The ROI of Language Services
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Is Translating Really Worth it?
Marketers are fully aware that in a globalized world, a multilingual digital presence can greatly increase revenue. However, one of the challenges they face is determining the real impact of language services, localizing websites, etc. to understand its actual value and, if necessary, obtain budget approval from stakeholders.
It's true that you can't do business internationally without translating your most important marketing assets, but in many cases, localization isn't something you can simply tie directly to your ROI. This is what you need to be able to operate and expand globally. However, some basic criteria need to be measured in order to evaluate the performance of your spending on language services.
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What metrics measure the impact of translation?
- How much revenue does localization bring?
By tracking this metric, you can see your localization investment as a percentage of the profits generated by the languages you support. Localization alone is not responsible for all of this revenue, as there are other resources involved. Looking at it from a different angle, you're as to be able to calculate the Return On Investment percentage from localization as you would trying to figure out what percentage is entirely attributable to web or team billing . But if you think of language services (especially localization) as a revenue catalyst rather than a revenue generator, their value, while difficult to measure, is undeniable.
- What's the cost of localizing language support as a percentage of language-backed revenue?
This number should decrease over time as your localization plan evolves. However, there is no formula for determining the "correct" investment or percentage. This will change over time and based on what you're translating versus what you're doing locally, your marketing strategy, the amount of content included, etc.
- How does location affect customer acquisition cost?
Your translation cost can easily be calculated as a percentage of the customer acquisition cost for each supported language market. Since product localization often represents a large portion of your overall localization budget, you may want to split what you spend on product localization versus sales and marketing.
- What is the localization cost percentage of the R&D budget?
Many software companies see localization as part of their overall R&D budget. It's nice and simple. However, if the translation supports features other than the product, it won't be a completely clean scale unless you can map it directly to the product based on other features
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The true ROI of translation is its impact on end users, loyalty and engagement. We should all be obsessed with customer experience and understand how localization affects customer experience metrics. This is how we can take a seat at the proverbial table and speak the language of other business stakeholders.
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