Why “Correct” doesn’t cut it in Global SEM

May 26, 2011 Posted by Nathalie Molina

 

This is a cautionary tale for Search Marketers, don’t worry, it has a happy ending.

Imagine you’re selling a new adhesive product that will revolutionize the market currently dominated by Scotch Tape (made by the smart cookies at 3M). You launch in the US first, your home market, and find that your fabulous new product is selling like crazy online, so you reprioritize your marketing budget and invest heavily in Search Engine Marketing (PPC) in order to continue to drive online sales. Smart.

Then, because you’re such an enterprising marketer, you set your sights on the international markets because you know that 3M does most of its $20B yearly sales outside the US, and you, naturally, would like a piece of that.

So off you go: you hire a localization firm to translate your website into 10 languages, you have your developers engineer your ecommerce modules to accept multiple currencies and do everything right. You even go the extra mile and hire a 3rd party firm to provide expert, in-country linguists and certify that your website is correctly translated, gramatically perfect and professional looking in every way.

Yay!

 

Then you look at your marketing strategy. Of course, being a savvy business owner, you’re going to use your money wisely and start by entering the new markets with a purely online focus. You initially test the markets by translating your paid search campaigns, more precisely your key words, using one of the easily available free machine translation engines online. Why would you do such a thing, after using professional translators for everything else? Well, two reasons:

1. You asked around and everyone you spoke to, from in-house marketers within a brand to big agency gurus, said they had used machine translation at one point or another.
2. It’s instant and free!

Ok that’s three, but work with me.

Then you sat in front of your screen eagerly awaiting the the onslaught of international sales. But it turns out, what all your marketer friends forgot to tell you is that one of the biggest problems with Search Engine Marketing today is replicating the success of domestic PPC campaigns internationally. Few performance media marketers have solved this dilemma.

Oops.

 

So, not dissuaded (never!), you call up your trusted professional translation firm and ask them to take your 1000 proven US English key words and translate them. In a week or so, they send you back the 1000 key words translated into 10 languages. You print out the 10,000 words and hug them, then you thank your translators profusely because although it wasn’t instant or free, when the international floodgates open, you’ll know it was worth the wait!

And again you wait…and consider framing those 10,000 key words you’ve now grown to love like children.

And hey, the results come in and they are better. However they are hardly the kind of results you’re used to seeing in your home market. Less floodgates, more trickle.

Why?

Does nobody care about adhesive tape outside the US? Is your product destined to be a US phenomenon only? What is wrong with these people? Or maybe, what is wrong with your product?

I know this is going to be tough to believe coming from someone at the largest localization company in the world, but here’s what we’ve found to be true in every Search Engine Marketing situation we’ve encountered:

Translation doesn’t work!

 

To understand why, it’s good to think of the United States’ largest and most successful export category, the entertainment sector. Specifically, I’m thinking of the film industry. Do you think the Chinese marketers, who ‘localized’ the title of the 1995 Oliver Stone film “Nixon,” by calling it instead “The Big Liar,” were worried about whether the title was a correct translation? No way. What they cared about was finding a locally relevant title that would draw the attention, and open the wallets, of their domestic audience.

Global SEM is no different. You don’t need to worry about translating those keywords “correctly,” what a good global SEM campaign does is rebuild your keywords from the ground up, not trying to give them a local flavor but actually being 100% local. An effective Global SEM effort is driven by local nuiance, common misspellings, misconceptions and slang, such as the fact that few people in the UK call it “Scotch Tape”, favoring instead “Sellotape,” or even “sticky-backed plastic,” coined by the BBC (and amusing many, according to my sources). Missing the opportunity that those local terms provide is a far more likely culprit for poor PPC performance abroad than anything else a marketer might worry about.

The bottom line is that your 1000 domestic key words could end up being 600 in another market, or 1500. There is no one to one relationship. It’s not about those numbers, nor is it about what’s correct, it’s about what connects with your local audience and what sells.

Want to know more?

• Listen to our webinar with Acquisio, with a real life case study from Smart Destinations
• Download the eBook
• Follow the conversation at #GlobalSEM