Cloudwords Blog

Grow Global Chats: The Considerations for Entering a New, Global Market

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:24:22 GMT

With technology making it possible to communicate with people all over the world, companies are looking for ways to reach new markets. One way to do this is through advancements in localization. Localization automation tools make it easy to translate your marketing materials into different languages, making it easier than ever to connect with new audiences. By using localization automation tools, you can grow your global chats and expand your business in new and exciting ways.

In this Grow Global Chat, Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt talks with GoTo's Chief Marketing Officer Jamie Domenici about the challenges facing translation localization, how to grow into new markets across the globe and what key metrics and measures you should consider for global CMOs.

"I think that global expansion is hard. You have to invest to grow. But, I also think global expansion is a key growth vector for our company," Domenici said. "We are global, but how we drive more through international is where we have more opportunities."

Domenici walks through GoTo's global localization process, looking both at the current landscape of localization and translation and what might be ahead.

You'll learn:

How to grow into new markets across the globe.
The challenges facing translation and localization and how to move forward, both now and in the future.
How to navigate digital transformation from a c-suite perspective.
What key metrics and measures to consider for global CMOs.
How to create a localization process, including finding an LSP and tech stack to work more efficiently.

Grow Global Chats: The Future of Localization Automation

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 18:20:55 GMT

As localization automation becomes more sophisticated and commonplace, the future of this technology is increasingly important to consider. With its ability to streamline processes and improve accuracy, localization automation has the potential to revolutionize how businesses approach translation. But what will the future hold for this growing field?

In this Grow Global Chat, Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt talks with Oralce's Vice President of Marketing Heike Neumann about the current localization landscape and how automation is changing the game for companies globally.

"[With localization automation], our time to market got significantly shortened. We shortened from about 8 to 12 weeks for localized campaigns going to market, to 2 weeks. And that is significant. Especially if you want to consider the customer experience aspect with that. Which enabled us to launch campaigns simultaneously in a variety of languages," Neumann said. "What it does is it is a courtesy to the people who are speaking this language. That you are coming out at the time in the same language they prefer."

Watch the full discussion below!

Grow Global Chats: How Localization Automation is Changing Marketing

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 18:21:37 GMT

In this Grow Global Chat, Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt talks with ServiceNow's Director of Marketing Localization Mariëtte Pepping about the current localization landscape and how automation is changing the game for companies across the world.

"I could see it was time to scale. I saw there was a great opportunity to centralize that experience, that task of translating source materials that were mostly created, and still are created in U.S. English., to directly translate it to all regions at one time in order to get that perfect customer experience that we all want to give to our customers," Pepping said. "If you think about the whole journey of the customer that they go through, to make that seamless in any language that we serve [was my goal]."

Pepping walks through localization at ServiceNow, looking both at the current landscape of localization automation and what might be ahead.

You'll learn:

How to build a localization team and how to work with other teams and key stakeholders in your localization efforts
The challenges facing translation and localization and how to move forward both now and in the future
How to create a localization process, including finding an LSP and tech stack to work more efficiently
What to consider to get consistent quality and results from your company's localization projects

Happy International Women's Day!

amanda.lee@cloudwords.com (Amanda Lee) — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 22:15:00 GMT

Happy International Women’s Day! Today, we want to celebrate all the female leaders we know who are breaking new ground and bringing their companies to greater levels of success! We hope you’ll join us in congratulating them.

Mariana Prado Cogan, SVP of Marketing at PTC.

With her persistent push to grow bigger and better, Mariana Prado Cogan’s leadership has sped up PTC’s marketing pipeline, allowing PTC to expand their marketing efforts into new regions. After Mariana and her team transformed their 12-week, manual localization process into a fully automated process, she and her team are now able to leverage their new 2-week publication speed to launch 20 emails in 7 languages every month. It’s an achievement that truly befits the director of the team that won our Operational Excellence award. Watch Mariana’s fireside chat to learn more about the three elements she has learned are key to building a digital global strategy.

