measurable Many multinational enterprises make little or no attempt to measure the effectiveness of multilingual marketing content . But metrics improve business results . Measurements and reports can tell managers if changes in marketing content make it more persuasive or less, if it is found by a greater number of customers or fewer, if it is delivered on time or too late, if the percentage of reused content is going up or down . Only by comparing outcomes over time will managers know if they are damaging business results or improving them steadily as they adjust their marketing content and the global content value chain that provides it to customers worldwide .



The concept of an overarching strategy for adding value to each phase has achieved wide acceptance among a large majority of the companies interviewed for this report. They may not call it a “global content value chain,” instead using internal names or generic descriptions such as “marketing localization.” Whatever it may be called, there is broad recognition that a strategy that integrates end-to-end processes for content globalization can deliver tangible business value .

In addition to recognizing this strategy in general, some companies use their version to enhance their globalization results. One marketing localization manager told us that his company “enriches the next campaign by using the results of the last” and tweaking multilingual content where appropriate. When a global content value chain is established within an organization, it can be used for analyzing opportunities for improvement in globalization processes, particularly by focusing on how to develop the necessary competencies .

Content Value Chains for Global Marketing

Now we have defined the strategy of a global content value chain and explained its components and benefits, as illustrated by Figure 5, representing a typical global content value chain as established in many companies for localization of product content or transactional content .

However, that diagram is not an accurate portrayal of operations for multilingual marketing content in most companies, based on our research for this study . We discovered that while managers involved with multilingual marketing content may understand the concept of an overarching value chain, it is rare for their actual operations to resemble such a coherent, complete point of view . Instead, most marketing content globalization operations we encountered were incomplete and not optimally structured . Their value chains are formative, just taking shape .

Here are four examples of global content value chains for marketing that illustrate issues we saw in various companies’ marketing content operations .

Figure 6. Multiple Creation Sources, But Only One Gets Localized


Create Translate and localize

Manageand

store

Publishand

deliver

Consume and contribute


Create

Create



Figure 6 shows the common situation of multiple creators generating marketing content in parallel operations, but only one of them delivering content for localization . This situation leads to the inadvertent duplicate creation of marketing content, while potentially useful marketing content is created but never made available for international marketing .

Figure 6 also shows metadata enrichment limited to two points in the value chain, and no content optimization, cross-functional collaboration, or business metrics .

Figure 7. Incomplete Global Content Competencies

With Figure 7, we see some content optimization, but the results gathered from analytics are used only by three functions in the value chain, not all five. This is a broken feedback loop. Content creators and localization managers, therefore, do not receive the feedback they need in order to create more effective marketing content, nor to localize marketing content in ways that would improve its results, such as by incorporating keywords that will attract more website visitors, or by making translated instructions more clear .

Figure8.TheBlackBoxandtheBlackHole

Many marketers hand their source language content to an external LSP with no visibility—and sometimes no concern—over what happens once the LSP receives it. How does localized marketing conform to marketing messages and branding? Are projects running late? Is the marketing department paying to translate text that was already translated as part of another project? Marketers who treat their LSP as a black box and toss their content into the box without insight as to what happens can pay for their lack of insight with problems in quality, cost, and delivery time .


Create Translate and localize

Manageand

store

Publishand

deliver






Create Localization black boxPublish

and deliver

Consume


A different but similar problem occurs when marketers publish localized content without monitoring the impact of that content when it is consumed by target audiences . This situation can seem as though global marketing content goes into a black hole, where people assume the localized content is doing its job, but nobody reviews metrics to be sure .

Figure 9. Multiple Unconnected Marketing Operations

As discussed in the Fractured Marketing Functions within Enterprises section, many enterprises deploy multiple unconnected marketing operations, each unaware of what the others are doing .

One factor that causes unconnected operations to sprout is lack of coordination between corporate marketing and regional marketing operations . It is very common for corporate management to have little or no idea what marketing content is created in the field.

Even more common is a lack of connection between different in-country marketing operations. It is rare for in-country marketers to know what projects their counterparts are conducting . Regional marketers sometimes view themselves as isolated islands, working in a state of segregation that makes content reuse difficult and out-of-step multilingual marketing inevitable.

