Why Need a Marketing Strategy?
A smart language service provider needs to reconsider how they are selling their services and to re-focus on the added value they offer to their clients. Isn’t that called “marketing strategy”?
The language service provider that survives this type of messy, albeit cut-throat, competition is the vendor that will be able to identify its customers, will know how they make their buying decisions, and will be able to answer such questions as who inside the organization is responsible for outsourcing a translation service provider, who makes the final decision, who sets the budget, what this budget actually is ─ more or less. Again, doesn’t this look like a “marketing strategy”?
There is also another reason ─ a crushing one! Even though most businesses around the world are increasingly recognizing how important translation services are for their companies, yet the language services market is so crowded that vendors are engaged in price wars that are cutting into their profit margins. Therefore, the successful language service provider is the vendor that rests their success on pillars other than just prices ─ such as quality, quick delivery, a wide range of language pairs, specialized translation and localization teams, a comprehensive product portfolio, and so on and so forth. Sure, this is “marketing strategy,” Isn’t it?
The Steps of Marketing Strategy Process
But how will you, as a language service provider, or a translation service provider, come up with a marketing strategy that persuades businesses to choose your services, not the services of other vendors ─ whether they are the services of translation, interpretation, localization, desktop publishing (DTP), transcreation, voiceover, transcription, dubbing, MTPE, ..etc.?
You should, first, get started with determining your company’s value proposition ─ which sums up your business’ main strengths and differentiators against competitors. Your clear value proposition is, in fact, your platform for identifying the main customer benefits and what value your services actually bring to the customer.
Then, you have to embark upon determining its marketing strategy objectives, taking into consideration that these goals should be specific, measurable, attainable and time-framed, in addition to the need for re-evaluating them on a regular basis ─ with a view to changing any of them if necessary and using them to measure performance.
Last but not least, the language service provider will have to face the most important step in the entire marketing strategy process, namely how to establish the right marketing methods ─ which constitute the make-or-break landmark!
Digital Marketing Tools
In consideration of the special nature of the language services industry and its current background of cut-throat competition, a successful language service provider should never underestimate the task of choosing their digital marketing tools, or the marketing methods that they will be using to communicate their brand messages to their personal or corporate clients. One has to distinguish oneself in this vast space of language vendors, isn’t it? However, it’s more helpful if we shed light upon the top 4 digital marketing tools:
1-Website
The website of a language service provider is indisputably its best marketing tool that ensures that the company will reach its audience, get them to stay on the site and eventually choose its services of translation, localization, or whatever. Therefore, it’s a must for any language translation provider to consistently update website content, use SEO to boost organic rank in search engines, use visuals to engage site visitors, consistently posts blogs, and create clear calls-to-action CTAs.
2-Social Media
To achieve their marketing and branding objectives, the language service provider should capitalize on social media platforms to consistently post text, image updates, videos, and other content, along with using paid social media advertising, to drive audience engagement.
3-PCC
If we look at PCC as a method to use search engine advertising to generate clicks to the website, rather than getting those clicks organically, there is no doubt that a language service provider is on top of the businesses that should use this type of digital marketing tools to attract clients, engage them and finally close deals.
4- Event
Event marketing is a successful method in which a language service provider should take into consideration to promote their corporate brand as well as their services through in-person interactions. The only remark which needs to be made here is that event marketing does not mean that your company should be always hosting events. Sometimes attending industry events makes a lot of difference!
5- Cold calling
Although the internet has revolutionized everything when it comes to the marketing of language services or any other business, we can’t deny the importance of sales calls for accelerating your sales opportunities. Sales managers who are working at LSPs companies know how busy they are attending meetings, replying to emails, and their daily operational work, so the quickest way to reach them by a simple phone call.
6- SEO
With the intense competition between LSPs, everyone is trying to increase its market share and attract more customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the key solutions that help LSPs recently to get more customers online. They have used their experience of understanding of every target market and how they can translate and localize words.
7- Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies to achieve better ROI. Some reports showed that every $1 you spend, you can expect to get $43 in return. So by a simple direct email, you can get in touch with a prospect that might be converted to be a long term client.
Experiment, tweak and Deliver
Like all successful businesses, a language service provider should always test, experiment and check the results of using this or that method of digital marketing tools, with the purpose of picking and choosing the most effective tool ─ not only to promote the various language services that the company delivers, but also to position the language service provider as a differentiated, distinguished “brand” which stands out in the crowd of competitors.
Finally, what about the other remaining digital marketing tools which your business may use to become number one in the language services space? Let’s discuss them further if you stay with us.
