Business process outsourcing (BPO) allows companies to buy in expertise that they don’t have in-house. A business can use BPO for its customer support service, its HR function, its IT support and so forth – in much the same way that it can use HubSpot to handle many of its marketing and sales functions, only with a greater human element to the service. A translation agency can also serve as a business process outsourcing service, providing a company with outside expertise in order to handle its multilingual requirements.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at using a translation agency as a BPO service to build a multinational, multilingual digital marketing campaign. We’ll consider the advantages of doing so and also drill down into some of the practical details.
Let’s get started!
Why use business process outsourcing?
More than half of the internet is written in English today. However, Wired magazine has projected that 2020 will be the first year to see that number dip below 50%.
There are over 7,000 languages in the world, but just 11 languages individually represent more than 1% of content on the internet. Whether you choose to focus on these top 11 languages in order to reach as many people as possible or focus on a sub-1% language in order to try and avoid the competition, you’ll need a translation agency on board to help deliver your marketing campaign.
There are multiple advantages when using an external business process outsourcing agency. Two of the biggest are cost and access to expertise. These can make a major difference to how a business approaches its multinational marketing work.
How much does translation cost? That’s very hard to say without knowing both the languages involved and any specialist expertise that may be required. However, a business can assess how much it can save by considering what the average translator’s annual salary is.
According to Indeed, the average salary for a translator in the UK is £25,573. The employer will have to pay on costs such as National Insurance Contributions and pension payments as well. And that’s just for one translator covering one language.
Looking at these costs, it pretty quickly becomes clear that a business that needs to translate its marketing documents into multiple languages has the potential to make a saving by using business process outsourcing.
It’s much the same when you consider services such as HubSpot. By providing CRM, sales, marketing and services tools, the software delivers far greater value than a company could achieve by employing individuals to complete all of those tasks.
The other advantage of using a translation agency as a BPO service is the breadth of expertise that doing so provides. If a company needs a multinational, multilingual digital marketing strategy, that means using different translators for different languages. They also need to have marketing experience in the target culture, to help mould the strategy appropriately.
Using a translation agency can deliver this expertise not just in relation to languages but also in relation to sector-specific skills and cultural knowledge. A decent agency can become a one-stop-shop for translation and localization work that can help to deliver a robust and successful digital marketing strategy. (We could point out again here that HubSpot does the same for your marketing and sales services, but I fear we would be labouring the point!)
How can a translation agency help develop your digital marketing strategy?
When it comes to marketing your products or services overseas, the earlier you bring in a translation agency to help you, the better. A reputable agency can deliver far more than just the conversion of one language to another. The degree of cultural expertise available through such agencies is staggering.
A savvy business will use this to full advantage when creating a digital marketing strategy. Tapping into a local audience’s views and expectations is key to successful marketing and doing so requires in-depth knowledge of the culture in question. As such, using a translation agency to contribute to a strategy as its being mapped out can have a major impact on its success.
Digital marketing enables a company to reach out across the globe. A digital marketing strategy can encompass everything online. Why is this so important? Because the number of adults whose internet use is “constant” has increased by 5% in just three years.
HubSpot advises that digital marketing means leveraging, “digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.” It’s a huge area of work. Thankfully, it’s also well suited to being handed over almost in its entirety to a business process outsourcing service.
Ways to work with business process outsourcing services
How to work with a BPO service is really up to each business to determine. For some companies, the best solution will be to hand over a service entirely. With a multinational, multilingual digital marketing strategy, that could mean laying out what needs to be achieved, they relying on the BPO company to make it happen, from concept through to delivery.
Many companies prefer to retain more control than this model of working allows. As such, using business process outsourcing for a defined element of the job can work well. By using a translation agency, for example, a business can be responsible for defining its own strategy and approach but have expertise on hand in order to localise its efforts as the strategy builds.
The agency can then undertake the translation element of the work with the full knowledge of how it fits into the wider strategy and what it is intended to achieve. This knowledge can help to guide translators’ choice of words and overall tone.
Why is a multinational, multilingual digital marketing strategy so important?
The level of competition that businesses have experienced since the rise of ecommerce is just phenomenal. A company that once had one or two local competitors now faces competition from across the globe.
On the flip side, that company also has a whole planet’s worth of potential customers out there, just waiting to be told why they should choose to buy from it.
Companies that don’t develop multinational, multilingual digital marketing strategies still have competitors around the world trying to win over their customers. It is only by expanding internationally that they can attempt to increase their own customer base to counteract the efforts of the competition.
Using business process outsourcing to do so – whether through fully outsourcing the strategy or using a translation agency to undertake only part of it – can allow a business to compete successfully on the global stage. It can also ensure that those within the company are freed up to focus on core business operations, rather than stretching their roles to cover international marketing efforts that can quickly become a major distraction from other responsibilities.
Factor in the potential cost saving and there’s a clear-cut case for businesses to use BPO services, just as there is for them to use CRM software. Ultimately, these services exist for a reason. Businesses that use them wisely can save time, money and effort while pursuing and achieving their strategic goals.