Five ways to explore the likely profitability of new markets using marketing translation

Launching in a new market can be both exciting and daunting. It’s a move that’s full of potential, but which also carries a fair degree of risk. As such, it’s essential to explore the likely profitability of new markets before you launch them. Using translation services is a major part of doing so. Professional translators can help with a huge range of marketing translation tasks designed to help you explore new markets. Here’s how.

Understanding marketing translation services

What is a professional translator? Professional translators convert text from one language to another. Marketing translators have backgrounds in marketing. Translators in other sectors are also suitably qualified: those providing legal translation services have legal experience, medical translators have medical experience, and so forth.

What are some examples of translation? In a marketing context, translation can include anything from a social media post to an entire website. Consider a marketing campaign from start to finish. According to William Mamane, CMO at Tomedes, converting it to another language will include marketing translation services that cover email funnels, adverts, presentations, social media posts, brochures, websites, and more.

One key element of marketing translation is market research. Market research is essential whether you are planning to launch in your own country and language or overseas. Without it, you won’t have a firm indication of the size of the market for your particular product, how consumers feel about it, what price they would be prepared to pay, or anything else.

Within market research, you have a host of activities available, all of which can work well when combined with translation services. Five important activities when you’re exploring the likely profitability of new markets include:

• Social media engagement
• Surveys
• Telephone interviews
• Focus groups
• Market trend analysis

We’ll take a look at each of these in turn, including how marketing translation can help you with them. But first, let’s put this in a global context. 

Marketing translation and global markets

Companies around the world expand by engaging customers overseas. They do so by using marketing translation services. Some companies also use marketing text translation to connect with customers in their own country who speak other languages.

The world is an incredibly linguistically diverse place and individual countries can be home to a wide range of languages. Papua New Guinea, for example, is home to 840 living languages, while Indonesia is home to 710. This means that professional translators can come in very handy for building up domestic customer numbers.

Regardless of whether a company is courting domestic customers or those overseas, it has to take market research translation seriously. The global market research services market is valued at $74 billion in 2020. That’s an awful lot of companies exploring new markets.

How to use market research and translation services to explore new markets

If you’re ready to explore the likely profitability of new markets, it’s time to start translating marketing materials for your market research.

Social media engagement is an excellent place to start. The always-on, instant nature of social media means that gathering feedback on appetite for a new product or service can be undertaken very quickly. It’s also a great way to gain honest feedback – social media users don’t tend to hold back when it comes to expressing their opinions. Use professional translators to ensure that you get just the right tone for your posts – and to help you understand what all those commenting in the language(s) you’re using are saying.

Social media is, of course, a public forum. If you need to gather opinions more discretely, away from the prying eyes of competitors, then surveys might be a better way to explore the likely profitability of new markets. Work out what you want to ask in your own language, then using a marketing translation agency to translate it. This is a great way to explore multiple markets at once. By asking the same questions in different languages, you can easily compare the resulting data in order to identify the market in which you’re most likely to succeed.

Telephone interviews are another getting way to obtain insights into how profitable a new market may be for you. You can use both translation services and interpretation services here – translation to prepare the questions you want to ask in the required language(s) and then interpretation to conduct the interviews.

Focus groups also require a blend of marketing translation and interpretation services, with professional translators preparing the questions and product information in advance, then interpreters helping to deliver the sessions either face-to-face or remotely.

Finally, professional translators can help with market trend analysis. The internet has a wealth of information to help you assess how profitable a new market might be – provided you speak that market’s language well enough to track down the right documents. If you don’t, a translation service can help work with you on a multilingual research project.

The potential rewards of getting marketing translation right when exploring new markets

Why go to all this effort? Well, according to Hubspot, global B2C eCommerce sales are projected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021. In the simplest of terms, companies that sell in multiple languages can reach more customers and take a bigger slice of that profit.

When it comes to translation services UK companies have plenty of ways to explore the likely profitability of different markets. So what are you waiting for?