To keep pace in the global economy, manufacturers must often translate their websites for international customers and suppliers. Unfortunately, these companies usually have small marketing teams that find the task practically impossible to accomplish-especially in often brutally short timeframes.
We recently spoke with one of our customers-a Senior Interactive Marketing Manager at a multinational B2B chemical manufacturer-about the challenges his company faced in "going global" online, and how he addressed them with MotionPoint. You can download the full Q&A e-booklet below, or keep reading for an excerpt:
Q: What were your goals for your global website initiative? What were the challenges you faced?
A: Our corporate website was only in English and didn’t serve our global customers, sales and service teams well. We needed to serve 30 markets by rolling out 29 websites in 11 languages—fast.
We also wanted to have one Content Management System (CMS) where we created content, one standard way to deploy that content to multilingual versions of the website, and one standard way to translate those websites.
And we needed to accomplish all that with a very small web team—a total of three full-time employees, if you include the development resources.
Q: You did a thorough analysis before selecting your partner for the initiative. What options did you consider?
A: We evaluated three options: increasing internal marketing resources to manage and translate website content; managing translations in our CMS (Sitecore) using in-region resources; and using cloud-based translation technology and services, i.e. MotionPoint.
We chose MotionPoint for several reasons. One was speed to market-if we tried to build a new language website on our own it would have taken us 18 months to get it right, whereas MotionPoint could get it right in 60 days. We also didn't have the internal resources to maintain and update in-language sites on our own.
But the biggest factor was cost: we calculated that the cost to actually build and operate an in-language website would have been 2-3 times more to do it ourselves than to use MotionPoint. It was a real no-brainer.
Q: You mentioned it was important for you to get a "turn-key solution" for your website translation. Why?
A: For us, it all comes down to limited resources. We don’t have the same web resources as a B2C company with 100 people on the marketing team and millions of dollars dedicated to the website. Because we’re a business to business company, an industrial company, our organization is primarily focused on sales and services and we run with a lean web team.
We don't have the luxury of hiring extra staff to translate content from the business units into each language of our website. We also don't have a traffic manager to traffic all the translations back and forth between translators and the business units. We don't have a translation validation team internally that's CMS-aware and CMS trained. And we don't have a large team of web developers to troubleshoot issues.
MotionPoint handles all of that for us. We also benefit from MotionPoint's expertise in optimizing websites for local markets, which means we don't need multiple SEO and marketing agencies to guide us on best practices.
Learn More In Our Free E-Booklet
To discover even more of this global manufacturer’s experiences and perspectives, download our full Q&A e-booklet, Going Global with a Lean Web Team: Straight Talk and Lessons Learned from a Global Manufacturer.
In this Q&A, you’ll learn how this multinational manufacturer:
- Addressed concerns about keeping multilingual websites up-to-date
- Identified hidden costs in managing multilingual websites in-house
- Overcame challenges in leveraging their CMS for multilingual websites