Geography is not the only cause of unconnected marketing operations . Some companies create separate marketing departments for each line of business . Other companies inadvertently create isolated marketing operations when they hire outside firms or build distinct internal teams to handle marketing specialties such as websites, publicity, mobile marketing, sales promotions, or social media, without providing means to link the specialists into an infrastructure that makes coordinated multilingual marketing productive and efficient.



CreateTranslate

and localize

Manageand store

Publishand

deliver





Business metrics

Content-driven

business value

Identifying Best Targets for Fast Improvements

Previous sections of this report discussed the relative immaturity of practices for globalizing marketing content compared with the maturity of practices for globalizing product content .

Our research showed that the companies that are maturing their multilingual marketing content processes the fastest (and often for the lowest initial cost) did so by concentrating first on areas of overlap between product content and marketing content . This includes not only overlapping content itself, such as product names and related terms, but also content functions and competencies . In other words, exploiting overlaps between the global product content value chain and the global marketing content value chain delivered the quickest business impact . This is the sweet spot for companies that want to stabilize and mature their value chains for global marketing content .

The wedge that marketers can leverage to achieve quick global marketing results is to seek out opportunities to exploit their organization’s existing expertise with multilingual product content .

Figure 10. The Sweet Spot Is Where Product and Marketing Content Overlap

For example, at some companies this starts on a small scale with consolidating the term management systems that are used for product and marketing content localization . A proven tactic is to first agree on product names . Formal product names, informal product nicknames, and product name abbreviations can first be standardized in a single source language, then in multiple target languages in a single termbase . Other trademarks and short marketing messages (slogans, company boilerplate, etc .) can then be added to the termbase in source and target texts so they will be consistent across languages, and can be changed simply in one place whenever needed . From there, work can move to consolidating translation memories, or using the same language service providers, or standardizing metadata localization processes .


• Customer support/experience• Cross-functional champions• C-level executives


Product content

Marketing and brand content

From an infrastructure perspective, our research shows that translation management systems often provide initial points of leverage for organizations trying to bring some order to their marketing content practices . These process-oriented solutions can be opened up to handle marketing content, wringing out a good portion of the manual labor required to get source content translated and localized . Translation management systems tend to be content agnostic, accommodating many different content file types. This is not the case for other technologies used within the global content value chain. Content creation tools and content management systems, for example, are often specialized to handle the unique characteristics of only a select number of file types.

All starting points for leveraging the overlap between marketing and product content require crossing departmental and technical boundaries to work across organizational silos . How do companies move beyond pure consolidation and actually start working in the overlap space?

First, to begin building organizational support, we recommend that marketers determine how leveraging the wedge will raise the bar on the global customer experience, or address a similar strategic issue that will attract enthusiasm from senior managers and from other departments . This will create the direct tie between multilingual marketing initiatives and corporate strategy that is poorly articulated in many global organizations . As discussed earlier, marching under the banner of improving customer experience can attract the attention and support of executives in most companies . If executives are not focused on customer experience, marketers must find global customer support or another issue that has executive focus across departments and across geographies .

Second, the marketers who want to use multilingual product content expertise in service of multilingual marketing will need cross-functional champions, people who can work with those from other departments, have budget power that matters, and can drive the conversation across organizational boundaries .

Third, as mentioned before, to capture the attention and support of C-level executives, marketers must present compelling value propositions for leveraging the wedge, including business cases supported with meaningful metrics . Securing sponsorship and funds requires the presentation of business impacts that affect more of the organization than just the marketing team.

Working with Service Providers and Partners

Few multinational companies interviewed for this research attempt to perform most translation and localization in-house . Most companies outsource the bulk of marketing localization to a small number of external language service providers .

Companies also hire additional firms, specialists that provide related marketing content services. For instance, in addition to LSPs, one company we interviewed employs three vendors for transcreation . These in-country specialist firms review marketing source content in its original English language version, review a creative brief outlining the content’s marketing goals and other relevant facts, and then create new content for their local audience that addresses the same goals while taking into account local culture and local purchasing habits .