Mariëtte Pepping, Sr. Manager of Digital Marketing Localization at ServiceNow

Spearheading the localization effort at ServiceNow is Mariëtte Pepping, who has been tirelessly expanding her company’s marketing reach to now support 22 languages worldwide. What we especially admire about Mariëtte is her relentless dedication to driving alignment within ServiceNow, by constantly communicating about their process so every team understands their goals and action items. Mariëtte also supports fellow marketers embarking on their localization journeys, by helping to build a community where marketers can share their experiences. Watch Mariëtte talk about internal alignment, and download her slide deck explaining localization now.

Melinda Hansell, Director of Digital Marketing at F5 Networks.

The winner of our Global Leadership Award, Melinda Hansell recognized F5’s need for localization, due to their lack of clear oversight regarding the process. Under her guidance, F5 created a role specifically for managing localization automation and hired more in-country consultants. Michael Meinhardt, CEO of Cloudwords, said of Melinda during the Awards, “[Melinda] has absolutely reimagined how [F5] has gone to market globally, both in EMEA and APAC, and she’s definitely passionate about bringing optimization and automation to her entire MarTech stack.” Hear from Melinda herself about F5’s localization evolution.

Jane Faraola, Solutions Program Manager at Cisco

Jane Faraola leverages localization automation to translate Cisco’s content into 30 languages. Thanks to Jane’s commitment to demystifying localization automation and building internal alignment, her team is able to handle a workload that has grown by 95%, and increase their number of supported languages with a smaller budget and staff. Check out Jane’s Grow Global Chat to learn how she approaches internal alignment, and the metrics she thinks are most crucial for localization automation success.

Melinda Hansell’s Inside Scoop on F5’s Localization Transformation

jazzlyn.venkataya@cloudwords.com (Jazzlyn Venkataya) — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 17:30:00 GMT

Recently, Melinda Hansell, Director of Digital Marketing at F5, shared her insights and learnings from F5’s Localization Transformation Initiative. Melinda kicked off the Grow Global Chat webinar by diving straight into problems, solutions, and results around her experience with globalization automation.

The Problem: A Manual translation process did not allow efficient website localization.

For F5 to achieve more internal business alignment around localization, Melinda recognized that her team needed more visibility from LSPs. She described it felt like they were "flying blind" when it came to understanding SLAs and the progress around their translation process.

Previous Translation Process Obstacles:

Localization team couldn't easily adjust and edit translated content
Translation process was manual and did not have the ability to plug in with an API
Lack of communication with LSPs around project problems

"All these challenges added up to make us unable to execute on the translation pieces we needed to do on the website ... Much less help anyone else through the organization with translation needs."

Solution: F5 implemented Cloudwords for an automated process with LSPs, approvals and delivery of content.

New localization process included:

Prioritized the involvement of the countries/regions they were localizing to by hiring local workers in the international market
Created a job role solely for managing F5’s localization process
Chose LSPs that integrated with Cloudwords who furthered the new automated process

Result: Increased conversion rates, number of projects, and speed to market.

This new translation process exposed that translated content creating better results in international markets. This led to gaining support around localization efforts in addition to increasing conversion rates, number of projects, and speed to market.

Overall Outcomes:

Closer to a single language seamless experience
Faster video caption, form, and web page translations
Stronger conversion rates

ServiceNow’s Localization Business Plan Framework

jazzlyn.venkataya@cloudwords.com (Jazzlyn Venkataya) — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 18:00:00 GMT

The January Grow Global Chat starred Mariëtte Pepping, Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing Localization at ServiceNow! Mariëtte has worked 10+ years in digital marketing and is a strong localization automation advocate. Throughout her chat with Michael Meinhardt, CEO and founder of Cloudwords, Mariëtte explains 3 main tips she has learned from her experience around globalization automation. In case you missed this GGC, click HERE to watch the replay!

Localization Business Plan Framework:

Create a Localization Hybrid Model: At ServiceNow, Mariëtte strives for a hybrid model between content creation and leveraging that content locally.

- This model allows international regions to be involved with local review process
- Workers living in the country that is being localized are closest to customers - they will know the customer the best!
- Localizing the content will create an easier workflow for these regions so they don’t have to start from scratch

Country Experience: Mariëtte emphasizes the importance of prioritizing the country experience in addition to the language experience when translating content.

- Misconception around translating one language the same way for different countries (U.S. content should not be the same as U.K. content)
- Same-language speaking countries markets and cultural experience differ so translations should reflect these differences

Gain Internal Alignment: Mariëtte emphasized the importance of gaining internal business alignment and shared her very own “Business Plan Framework” deck.

