Cloudwords Perspectives - A book for the global marketing professional

Cloudwords PerspectivesJanuary 2014

Copyright 2014 Cloudwords, Inc. All right reserved.
Cloudwords Perspectives | January 2014
Welcome to the first edition of Cloudwords Perspectives, a collection of our
most reshared, retweeted, and viewed posts from the Cloudwords blog.
This particular edition of Cloudwords Perspectives covers critical aspects and
best practices of taking your marketing content global. Here are the blog posts
featured in this first edition of Cloudwords Perspectives:
• Have you cracked the code to going global?
• 4 Essentials for taking your content global
• Best Kept Secret? Only 20% of Global Marketers Know What
“Translation Memory” Is
• Quantifying the Importance of Global Customer Engagement
• You are so global, you don’t even know it!
We are looking forward to sharing more Cloudwords Perspectives with you
every quarter.
Best,
The Cloudwords Team
Heidi Lorenzen
Chief Marketing Officer
Michael Meinhardt
Co-founder and Chief
Customer Officer
The Authors

Have you cracked
the code to going
global?
We are all keenly aware that the global
economy is interconnected and depen-
dent on the strengths and weaknesses of
the countries that trade with one another.
More so, trade and related activities are
greatly impacted by government policies.
Obviously, during the 2008-2009 financial
crisis that affected this country and also
shook most ofthe world,
globalization weak-
ened due to significant
declines in trade and
foreign investments.
Beginning in 2010, once
global economies began
to improve, globalization
increased as inter-
national trade and
investment flows picked
up, and since then we’ve seen global orga-
nizations continue to expand and benefit
from opportunities abroad.
However, according to an article in
Bloomberg Businessweek, “Why Global-
ization Is Going Into Reverse,” the global-
ization upswing has stalled. Based on a
study conducted at IESE Business School
in Barcelona, the article states that while
globalization was picking up momentum
following the global financial downturn, the
“depth of globalization” slowed down again
at the end of 2012. The main culprit? Poor
economic and trade policies put into place
following the financial crisis.
Even so, we know the potential for
increased global revenues still
exists, particularly within emerging
markets, such as in
Brazil and Africa.
According to the
McKinsey Global Insti-
tute (MGI), the num-
ber of global consum-
ers today is about 2.4
billion people, and MGI
projects this figure
will nearly double by
2025 to 4.2 billion con-
sumers (out of a global population of 7.9
billion), at which point MGI estimates
annual consumption in emerging global
markets will increase to $30 trillion, up from
$12 trillion in 2010. Clearly, reaching these
global markets is critical to drive growth.
In the Bloomberg Businessweek article, the
IESE study’s authors argue that globaliza-
tion would continue to rise “if multinational
corporations learned to ‘crack the code for
By Michael Meinhardt
According to the McKinsey
Global Institute (MGI), the
number of global consum-
ers today is about 2.4 billion
people, and MGI projects this
figure will nearly double by
2025 to 4.2 billion
consumers.

competing in emerging economies’ where
growth is strongest.” In other words, com-
panies could increase revenue and further
strengthen a growing global economy if
they could successfully reach potential
consumers in emerging markets. Bingo.
So what is the secret “code” to unlocking
global revenue potential? Localization is
surely a key element: organizations that
develop and implement global strate-
gies to expedite the delivery
of product information, sales
materials, customer experienc-
es, marketing content, etc.,
in a market’s local language,
using culturally relevant
references and images, are more
likely to engage consumers and
convert them into customers.
Our customers know the value
of localizing materials to reach
multilingual audiences, and,
prior to using the Cloudwords
application, were all too familiar
with the challenges traditional
approaches to the localization
process entailed. Marketing on a global
scale requires collaboration among grow-
ing numbers of stakeholders, communi-
cation among globally-dispersed internal
teams and departments as well as outside
translation vendors, and seamless manage-
ment of sky-rocketing amounts of content
that is created, stored and delivered in a
variety of business applications (Web CMS,
marketing automation, etc.) in a plethora of
languages.
We recognize both the challenges to local-
ization and the benefits of localization, and
since Cloudwords’ very inception, we’ve
worked to develop a very user-friendly
application that takes away the
complexities of going global and enables
customers to optimize the translation
and localization process more easily. By
automating the globalization process with
the right technology tools, our customers
reach global markets up to 60% faster.
Regardless of whether globalization trends
are reversing, smart companies recognize
potential opportunities for revenue growth
still exist in global markets—both emerging
and otherwise—and know how to crack the
code. Do you?

