On the Importance of Proper Localization

Business development and retention start and end with effective communication with your customers. At the end of the day, it’s about the relationship and perceived value that a customer has with your brand and product (or service) that ultimately informs their decision to transact with you the first time and further down the line.

These days, your digital presence will often be at the top of the funnel in terms of interfaceable touchpoints. That is, the first impression and experience of your brand and value proposition by a prospective customer is now likely to take place online.

This can be both exciting and frightening at the same time. The barriers are lower than ever for business owners in terms of being able to access new addressable markets.

There is a special feeling of accomplishment when an organic conversion happens online. 

All the groundwork done to build your online presence, explain your value proposition, and entice and excite the customer about why they should pick you pays off. You’re reminded of the power of the Internet and how it has allowed businesses worldwide to scale and grow at an unprecedented rate.

While a lower barrier to entry creates a more competitive landscape (which, in theory, is good for the consumer), you cannot be everywhere at once, especially when a mistake or misunderstanding occurs. There are moments when the customer’s attention is piqued, but for the wrong reasons. 

Perhaps it’s just the realization that this isn’t what they were looking for, and they move on. But sometimes it’s a typo, a bug, or a misunderstanding of what you’re trying to communicate. This can be very off-putting. 

As much as we want to avoid mistakes, they do happen—and let’s be honest, more often than we’d like to admit.

The good news here is that, in the same way that technology allows you to optimize your digital touchpoints to improve conversion, it is also easier to find and fix any mistakes or errors. 

But this can be a trap to fall into, whereby a product or service is rushed to market because of the comfort of, or complacency in, knowing that it can always be fixed or improved later on.

Either way, being able to adjust iteratively and in near real-time is a huge benefit when it comes to running a business in a leaner and more agile way. But first impressions will always matter, and being thoughtful about communication from the start can go a long way.

As a new market player, you do want to stand out, but not for the wrong reasons. 

Differentiators that helped you decide to enter a new geographic market in the first place are why you should stand out, not messaging and content that isn’t properly localized for the audience you’re trying to serve.

With all the advances in new tools and technologies when it comes to language translation, entering a new market can appear to be deceptively easy (at least from an online perspective). 

More often than not, localizing doesn’t just apply to translating text but also adapting visual and audio elements of your product or service to the local environment; the entire user experience is therefore technically within scope. Cultural, linguistic, and even legal nuances need to be considered, captured, and appropriately reflected. 

There is “a way of doing business” in every country around the world. 

And while technology has come a long way in aiding localization efforts, accounting for cultural and contextual nuances is still something it’s not able to do proficiently. It is essential to connect the dots in order to resonate with an audience. 

Ensuring you have sufficient human involvement in your localization workflow is essential to achieving this. It can also help minimize errors, and where mistakes do happen, be able to respond in a timely and appropriate manner to any errors that you may bump into down the road.

Now, re-working entire UI/UX flows sounds like a drawn out and expensive venture, something that’s easy to put on hold until next time. 

But there has never been a better time to balance the need for human involvement, which can be lengthy and expensive, with the tools we have available today, which can speed things up and are easier to access, to localize iteratively via a step-by-step approach.

For those considering market entry into Japan but who are less familiar with the landscape, Litmus comprises an experienced team of professionals who have worked in tech across industry verticals and company horizontals in Japan and abroad. 

We have hands-on experience in localizing web-based services inbound to Japan as well as for Japanese businesses that have expanded into other markets.

Get in touch with us today to learn more about the opportunities for a Japan market entry and how we can help. Litmus specializes in providing marketing, consulting, and localization services tailored for the Japanese market.