Almost all companies employ the same LSP or LSPs for marketing content that they use for non-marketing content . Companies said that using the same service providers for all content types reduces complications, and also enables a company and its vendors to use the same term management and translation memory systems for both marketing and non-marketing content, thus improving consistency and reducing costs . Almost all companies we interviewed selected their LSP or LSPs to localize marketing content because the companies had an existing relationship with the LSPs for non-marketing content. Other factors that had a less-frequent influence on the selection of LSPs for marketing include the regions the LSPs served, experience working with the same content technologies that the companies use, and price .

For marketing content, translation and localization services are those most commonly delivered by LSPs . Some interviewees told us that they also use LSPs for technical support services, have LSPs conduct in-country reviews of marketing content, perform training of company employees, and in one case, write marketing content . In the future, several companies hope to have LSPs assist with marketing to specific cultures, and help them integrate the many technologies they use to create, manage, and localize multilingual marketing . There is also interest in having LSPs perform transcreation . However, respondents were not as interested the possibility of LSPs providing future assistance in marketing to specific industries. One manager stated, “LSPs don’t do a good job of this.”

Global online marketing agencies and global CRM agencies are specialized types of service providers that do have a track record of generating good results from multilingual marketing to reach specific types of customers for specific industries, such as the hospitality industry, the travel industry, or certain kinds of manufacturers . Some provide localization and transcreation services as well as creating original marketing content . Companies that use these agencies report satisfaction with the results, leading us to predict growth for such agencies in the future, and greater partnerships with and competition between the agencies and traditional LSPs .

Leveraging Metrics and Results

Some multinational companies measure important indicators of their multilingual marketing content costs and what business value it generates—mostly technology companies and clients of global CRM agencies—but they are the exceptions rather than the norm. Once again, measurement and optimization practices for marketing content are not formalized and consistent across enterprises to the point where standard best practices have emerged .

Rather than best practices for multilingual marketing metrics, we found trends . The ideal metrics would be based on real data that directly ties marketing content with sales lift: How much did this content increase revenue? Because of the difficulty of getting actual sales results accurately linked to the sources of individual sales, we found no companies—not even the best-run operations—were able to tie marketing with sales lift . However, the leaders were able to extract and use data that provided insights into what could be working, such as what percentages of e-mail recipients opened this e-mail message, what percentage of them clicked on which link in the message, click-through rates from web banner advertisements, number of web pages visitors viewed, or percentage of customers who drop out during an enrollment or purchasing process .


These metrics can be used to improve the results from marketing content, and, in the cases of companies with in-field translations supervised by regional marketing managers, to compare results delivered by different managers to see whose content processes generated sub-par results. Some companies measured time-to-market, customer satisfaction levels, and region-based sales leads before and after multilingual content revisions for comparison . Marketing leaders also measured cost-per-word translated and average percentage of words reused, which helped in cost reduction and optimizing operational efficiency.

However, most multilingual marketing operations do not perform these measurements . Even when content use is measured, the accumulated data is rarely reported on and infrequently analyzed for insights that can make content operations more effective. For example, nearly every business runs web analytics on its websites, but according to research by CRM Buyer, only half of them actually use web analysis reports to improve their content effectiveness. Some managers we interviewed could present only anecdotal evidence of results, such as a “partner threatened to go to our competitor” if marketing materials were not localized, or “field sales reps said they preferred the new localized brochure.”

Most managers are frustrated because they have difficulty demonstrating the value of their multilingual marketing content operations, especially when trying to provide guidance to key decision-makers . The measurements of content value and operational value are usually fragmented across a mixture of often-isolated tactical concerns . In most cases, we found a serious disconnect between what the metrics measured and corporate objectives . Advice from leaders on metrics included the following three guidelines .

Tie Multilingual Marketing Metrics to Corporate Goals

An excellent starting point is to capture and articulate the relationships between corporate goals, metrics that are meaningful measures of progress towards those goals, and metrics at the level of multilingual marketing content . This enables marketing and localization managers to create metrics that tie activities in the marketing organization with their potential impact on the business in positive ways . Examples are illustrated in Table 4 .