- Explain localization terminology so everyone is on the same page

- Tie it all back to revenue - show data that fiscally supports localization efforts
  - Highlight revenue from international markets
  - Tie back how you can reach revenue goals through localization

- Emphasize an automated process is easier and more effective for international teams
- Outline the goal of content localization and what the creation process looks like
- Remind the team that localization improves the customer experience and will create a stronger relationship with international markets and improve net promoter score!

Download Mariëtte’s "Localization Business Plan Framework.”

Cloudwords loved having Mariëtte on the Grow Global Chats and can’t wait to see all that she and her team will continue to accomplish.

Watch the replay HERE.

Grow Global Chats: The Journey from Now to Next with Microsoft

jazzlyn.venkataya@cloudwords.com (Jazzlyn Venkataya) — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:30:00 GMT

Recently Michael Meinhardt, Cloudwords CEO and founder, and Ryan Schroeder, Senior Engineering Program Manager at Microsoft, sat down for a Grow Global Chat. Microsoft is the 2020 Cloudwords Global Scale Award winner, with Ryan and his team setting the tone for localizing vast quantities of content at high speeds. Ryan shared his experience with roadblocks, key solutions, and results from Microsoft's localization automation journey.

Roadblocks prior to Cloudwords:

Could not accurately scale content around the world in a timely fashion
Manual process allowed small mistakes to break down workflows
Slow time to market - translated content became outdated

Ryan explained that the “Global demand center team was in a position where it was taking up to 6 months to launch a new campaign… Localization was slow as well and it was painful. So there was absolutely no agility in the content that we were delivering to our customers. Review process was a pain point.”

Due to how fragile the localization process was, Ryan’s team needed tools that are efficient, scalable, and reliable.

Key Solutions:

Implemented Cloudwords for a centralized and automated localization process
Standardized on Marketo platform
Shifted content to become neutralized so marketers could easily globalize content
Secured executive sponsorship around localization efforts
Created strong partnership with LSPs

Results with Cloudwords:

Supports 100 markets all over the world
Manages workflow of content requests in a predictable matter on a “sprint cadence”
Created a more cohesive brand/voice that accurately represents Microsoft
Obtained 100% field review participation rate - WOW!

“Everybody is in on the localization platform … We get basically a 100% participation on our field reviews through the global demand center.”

Increases engagement with local field level by content going through central system
Produces a more efficient and centralized review process with a faster content production time

Cloudwords loved having Ryan on the Grow Global Chats and we can’t wait to see all that Microsoft and Cloudwords will accomplish together in the upcoming years. Make sure to watch the GGC full replay to learn about Microsoft’s localization journey from now to what’s ahead.

Grow Global Awards Recap

jazzlyn.venkataya@cloudwords.com (Jazzlyn Venkataya) — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 18:41:00 GMT

Yes it is time to Celebrate! The Grow Global Awards brought together the top companies in the world who are rocking the international market. Grow Global showcased how powerful the globalization automation community is and all that our Cloudwords customers are achieving. We loved hearing from our amazing guest speakers Rob Bernsteyn, CEO of Coupa and Mariana Prado Cogan, SVP Marketing for PTC in addition to our Grow Global Awards host, Michael Meinhardt, CEO of Cloudwords. The virtual event covered how to prioritize community intelligence as a business standard, what global digital business processes should look like, a Cloudwords road map, and all of our outstanding award finalists and winners.

Click to watch the event replay and see the Grow Global slide deck here!

The Grow Awards kicked off with Michael Meinhardt, CEO of Cloudwords, walking through the last ten years of Cloudwords’ journey, in addition to a ten year Cloudwords roadmap. Michael explains that in the last ten years Cloudwords has seen our positive impact by empowering customers to meet their global financial, quantity and speed benchmarks. Next, Michael introduced that Cloudwords has many product advancements including AI integration, higher scalability, and exposure to the world's largest database.

