If you’re thinking of expanding your business, taking your goods or services overseas could be the way to do it. It’s a great way to reach additional demographics and boost sales. And by working with a translation company, you could expand overseas without worrying about the language barrier.

Below, we’ll cover expanding from Wales to overseas customers, and look at how the multitude of services that a translation company provides can help you grow your business.

Using a translation company to expand beyond Wales

Wales already has a well-established export industry, proving that it can be done successfully and that there is an international market for Welsh produce. In 2020, Germany was the top goods export destination for Wales, with exports to Germany accounting for 16% of all Welsh exports.

If you do decide to expand overseas, you’ll want to start with some market research. It’s common for companies to look at big data resources from overseas regions to see what is selling where, like POS data or credit card information. Analysing this data can show you what is already a top seller, what is a moderate seller and what doesn’t seem to have any presence in the region at all.

To make greater sense of the situation, a company may then conduct consumer surveys or look at trending topics on social media in the new potential region. These reports can show what people think of the product, whether they’d use it and how receptive they may be to the product being introduced to the area.

Translators can help by making sense of these foreign data sources. It might translate and lay out big data reports, translate surveys and survey responses and help translate any messages analysed from overseas social media sources.

Marketing With Translation

Translation can help with a wide variety of marketing efforts, if you do decide to expand into a foreign region. They can help with traditional advertising, like translating print ads, TV ads or direct mail letters.

You might also look into help from translation for newer ways of marketing. For instance, social media marketing requires regular updates, knowing how people in the market interact with social media and sounding native in such a casual environment. Translation can help make regular social media updates less of a hassle, helping you to build your brand and drive up engagement overseas.

Data shows that brands with 10,001+ followers saw the most engagement (in this case, defined as clicks per post) when they posted 31-60 times per month on Facebook. Brands with fewer followers than that saw the most engagement when they shared between one and five posts per month. Either way, social media posting is an ongoing need for businesses, and translation can help make sure you’re coming off as culturally sensitive, on trend and generally in touch with the new region.

Translating can also help with a wide variety of other digital marketing efforts. It can translate and update pay-per-click ads, email campaigns, blog posts, affiliate marketing and content marketing. All of these types of marketing rely on direct interaction with online audiences, and translation efforts can make sure you’re building brand trust in the new region with engaging and accurate content.

In addition to making sure people click on, like and share the content, a unique part of digital marketing is that different platforms/messages often require a very different way of communicating. Different types of blog posts have their own structures, each social media site has its own posting conventions and affiliate marketing has certain rules, like needing to specify when content is sponsored. Translators can make sure that your content is not only translated, but that it is following all of these rules and conventions in the new language and market.

Also, keep in mind that these companies do more than just translate the language itself. It can make sure that all parts of the message or product are updated to fit with the new market. It might check for cultural sensitivity in messaging and design, like if a certain colour has different connotations in other cultures. You might see companies change the layout of an ad or other document to make readability and design fit better with the new language or with cultural norms around formatting and presentation. Translators can update small details like currency symbols and dates, too.

Using translation company in business operations

Once you do expand overseas, you’ll be talking to vendors, business partners, employees and/or customers in that region. A translation company can then help with the running of the business by:

Connecting you with interpretation services for business meetings, presentations and calls with people who speak another language
Translating internal communications like emails, memos, contracts, sales reports and project instructions
Handling technical documents like instruction manuals, drug data safety sheets, product specifications, patent information and other technical documents

As you can see, translators can help you with running all parts of an export business, from market research to marketing messages to conducting business overseas.