Content or Rooms: What Comes First?
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In his second guest column for Travel Daily Asia, James Keddie, chief sales officer for EQHO Globalization, looks at multilingual content strategies for travel companies
In my first article, “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy – Insights into Asian Travel Consumers”, I shared some insights into the online travel buying habits of some Asian consumers.
You may recall Japan led the “Can’t Read Won’t Buy” pack with 87% of Japanese reporting they “Won’t Buy” from an Anglo-centric travel website. With high “Won’t Buy” habits across the globe, coupled with the fact that only 34% of global travel companies have translated content and 53% have no defined multilingual strategy, this second article focuses on creating a multilingual content strategy.
Ask yourself this question: Could you sell rooms, tickets or tours without any content? I think I know your answer. But how strategically does your company view content, in particular multilingual content? Chances are that you do not have a defined strategy.
Welcome to your new business—content creation and management. Travel companies that understand they are firstly in the business of multilingual content are the companies that are prospering. They understand the strategic importance of content and why it makes sense to deploy a multilingual content strategy.
So my question to you is “How strategically does your business view content, and what tactics do you use to make it more frequent, engaging and actionable content?”. If you think of content and the user experience you provide visitors as the road and the destination you are selling, as err, the destination then this is a great first step.
Good content that engages users is not all about using wonderful marketing buzz words either. It’s not about the 3-4 adjectives you’ve crafted in a single sentence to describe a view or a room or restaurant. Good content is all about giving users the news. That’s why they’re on your site. You deliver value by delivering…value. Great content engages with your visitors and customers how they want to be engaged with: simple descriptions that can be quickly scanned, easily accessible information through tabbed browsing, responsive websites that change depending on the device being used to access your website, prominent on-site user reviews, links to third-party user review sites such as Tripadvisor, incentives for the user to book directly instead of through an agent. All these killer content best practices add up to more trust, higher conversions and more revenue.
Assuming you do not have a formalized multilingual strategy, here are some pointers that will hopefully allow you to get more bang for your buck.
Prioritize Markets—do not aim to launch into 10-20 markets simultaneously, especially if you don’t have a defined multilingual strategy. Instead, categorize markets into three tiers. Tier 1 markets are the most strategic and Tier 3 the least. This simple approach allows you to launch into priority markets first, deploy different content and marketing strategies depending on strategic importance, and allocate investment and resources to accelerate ROI.
Rationalize Content—if you are dealing with hundreds-of-thousands or millions of words you need to rationalize your content. Scalability, time-to-market and ROI are the key drivers here. For example, for high-value revenue generators you will want to spend more time by following a high-quality translation + separate copy editing service. Conversely, for properties that do not generate revenue then a lower but acceptable level of quality using customized machine translation engines will allow you to keep costs down. Any mid-tiered content may be suited to a translation-only solution or even machine translation with human post-editing. But either way the days of “one size fits all” are gone.
Control the Source—remember, your objective is to create content that is easy to translate. You will achieve this objective far quicker and more cost effectively by maximizing content re-use to optimize human translator productivity or first-time quality passes from a machine translation engine. Well written source content is not about beautiful adjectives, not about superlatives or long sentences with carefully placed conjunctions. Instead it’s about simple sentence structure and the use of controlled language. After all your strategic objective is to get the translation out to market as quickly and cost-effectively as possible—and the quickest way is to maximize content re-use. Scalable translation is all about re-use through “exact matches” and “fuzzy matches” whereby the Translation Memory tools can identify content that has been translated before (aka an exact match) or content that has been partially translated before (aka a fuzzy match). The main benefits lie in the productivity gains for translators and the ease to train custom machine translation engines.
There are of course many other aspects to consider such as multilingual SEO, multilingual PPC, multilingual social media posts, press releases. The list goes on and on. But I hope these brief pointers were able to get you make you realize that without content your business would not exist and people won’t buy—both compelling reasons to start looking at content more strategically and to formalize your multilingual content strategy.
In my final article I will give you some tips on the types of processes, tools and technologies that will provide the levels of automation and scale your business needs to be truly successful in this dynamic, multilingual world.
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James Keddie is the Chief Sales Officer with EQHO Globalization Pte Ltd. In 2014 EQHO’s team of 3,500 linguists translated 45 million words into 63 languages and 550 voice artists recorded 51,666 minutes of multilingual audio. EQHO caters to a range of travel and hospitality clients including, Accor, Agoda, Expedia, ICS Travel, TripAdvisor and Wotif.
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