4 Essentials for
taking your
content global
Marketers worldwide are leveraging content
to engage customers, build thought leader-
ship platforms, and drive demand for their
companies and offerings. In fact, 93% of
B2B marketers use content marketing as a
key part of their marketing mix. It must be
working: marketers are spending a full third
of their budgets on content
marketing and more than half
plan to increase that amount.
However, marketers are dis-
covering that reaping the
benefits of content on a
global scale is a daunting
challenge. Organizations that
operate globally have to create content for
multiple markets, which means localizing
the content to the languages and nuanc-
es of regional audiences and customs, and
delivering large amounts of content across
an even more complex array of channels.
Developing and implementing a com-
prehensive global content strategy and
operational plan is necessary to scale to this
degree.
The upside is worth it. When done
well, marketers can connect their
businesses with more customers worldwide
and increase company visibility, growth and
revenues.
I recently had the opportunity to share
my insights on global content operations
during a webinar discussion with Pam
Didner, Global Integrated Marketing
Manager at Intel, moderated by
Clare McDermott, Editor
-in-Chief of Chief Con-
tent Officer magazine.
The event was hosted by
the Content Marketing
Institute.
One portion of our dis-
cussion focused on the
development of a global
content strategy to accelerate the creation
and delivery of impactful and engaging
marketing content to global audiences.
Based on my years as a global marketer,
with more than 10 years spent overseas,
here are four core elements I recommend
fellow global marketers consider when ap-
proaching global content operations.
1. Think global first, not as an after-
thought. This seems ridiculously obvious,
but it’s not yet common marketing practice.
When building a marketing strategy and
In fact, 93% of B2B
marketers use content
marketing as a key
part of their marketing
mix.
By Heidi Lorenzen

the content plan to support it, consider all
geographies at the outset. I’ve witnessed
too many talented marketers focus first on
the headquarter market, with the (flawed)
intent of rolling out campaigns and content
to international markets later. This leaves
untapped opportunities for revenue on
the global table. It’s important to focus on
markets where the highest growth potential
exists for your product or service and prior-
itize those. Trying to tackle global markets
after you’ve already launched in headquar-
ters’ market causes tension among global
and regional teams, and creates huge op-
portunity costs in both untapped revenue
and competitive disadvantage.
2. Integrate your global
content strategy worldwide.
By this I mean, ensure that all
geographies and business units
are represented from Day One.
Creating a Global Content Council
is one way to do this. Being well
integrated also means stopping the
proverbial pendulum from swinging
to extremes of either centralization or
decentralization of control of marketing
content. This is a huge topic in and of itself,
but for now, let me summarize by saying
that it’s vital to balance the business-driv-
ing needs of the regions with the strategic
priorities of corporate teams.
Breaking down silos across teams, especial-
ly between corporate and the field, manag-
ing brand consistency, economies of scale,
AND the local relevance, creates the best
outcomes.
3. Develop an audience-centric strategy
– global-style. Marketers are always laser-
focused on the personas they are targeting.
That’s not a new concept. However, what
has become challenging is applying that
same discipline to the global elements of
personas. Besides adapting your content
map to your general personas, as well as
the points in the buying cycle you’re trying
to affect, your campaign themes, and the
place in the customer lifecycle, it’s critical to
overlay that with the languages and other
considerations of the regions and cultures
you’re trying to impact. And, again, to do
this at the outset.
4. Build a technology infrastructure
designed to scale globally and accelerate
global deployment of content. This forms

the very foundation of an organization’s
entire global content strategy. It’s what
makes execution possible with the speed,
agility, and quality the markets demand,
with the efficiencies your resources require.
This infrastructure should include your
web CMS, your document and digital asset
management systems, your marketing
automation systems, as well as newer
technology that streamlines the entire
globalization process and becomes the hub
for taking all your other technologies global.
The Cloudwords application was designed
specifically for that purpose. It sort of
becomes the marketers’ ERP for their
content factory, if you will, delivering faster
time to revenue while significantly reducing
the costs and time associated with taking
your content global.
Cloudwords Marketing
Globalization Platform