Table4.SampleCommunicationsGoalsandEfficiencyGoalsforMultilingualMarketing

Corporate Goals Corporate Metrics Multilingual Marketing Metrics

Increase customer satisfaction Increase net promoter score from 45% to 55%

In regions with net promoter scores below • 55%, provide localized social media targeted to existing customers .

Increase revenue in targeted emerging markets

Increase sales revenue 25% from China and India

Increase average response rate to text message • campaigns in China and India from .05% to .75% .Increase the number of text message • campaigns in China and India .Increase the number of e-mail campaigns in • China and India .Increase web landing page signups from China • and India by 30% .Reduce time gap between English marketing • campaigns and Chinese and Hindi campaigns to 2 days .

Increase revenue for product family A

Increase sales revenue 15% from product family A

Increase qualified web leads for product family • A by 20% in target countries .


Track Metrics Across the Global Content Value Chain

Efficient translation and localization has always been dependent on globally dispersed knowledge workers . The prevalence of workers who are scattered around the globe and also distributed across organizations inside and outside the enterprise exponentially increases the risk of inefficiencies whenever the enterprise needs an increase in the volume of translation or number of languages . Establishing, monitoring, and reporting performance metrics are central to reliable business management . Capable translation management solutions include reports on job completion, turnaround time, and number of words processed . Although most companies outsource marketing translation work to one or more LSPs, they still need a centralized resource to track and manage project costs, total costs, and content effectiveness.

We have found that for multilingual marketing content metrics to generate productive results, a champion must push across functional and departmental lines, and to personally possess these five qualities:

Understanding of corporate objectives and responsibility for achieving one or more specific key • performance indicators (KPIs) .

Knowledge of marketing objectives (including the personal objectives of individual marketing • executives), past performance, and regional objectives .

Good relationships with directors or executives in other content domains .•

Access to metrics from systems in finance, accounting, and sales.•

The perspective that establishing, monitoring, and reporting performance is central to good • business management .


Provide Periodic Reports on Performance

If an organization truly intends to establish a unified global content value chain, consistent reporting on the results of multilingual marketing content will be essential . Adding value to quantitative reporting with descriptions of business and marketing implications that clarify the impact of performance for executives is even better .

Our previous research into multilingual content operations showed that respondents with current or projected reporting on cost savings (including discretionary spending, headcount reductions, or savings from not needing new hires) or increased customer satisfaction levels were less likely to experience negative repercussions from troubled economic conditions . Those who further segmented reports from a multinational perspective (using both qualitative and quantitative information from regional operations) and by content type have a distinct advantage when it comes to obtaining sustained content investments from management . They are content stakeholders who can prove value with metrics beyond simple anecdotal evidence .

ManagingtheExecutives

In our research and user consulting engagements, we consistently find that securing executive support for content initiatives remains a top challenge for managers across all departments and functions . Many executives do not understand that the organization’s content is an asset with business value and that it should be managed with the rigor that companies apply to other assets like physical plant, inventory, and cash .

Our research included a series of questions designed to help us characterize the level and nature of executive support for multilingual market content investments . We asked interviewees if their executives appreciate the value of multilingual marketing content and understand its challenges . Responses were predictably mixed .

Some executives understand the value and appreciate the challenges .•

Some understand the value, but do not appreciate the challenges .•

Some do not understand the value, and only see content globalization through a cost lens .•

Marketing executives understand value and appreciate challenges, but other executives do not . •

The focus on cost issues aligns with the tactical rather than strategic nature of the current state of practice described throughout this report .

The majority of interviewees recognized the need to educate their executives on the value, challenges, and opportunities associated with improving the global content value chains . Today, in fact, managing executives is first and foremost a matter of educating them . This can be challenging for marketing and localization professionals because best practices for marketing content globalization are still in the formative phase . Managers are just learning how to capture the right metrics and measure the right


performance indicators to make business cases; they lack proven, industry-driven cost frameworks for guidance . There are no industry benchmarks for executives to compare, no Harvard Business School case studies. Put very simply by one manager, “Part of our job is to educate [executives]. It’s not as simple as people think.”

