Five Best Practices for Localization Testing
Localization is critical to reaching a wide geographic area with your marketing and overall business efforts. As part of your localization platform, testing your processes and ensuring they meet your stated goals is essential. Consider utilizing these critical five best practices as part of your localization testing.
1. Identify Your Goals
Before you start localization testing or, in many cases, the localization process, begin by clearly identifying the KPIs you want to use to address your localization efforts. Common KPIs for localization may include things like:
How do your users change with your localization efforts? If users in a specific geographic area decrease in response to something you have changed, you may need to revise your approach dramatically.
Do you have any localization-related complaints? Users will often notify you of potential problems, including any issues with your translation or images used.
Your net revenue for new target areas.our revenue increase due to your localization efforts?
When you know what you intend to accomplish with your localization, including what KPIs your business needs to reach, you can better determine how your localization works through your testing. On the other hand, if you simply start localizing without your goals in mind ahead of time, you may discover that you need to know whether your localization has succeeded.
2. Start Localization Testing Early
As your brand expands to a global audience, you want to start testing to determine how that audience receives your business. Growing from a specific local audience to one that spans a much wider geographic area is more complex than translating your content into a different language and hoping for the best. You must also ensure that you are localizing your content, from the colors you choose to represent your brand to the images selected for various products.
Start your localization testing as soon as possible. You need to know how your new geographic targets receive your brand and whether you may need to make changes to your brand to meet the needs of that specific group. Consider things like the needs of your new target market and how your product fits their pain points. In many cases, as you change geographic regions, you will also need to change how you approach your audience.
The sooner you start localization testing, the better you can shape your ongoing efforts. Then you can ensure that you continue to meet the needs of your audience in every market. Over time, you may also learn how to shift your marketing segments to ensure that you are reaching people from each region.
3. Automate What You Can
Localization is a vital part of your ongoing marketing strategy. Automation should also be part of that process. You want to start a new test only when you have a question. Nor do you want to reference old data when you're ready to learn about your current market. By automating your localization testing, you can get a better feel for where your customers are at any point.
Automation often simplifies the process and makes it easier for you to achieve your goals. Set up your platform, let it start running, and experience the benefits. You can change the parameters of your testing at any time. However, automation means you do not have to alter your testing or set up something new continuously. Instead, you can keep up with the continuous testing needed to keep up with how your brand is performing in various markets.
However, while automation is essential, it's vital not to over-automate. If you remove the human element from the practice, especially when testing the accuracy of your localization efforts, you may find it easier for mistakes to slip through. Furthermore, automated software solutions may prove less effective at testing overall human response.
4. Utilize Localization Experts
Localization experts aren't just critical for creating the content that allows you to localize your market and website. They're also a crucial part of your localization testing efforts. Localization experts can give you vital insight into how your content is performing:
How people are likely to respond to your content
What the community is saying about the content you have created
How your content fits into the greater conversation surrounding your industry.
When you choose localization experts to test your localization, ensure checks and balances are in place. You do not necessarily want the same expert who created your content to be the one testing that content. The creator of that content may have some intrinsic bias toward its success that could make it more challenging to determine how it is performing or whether any changes need to be made.
5. Take Your Time
Expanding your brand is an ongoing process, not one that happens overnight. Even if you can quickly scale your brand to reach a wider audience, breaking into those markets will take time and becoming a trusted resource in each local community. Localization is also a process. It's more complex than translating your content and hoping for the best. It is an ongoing process that includes:
Conducting market research
Getting to know your target market
Producing content for each market segment
Testing that content over time to ensure you get the best possible results.
Likewise, you need to take your time with localization testing. Observe the response to your content and your brand over time. When you first enter a new market, there is naturally excitement surrounding a new product. But there may also be a level of distrust that influences how willing new customers are to buy from your brand.
As trust increases and you become part of the community and part of the industry, customers will naturally develop a more profound sense of connection to your brand. They will associate things like your logo and voice with your brand specifically. They will also respond more naturally to your marketing efforts.
To gauge the success of your localization efforts, you have to keep that journey in mind. Observe changes over time. Remember what stimuli may have contributed to those changes and how your ongoing localization efforts continue to influence them.
Trust Vistatec for Help With Your Localization
Localization is an ongoing process for your brand. With effective localization testing, you can observe changes over time. Track how your localization efforts improve your revenue, ability to connect with customers and ongoing consumer trust in your brand.