Best Kept
Secret? Only
20% of Global
Marketers Know
What “Transla-
tion Memory” Is
Cloudwords recently surveyed nearly 500
global content marketers to learn about
the processes they use when it comes time
to localize their marketing copy to reach
customers in international markets. One
of the questions we asked was whether
participants were familiar with the term
“Translation Memory” because this is such a
valuable asset for global organizations.
In a nutshell, Translation Mem-
ory is a database of a company’s
previously translated words and
phrases. It’s valuable because if
you’ve translated something once,
you should never have to pay to
have it translated again.
To our surprise, only 20% of global
marketers are familiar with Translation
Memory. Keep in mind, these are marketers
who are already translating content to reach
multilingual audiences—in fact, on average,
they’re translating content into eight differ-
ent languages, some more, some less. That
means a whopping 80% are unfamiliar with
a tool that can tremendously reduce their
translation costs and save significant time
when it comes to getting their content to
market.
Regardless of whether you need to trans-
late marketing materials, website pages or
product copy, global professionals can no
longer afford to have Translation Memory
kept a secret. In fact, they need to own it,
access it, and leverage it.
Consider this: the two largest cost drivers
for localization projects are the number of
words you need to translate and the amount
of time it takes the vendor to finalize the
document. Cost per word varies depending
on which language you are translating to,
but if you didn’t have to translate a portion
of your words because you’re re-purpos-
ing previously translated copy, that’s fewer
words you have to pay to translate again,
and less time it takes for the translation
vendor to finish the project. That is, IF your
translators are leveraging your Translation
Memory, and if they are, whether they’re
passing along the savings. When multiple
translation vendors are being used, there is
no shared leverage among them.
As you can see, global organizations have
had little opportunity to manage and use
their own of Translation Memory data-
base well or even at all. Cloudwords is the
only content globalization application that
hosts a cloud-based Translation Memory

database for each customer to own and
manage. Cloudwords’ OneTM stores a
company’s words and phrases that have
already been translated and keeps them
updated within the database. A customer’s
OneTM is accessible to any vendor that the
company chooses to contract with.
By enabling all vendors to
access their client’s
OneTM, brand and
message consistency
are greatly increased
because everyone
is working from the
same set of up-to-
date, approved termi-
nology. Such improved
collaboration processes ultimately leads
to an overall higher quality of translated
materials. All the while, reducing the costs
and time needed to complete each project.
If you didn’t know about Translation
Memory before you read this post, you’re
clearly not alone. But now you know,
and we hope that if you’re not already a
Cloudwords customer, you’ll reach out to
learn more about how to take advantage
of your own OneTM database, as well as
experience all the additional benefits our
world-class application provides.

Quantifying the
Importance of
Global Customer
Engagement
Engaging customers successfully on a
global scale requires a fresh approach to
localization – namely, thinking about it
as a strategic piece of your global go-to-
market strategy, and tackling it as the
complex business process it is.
Customer engagement is the holy
grail of marketers
Whether you’re in the
B-to-B realm or marketing
directly to consumers, the
importance of authentic
customer engagement
can’t be overstated. Is it
possible to put a dollar
value on customer en-
gagement? You bet.
According to a Gallup study of thousands
of B2B customer relationships, for example,
fully engaged B2B customers accounted for
a 23% increase in share of wallet, profit-
ability, revenue, and relationship growth
relative to average customers, whereas
actively disengaged customers actually cost
companies 13 percent along these same
benchmarks.
However, only 13% of B2B customers are
fully engaged, according to the study.
The reason may surprise you. Analysts at
Gallup noted that many B2B companies
focus on price, speed, and efficiency when
they communicate with their customers.
Instead, these companies should have been
establishing an emotional connection with
their customers in order to engage with
them successfully.
Engaging customers
on a global scale is
inherently more
complex and
challenging
Mastering this connection
requires speaking their
language – literally and
figuratively. After all, if
your words are (ahem) lost in translation,
you’ll fail across the board. As the Gallup
study illustrates, getting engagement right
is obviously vital, but also an enormous
challenge. It’s exponentially more difficult
for multinational companies to engage
effectively with customers who speak
other languages and have completely
different cultural frames of reference from
themselves — and each other.
By Heidi Lorenzen
Fully engaged B2B cus-
tomers accounted for a
23% increase in share of
wallet, profitability, rev-
enue, and relationship
growth.

Using local language is an absolute
requirement for business success
A Common Sense Advisory study found
a strong correlation between the num-
ber of foreign languages appearing on a
company’s website and the company’s
measure of business success as
represented by its score on leading rankings
of company revenue (Forbes), brand value
(Interbrand), or website traffic (Alexa). The
top-ranked companies consistently offered
greater language support to their global
customers than companies occupying the
lower positions on these rankings.
Here’s where the proverbial rubber hits
the road: Another study of Fortune 500
companies shows that those which trans-
lated content to keep up with or gain an
edge over their competitors were more
than 2x more likely to have an increase
in profits and 1.27 times more likely to
generate increased earnings per share
(EPS).
But let’s consider localization from the
perspective of the consumer we are trying
to engage:
• 56.2% of consumers say that the
ability to obtain information in their
own language is more important than
price in making a purchase decision,
according to Common Sense Advisory
• 72.4% of consumers would be more
likely to buy a product with information
in their own language
• 72.1% of consumers spend most or
all of their time on sites in their own
language
Clearly, any way you look at it, overall
success in global customer engagement (as
measured by revenue growth and P&L) can
only achieved by looking at localization as
a critical business process to be optimized.
Doing so will translate (no pun intended!)
into bottom-line benefits too powerful to
be ignored: shorter go-to-market timelines,
faster time-to-revenue, and zero chance for
the competition to sneak in and steal your
thunder.
Your content is an extremely valuable
asset. Having accurate marketing and sales
messages across every customer touch-
point in every relevant language is crucial
to the customer experience, and your com-
pany’s ability to capture the global revenue
your go-to-market plans are built to yield.