Even in the best situations, there is still a leap to be made from comprehension and appreciation to actual sponsorship. To understand when and how this happens, we asked about tipping points—that one factor or event that causes executives to sit up and take notice . Tipping points cited by interviewees included the following:

New sales tied specifically to localization.•

The additional number of new hires that would have to be made without investment in • translation management technology .

Partners defecting to competitors who had localized marketing content .•

Poor quality output because IT people had to get involved in work that should be done by creative • staff.

Tipping points provide motivation through a highly visible success or failure . For localization and marketing managers, they are the keys to managing executives through education . It can be relatively easy to recognize a tipping point as it occurs—failure to launch a new product campaign simultaneously because of localization delays, for example, or the loss of a key partner due to the inability to support regional marketing programs .

Sometimes tipping points are on the horizon and can be anticipated by the people who do the work . In one example earlier, a manager showed that the costs of hiring new employees to meet the translation volume to support market growth would have been more expensive than investing in translation management technology that would deliver the same target volumes . A tipping point is often related to scalability issues—when translation and localization processes are no longer scalable to meet business needs .

With today’s tactical focus on getting the job done, it is no surprise that some executives only look at content globalization though the cost lens . It is common, in early phases of operational maturity, to focus on productivity and cost savings . Marketing and localization managers can learn to use this lens in their executive educational efforts. The most effective tools for educating executives are metrics that are meaningful for the business . Quantifying failures and successes in terms of real business impact is one of the best ways of presenting value propositions for global content and for characterizing the challenges related to it . Identifying a marketing or localization team member who becomes an expert in the relationship between localization and business performance is certainly emerging as a best practice for global companies .


Essential Actions for Global Marketing and Localization ManagersGlobal marketers and marketing localization managers are at a stage where they must go beyond focusing only on short-term tasks and start developing strategic outlooks and skills, becoming marketing content strategists . Based on the results of this study and on our previous work with hundreds of multinational companies, we emphasize these essential actions:

Adopt a Global Content Value Chain Strategy1 .

Develop Global Content Strategists2 .

Leverage the Wedge—the Overlap of Marketing and Product Content Practices3 .

Adopt a Global Content Value Chain Strategy

Managers who work with multilingual marketing content and focus only on their day-to-day deliverables are in danger of operating without a bigger-picture view that will help their company achieve its goals .

Our recommendation for correcting this problem is to use a global content value chain as the strategy for multilingual marketing . Value chain analysis helps a manager determine what parts of an operation directly add value (from the customer’s point of view) and therefore generate return on investment, and what parts support the operation internally and are therefore targets for cost reduction or efficiency improvements .

As explained throughout this report, the strategy of managing a global content value chain is supported by practices (such as content management and translation management) and requires an enabling infrastructure (the people, processes, and technologies that create and deliver content to multinational audiences) . Managers can use the value chain diagram in Figure 11 as a starting point for creating their own diagram, mapping it to the actual operations of their enterprise and the resulting business impacts .


Figure 11. A Value Chain Diagram Is a Tool for Improving Multilingual Marketing

Viewing an enterprise’s multilingual marketing operations as a value chain enables managers to ensure that every function is adding value to marketing content, and to spot and remove impediments that affect the value chain as a whole. A chain-wide view also enables them to ensure that the necessary competencies are in place across all functions, and to determine if the value chain is delivering desired business impacts as end results .

Managers can ask if enrichment with metadata is taking place across all five functions, or if a metadata gap needs to be addressed . After content is published, they can determine if its effectiveness is measured, and whether suggestions to increase that effectiveness are captured and made available across the chain, enabling every function to contribute to content optimization for greater effectiveness in the future. Managers can see where cross-functional collaboration is blocked by silos and can investigate with their teams to find ways to work together. Finally, managers can determine whether business metrics are captured and delivered to the executives who need them to ensure that multilingual marketing initiatives are helping the enterprise reach its business goals .

Develop Global Content Strategists

Who should be “in charge” of a global content value chain?

