The Marketing Nation Gets Global with Cloudwords’ Customers Hach and Sherwin-Williams

5 min read

“Inspiration in the Nation” was Marketo’s theme for the 2015 Summit, and wow, did they deliver! From the early morning fun run, to educational sessions, happy hour networking, and inspiring speakers, kudos to Marketo for putting on a phenomenal user conference. Cloudwords would like to thank both our customers and new friends for stopping by our booth to say hello.

We’d also like to give a big shout out to two customers in particular who rocked an inspiring panel session about global best practices: Steven Lane, Director of Brand Communications at Sherwin-Williams, and Debbie Lakatos, Senior Demand Gen Manager at Hach Company. Attendees filled the room for the session called “Localization is the Ultimate Form of Personalization”.
team pic at MKTO summit
The Marketing Nation audience and our panel of localization and global marketing experts engaged in a dynamic discussion on the importance of creating and delivering personalized messages in their audiences' native languages. Both Steven and Debbie shared their experiences about how they use Cloudwords with Marketo to enable them to quickly and efficiently increase their presence in existing regions, as well as expand into new ones.

Hach and Sherwin-Williams both use Cloudwords with Marketo to reach global audiences in multiple ways to meet company goals. Hach is a global manufacturer of water quality instrumentation. The company’s mission is to ensure water quality for people around the world. And while many people recognize Sherwin-Williams as a consumer product (paint), the company has a Global Finishes Group with three B2B divisions – Protective & Marine (fun fact, they supply the paint for the Golden Gate Bridge!), and Automotive, and Product Finishes.

The panel touched on the business needs for localization, including sales, marketing, and demand gen, as well as the importance of getting words and phrases localized correctly, and global message consistency for increased brand effectiveness. Debbie provided an interesting example: Hach takes pride in making analytical instrumentation that’s easy to use, so their messaging often refers to how “flexible” the instruments are. In this context, “flexible” is seen as an advantage in English; however, in Italian the same word implies “weakness.” Not the message they want to be sending!

Heidi StevenWe also talked about translation spend and how much to budget for localization; typical time-to-market for localized content and campaigns pre- and post-Cloudwords; and of course, ROI – including cost savings and efficiency savings, such as increased productivity (employees have more time to create/deliver more campaigns), better campaign results, and improved translation quality.

The audience had a big “a-ha” moment when our panel discussed the opportunity costs of a slow, inefficient localization process. Both Steven and Debbie talked about how their teams have significantly increased the creation and delivery of multilingual campaigns destined for global markets, and it really hit home when they pointed out the missed revenue opportunities that was a direct result of the manual, traditional approach to localization they had in place prior to integrating Cloudwords with Marketo.

For example, at both Hach and Sherwin-Williams (and typical at many global organizations), their in-country sales team was key to their translation process – acting as either translators or translation reviewers – because they speak the language and are familiar with the local culture. However, if your sales team is spending half their day translating, or trying to track down and manage a manual review process, that’s half the day that they’re NOT selling. A missed opportunity to make a sale means that sale is going to your competitor, and potential for revenue growth and market traction is lost.

Moreover, there are significant costs associated with delays due to slow translation turnaround times. Excessive time spent getting translations pushed through the process – either because of a poorly managed process and/or time spent manually copying and pasting content in and out of Marketo to send to the translators – means content is not getting delivered on time. This is often referred to as “calendar slip” – when your email campaigns launch after your product already has. The result is fewer leads and lost revenue in your global markets. Debbie pointed out that Hach can generate an average of 250 leads from an educational document; by applying their conversion rate and average order based on their range of products, a three week launch delay due to slow translation turnaround times can amount to $75,000 to upwards of $250,000 in lost revenue!

We also talked about the value of Translation Memory – I asked the audience to raise their hands if they’d ever heard of it, and not surprisingly, only a handful were familiar with it. It’s true, Translation Memory is the best kept secret in the translation industry. Cloudwords’ Translation Memory feature, 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 available and accessible to any translation vendor that the company chooses to contract with. Debbie and Steven touched on the significant cost and time savings OneTM provides their respective companies, particularly during the review process. Every time a new word or phrase is translated, it is reviewed and then stored in Translation Memory, reducing costs because they don’t have to keep translating the same thing over and over again, but also saving review time. Local reviewers already know which words and phrases have already been approved, which reduces the time they have to spend on translation reviews and enabling them to get back to their primary job responsibilities.

Based on the Marketing Nation’s feedback, the audience learned more about the impact and importance of marketing globalization than they did when they came in. We’re always pleased when our customers share their experiences because it’s invaluable to see how others have overcome translation roadblocks. It also helps Cloudwords continue to build a more valuable, customizable translation management solution to further meet global marketers’ needs.

If you attended the session, please let us know what was most enlightening or inspiring for you in the comments below. And if you missed the session, don’t worry, you can listen to the recording, or feel free to give us a call and we’d be happy to chat about the Cloudwords for Marketo solution!

Written by Richard Harpham