You are so
global, you don’t
even know it!
Consider the following:
1. Starbucks coffee drank by a business
man in Shanghai helps to feed a
family on the island of Sumatra, the
hills of Costa Rica and Western Africa
2. A selfless act in Tunisia sparks a
social revolution on Twitter across
northern Africa and Middle East
3. Products developed in Southeast Asia
are sold to collectors in the United
States through the help of Amazon.
com
4. Kiva Microloans are disseminated
throughout developing countries
bringing pride, commerce and liveli-
hoods to families
5. Life-saving vaccines developed in the
United States by Eli Lilly prevent the
spread of Polio in Africa and save the
lives of millions
Global communication and collaboration is
shaping the way we view different cultures,
different people and provides a new plat-
form for social empathy.
Our world is already pretty small and only
getting smaller – I can jump on a plane at
12pm in San Francisco and land in London
at 7am the following day. I can jump on
FaceTime, Skype or Viber and see my family
in Boise, LA, San Diego, London and Dublin,
Ireland all in a matter of seconds.
Organizations, individuals are constantly
looking for new ways to connect, engage
and communicate and the rate at which
this is now possible is staggering. Think
about it – email in its earliest forms was
developed in the 1960s, the PC went
mainstream in the 1980s, the Internet
went mainstream in the 1990s, Social
applications went mainstream in the 2000s
and now as we enter the 2010s – world-
wide communication is only accelerating
as businesses continue to invest heavily
in all things localization, translation and
globalization – or put another way, all things
multi-lingual; their products, collateral, and
communication strategies.
Accelerating Global Product Usage
and Registration
I remember working with a
company called hi5 in 2004, one of the
many companies pre-Facebook, that
were trying to make a name in the
“social media” space. I worked with them
to identify their “tier-1” languages and we
set out to localize their application into

11 languages – French,
Italian, German, Spanish
(EU), Portuguese (EU)
Brazilian Portuguese,
Spanish (LAS), Chinese
(Simplified), Chinese
(Traditional), Japanese
and Korean. They didn’t
have much content to
localize, but they contin-
ued to tell me “how big
they were in Portugal”
– which I thought was
pretty cool. But when I
asked why that might be
the case, they responded
with “We have no idea! But we think if we
localize our application everyone will begin
to understand how to really use our cool
features”. So, we localized their applica-
tion, they loaded the translations into their
system and turned it on.
In 24 hours the following happened:
• Application Usage was up 7x
• New Registrations were up 10x
• New advertisers around the world were
calling them to do business
Pretty amazing considering all they really
did was adapt their offering to accommo-
date the growing global audience.
In short, localization is kind of like helping
someone see for the first time – where once
they were truly struggling to understand
what you were trying to communicate, or
worse, had no impression at all because
they didn’t bother to check out your mes-
sage, because it wasn’t in their language –
the communication veil was lifted and they
were now able to really begin to fully utilize
all of your products cool new features and
have a deeper understanding of the value
of your offering.
Obviously enhanced global results will vary
across industries, but one thing remains
clear – people want to have an experience
that is familiar, easily consumable, and
enables deeper understanding.
The real challenge for the global orga-
nization is to invest enough energy and
resources into the experience such that
their desired message reaches the targeted
individual at the right time — and in the
right language.

Content Operations on a Global
Scale
Did you enjoy reading our Cloudwords
Perspectives on taking your content
global? In our new ebook - Content Operations
on a Global Scale - we share specific ways to
improve global content delivery and better
align it with your go-to-market strategy. The
new-found efficiencies and greater glob-
al marketing impact will help you drive
more growth and customer engagement
in all the markets you serve.
Download the new ebook from our
website at www.cloudwords.com.
NEW
eBOOK

ABOUT CLOUDWORDS
Cloudwords has uniquely disrupted the localization
industry with a powerful end-to-end platform
created specifically to turbocharge the marketing
globalization process. We’re not a translation
vendor. Rather, Cloudwords is the first and only
software to fuse workflow, collaboration,
financial and project management, and
analytics to streamline getting marketing
content into the languages that resonate
with a company’s target audiences.
Contact Us
Cloudwords, Inc.
400 Montgomery Street, Suite 1200
San Francisco, CA 94104
USA
Phone: +1.415.394.8000
Sales: sales@cloudwords.com
www.cloudwords.com

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