If a value chain is first and foremost a strategy, then it makes sense to identify a content strategist for this leadership role . This is the second essential action that marketing and localization managers can take in order to improve and bring maturity to their multilingual marketing content practices .

More and more global companies are seeking and grooming content strategists—very senior-level professionals who are responsible for managing content assets in all languages across their organizations . These companies recognize the need for a core management function that develops guiding principles for making decisions about content and how it can be used most effectively to achieve larger corporate objectives .


Impacts

Revenue growth


Audience engagement


Brand consistency

Risk management

Cost reduction

CreateTranslate

and localize

Manageand

store

Publishand

deliver

Consume and

contribute




Business metrics

Content-driven

business value

Global content functions

Competencies


As an emergent discipline, there is currently lively discussion about what a content strategy is and job descriptions for content strategists. In an article entitled “The Discipline of Content Strategy,” Kristina Halvorson, founder and CEO of Brain Traffic (a consultancy focused on content strategy development), writes:

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only

which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place. Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production

line for content nobody really needs or wants.

Halvorson’s observations resonate with us for two reasons:

A content strategist can help an organization gain a better understanding of the connection 1 . between its business and its content. This is a key area of opportunity identified in our research: achieving better alignment of the work that marketers and localization managers perform, the investments that companies make, and the strategic goals and objectives of the business .

The clear message is that viewing content globalization as a “glorified production line” is surely a 2 . losing proposition . Adopting a global content value chain that is grounded in strategy is the route to long-term, sustainable competitive advantage .

Providing guidance on developing content strategists is beyond the scope of the research conducted for this report. We can, however, offer some advice on starting to think about such role in conjunction with the formalization of a global content value chain .

Develop and foster expertise in the chain’s core competencies . Skills and knowledge in the areas • of multilingual metadata enrichment, content optimization, cross-functional collaboration, and business metrics are applicable to all types of content, not just marketing applications . An appreciation for these competencies and why they are essential to an organization’s efforts to leverage its global content will be key qualifications for content strategists.

Recruit an evangelist who has knowledge, communication skills, personality, and executive • connections . Enterprise-wide education will be essential for securing funding, engaging sponsors, and bringing stakeholders to the table . Evangelists are not necessarily content strategists . But they can play a critical role in connecting executive management with the people who do the real work . They are trailblazers for content strategists .

Identify the metrics that matter, scouring both marketing and translation and localization • activities . Developing a keen, focused understanding of the connection between multilingual marketing content and the levers that move the business is essential . As we advise earlier in this report, a small number of team members whose job is metrics will be invaluable to improved practices for multilingual marketing content .


Leverage the Wedge

Whether a company calls its strategy a global content value chain, global content management, or by some other name, at the end of the day managers have to prioritize where their organization will move first. How do managers determine where to start? How do they begin to evaluate global content strategies from where they are today, and where they need to go? What is the appropriate starting point?

Earlier in this report, we discussed finding the sweet spot, the place where multilingual marketing managers can leverage resources that already exist and so expand a company’s global product content expertise . To provide further guidance, we can chart the various paths to global growth: generating revenue from new or existing products, and from new or existing geographies . Managers can start by mapping their content globalization practices to their company’s global business strategy .

Figure 12. Map Content Globalization Practices to Global Business Strategy

For example, one organization’s growth strategy might be product-centric . Its business strategy plans to drive growth by taking new products into geographical regions where it has an established marketing presence . Its content globalization strategy might therefore be weighted in favor of improving its global product content value chain . Managers might focus on transforming its technical documentation practices, such as integrating translation with content management, or implementing content reuse strategies with XML . Managers will focus on deeper understanding of customers in established markets, and build competitive advantage by fine-tuning content to deliver high levels of customer satisfaction .


Establishedproducts/regions New regions

New products

Sweet spot


Marketing content

Prod

uct c

onte

nt

For another organization, growth may be region-centric . Its business strategy plans to drive growth by taking established products into new geographies . In this scenario, the content globalization strategy might be weighted in favor of establishing and formalizing its global marketing content value chain . Managers might review cross-functional processes: What can be done by connecting the web content management system to translation and localization assets for faster web publishing of on-demand content? Is metadata available for multilingual search engines? How can managers bring social media into the global marketing content value chain?

A third organization might plan to drive growth by taking new products into new markets . In this case, managers might base their content globalization strategy on finding the right balance of investments in both value chains, for product content and for marketing content. They might start at the “sweet spot” that provides the wedge for leverage, the space of overlap between marketing, brand, and product content .

Conclusion: Maturing the Global Content Value Chain for MarketingAs global organizations push their marketing practices ahead in today’s frenetic digital multilingual environment, they are navigating uncharted territory . It is easy to forget that the internet has been part of the landscape of business technology for less than two decades, and that digital marketing is an emergent practice . As a community, we are still very much making it up as we go along .

But it will not be long before first-generation tools for digital marketing in multiple languages evolve into second-generation content globalization systems that are integrated and refined. As we note earlier in this report, technologies for content management, digital asset management, and localization and translation are evolving rapidly . To cite just two examples, web content management systems are morphing into web engagement hubs, and robust machine translation tools are incorporated into platforms for business users and language professionals alike .

As core content functions comprising the global content value chain are integrated, greater automation and scalability of marketing, localization, and translation processes will deliver improved business results from global marketing. Language service providers—critical participants in global content value chains—are also leveraging technology more extensively and developing new capabilities that enable them to become service partners, not just service providers .

At the same time, we see growing recognition that eliminating language afterthought syndrome is critical to improved performance and ability to execute. Organizations are learning—sometimes after painful experiences—that they can no longer afford to invest in ad hoc, cottage-industry localization and translation in order to meet the demands of global business in the twenty-first century. The more attention companies pay to metrics and to measuring the right performance indicators, the better equipped they are to grow their international business with effective content globalization practices.


We predict that global content value chains for marketing will move beyond the formative phase over the next 18 to 24 months, and will approach the same levels of maturity that many companies have realized within their product content value chains . Global marketing and localization managers who seize the opportunity to become global content strategists can lead the way and create competitive advantage for themselves and their businesses .

Related Research

Outsell’s Gilbane Services Reports

These Gilbane Services reports are available at no cost with registration on Outsell’s Gilbane Services website .

Multilingual Marketing Profile: TomTom NV (forthcoming in 2011)

Content, Context, and Conversation: The Three Kings of Consumer Engagement (December, 2010)

Translating Social Media and Dynamic Content in Real Time for Customers: New Options for Enterprises (November, 2010)

Smart Content in the Enterprise: How Next-Generation XML Applications Deliver New Value to Multiple Stakeholders (August, 2010)

Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices into Global Content Value Chains (June, 2009)

Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain (July, 2008)

Outsell Subscriber Reports

These Outsell reports are available to Outsell subscribers .

Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010: Total UK Advertising and Marketing (June 10, 2010)

Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010: Total US and Consumer Advertising (April 14, 2010)

Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010: Total US and B2B Advertising (March 3, 2010)


http://gilbane.com/profiles.html

http://gilbane.com/whitepapers.pl?view=35

http://gilbane.com/beacons.html

http://gilbane.com/Research-Reports.html





http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/929-annual-advertising-and-marketing-study-2010-total-uk-advertising-and-marketing

http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/919-annual-advertising-and-marketing-study-2010-total-us-and-consumer-advertising

http://www.outsellinc.com/store/products/912-annual-advertising-and-marketing-study-2010-total-us-and-b2b-advertising

Third-Party Sources

The Discipline of Content Strategy (December, 2008)

Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (1985)

MethodologyThe primary research for Multilingual Marketing Content comprised in-depth interviews with marketing and localization managers and executives at 12 global companies, conducted in 2010, and data and insights drawn from the primary research conducted for our 2009 study on multilingual product content and our 2008 study on multilingual business communications . We leveraged primary research conducted for Outsell’s Gilbane Services’ detailed case studies on content globalization practices at FICO (formerly Fair Isaac Corporation) and Philips (both studies are available for download from Outsell’s Gilbane Services’ website) . The analysis related to product content and XML was partly informed by primary research for our 2010 report, Smart Content in the Enterprise: How Next Generation XML Applications Deliver New Value to Multiple Stakeholders.

Figure 13. Job Roles of Marketing Content Respondents


Localization/translation

Marketing

Other LOB

Base: 12 enterprises (2010).Source: Outsell’s Gilbane Services 2010 Multilingual Marketing Content Survey© 2011 Outsell, Inc. Reproduction strictly prohibited.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy/

http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sustaining-Performance/dp/0684841460/

Figure 14. Number of Languages Used by Respondents for Marketing

In addition to gathering new data from marketing and language professionals specifically for this study, the study team drew on its own first-hand experience and deep knowledge of content globalization. The insight and analysis presented in this report are shaped by two decades of expertise working with Global 2000 companies and leading providers of localization and translation technologies and services .

Sponsor AcknowledgementOutsell’s Gilbane Services appreciates the contribution of content for this section from our research sponsors .

Across Systems is the producer of the Across Language Server, the most innovative centralized server platform technology in translation and localization management. It is a flexible, fully configurable translation management system that integrates all aspects of the linguistic supply chain from source to market . Across language technology includes a translation memory and terminology system along with powerful project management and workflow control tools. Open interfaces enable the direct integration of corresponding systems, such as CMS, catalog, or ERP solutions . Companies using Across technology significantly reduce time and costs, and increase productivity and accuracy, due to simplified and automated processes. Across Systems is the only independent translation management system provider and focuses 100% on developing comprehensive yet robust technology that allows companies to choose any LSP or work with internal and/or external translators . For more information: http://across .net .


Less than 10

11 to 20

21-35

Greater than 35

Base: 12 enterprises (2010).Source: Outsell’s Gilbane Services 2010 Multilingual Marketing Content Survey© 2011 Outsell, Inc. Reproduction strictly prohibited.

http://across.net

ADAM is a global provider of media workflow and marketing technology software. We offer enterprises the ability to manage, structure, and deliver media between people, processes, and systems . Working with our partners enables us to implement our software globally while providing workflow solutions to all types of enterprises . What drives us is a passion to organize media intelligently, making it easier and more accessible to everyone . ADAM-Media Intelligent . For more information: http://adamsoftware .net

Lionbridge is the leading provider of translation, development, and testing solutions that enable clients to create, release, manage, and maintain their technology applications and web content globally . Lionbridge translation and localization solutions are based on our internet-architected language technology platforms and global service delivery model, which make the translation and localization processes more efficient for Lionbridge clients and translators. A key differentiator for Lionbridge is our global footprint, which enables us to deliver superior service to customers through local contacts and resources . We employ more than 4,200 specialists, including linguists, project managers, engineers, subject matter experts, content developers, application developers, and quality assurance professionals, in 26 countries . For more information: http://lionbridge .com .

SDL is the leader in Global Information Management . Global Information Management enables companies to engage with their customers throughout the customer journey—from brand awareness to sales and after-sales support—and across languages, cultures, and channels . SDL’s best-of-breed Web Content Management, eCommerce, Structured Content, and Language Technologies, combined with its Language Services, drive down the cost of content creation, management, translation, and publishing . SDL solutions increase conversion ratios and customer satisfaction through targeted information across all customer touch points . Global industry leaders who rely on SDL include ABN-Amro, Bosch, Canon, CNH, FICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Hewlett-Packard, KLM, Microsoft, NetApp, Philips, SAP, and Sony . SDL has over 1,500 enterprise customers, has deployed over 170,000 software licenses, and provides access to on-demand portals for 10 million customers per month . It has a global infrastructure of more than 60 offices in 35 countries. For more information: http://sdl .com .

Multilingual Marketing Content: Growing International Business with Global Content Value Chains©2010 Outsell, Inc . 41

http://www.adamsoftware.net

http://lionbridge.com

http://www.sdl.com

Vince EmeryAffiliate Analyst, Content Globalizationinfo@outsellinc .com

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February 28 , 2011 Multilingual Marketing Content: Growing ... · Brand and marketing managers,...

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