Next up was keynote speaker, Rob Bernsteyn. Rob highlighted how important it is now, more than ever, for companies to be looking out for their customers’ and partners’ interests with a community mindset. Rob compares a neighborhood watch to the type of community that needs to be cultivated in a world with so much unpredictability. He believes businesses should lean on each other by sharing insights with each other, in addition to directly communicating with customers what is in their best interest. Rob concludes that having a community-driven business and being exposed to more perspectives and resources leads to gaining a competitive advantage by becoming more operationally efficient.

Afterwards, Mariana Prado Cogan took the stage and tapped into her personal journey with PTC becoming a global powerhouse in addition to three key elements she believes is essential in running a digital global process. Mariana shares that she was born in Mexico and grew up in Japan, and believes her international exposure has contributed to her global awareness and success in international business. Mariana then explained how PTC started to expand into each global region and what this process looked like. Lastly, Mariana presented and dove deeper into describing the three key elements to running a digital process:

1) Be customer centric

2) Align with the business strategy

3) Scalability

Finally, Michael Meinhardt announced all of the Grow Global Award winners! Huge congratulations to all the finalists and winners below!

Team Awards Winners:

Global Scale Award: Delivers impact on a global scale
Winner: Microsoft
Finalists: Microsoft, Agilent Technologies, Mouser Electronics

Rising Star Award: Showcases speed to value with globalization automation
Winner: Splunk
Finalists: Splunk, BNY Mellon, Southco, and Sandvik

Operational Excellence Award: Change maker in driving speed to impact
Winner: PTC
Finalists: Cisco, Aruba Networks, Armstrong, PTC

Revenue Impact: Turns global automation into high revenue results
Winner: NVIDIA
Finalists: Microsoft, F5 Networks, NVIDIA, and Power Integrations

Global Excellence Award: High impact team delivers combination of scale, speed, and revenue impact globally.
Winner: Google
Finalists: Amazon, Google, UL, Merck

Individual Awards Winners:

Global Fast Mover Award: Marketing Operations Leader driving Automation Globally
Winner: Aimee Smith

Global Leadership Award: Marketing Executive Leader driving Global Impact
Winner: Melinda Hansell

Partner Award Winners:

Outstanding EMEA LSP Award:
Winner: RWS Moravia
Finalists: Cisco, Aruba Networks, Armstrong, PTC

Outstanding Global LSP Award:
Winner: Lionbridge
Finalists: Lionbridge, RWS Moravia, and Welocalize

Outstanding APAC LSP Award:
Winner: EC Innovations
Finalists: Kawamura, Pactera EDGE, and EC Innovations

Outstanding Systems Integrator Award:
Winner: Accenture

Thank you again to all of our amazing speakers, customers, and partners who came to the Grow Global Awards! Congratulations to all of our award finalists and winners. Watch the event replay here.

Ready, Set, Localize - Top Takeaways from the Uberflip and Cloudwords Webinar

amanda.lee@cloudwords.com (Amanda Lee) — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 19:45:00 GMT

Recently, Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt and Uberflip Product Marketing Manager Rahim Lalani hosted a webinar to introduce the new Uberflip-Cloudwords integrated solution, which allows Uberflip users to seamlessly manage the localization process through the Cloudwords platform, before smoothly moving back to the Uberflip platform.

The Uberflip-Cloudwords experience will make the localization process much more simple. “A lot of companies we talk to, perhaps even Uberflip customers prior to obviously having this great integration with Cloudwords, were living in a copy and paste world,” Michael says. “Literally copy and pasting out of Uberflip, which frankly, can be quite slow and tedious without automation baked in.” With the Uberflip-Cloudwords integration, all of the localized content is automatically synced from Cloudwords to Uberflip.

As Cloudwords brings automation to the table, customers will also find that their translation management process can be easily handled within one system, including selecting their preferred translation resources, discussing project specific detail, and reviewing localized content. “I’m sure we’re all very familiar with the multi-tab spreadsheets, trying to track a global product launch or a global marketing launch, and ultimately communicating and engaging with those people through email or various phone calls,” Michael says. Cloudwords’ solution completely streamlines the process.

Rahim says the challenges of localizing content were addressed by developers with thoughtful solutions in the Uberflip-Cloudwords integration. “I think [these challenges are] really the driving force why some of the features we’ve created in the integration are so important from a strategic perspective,” he says.

A successful global content strategy requires making localization a priority, as Michael says. “These global brands absolutely view localization as a strategic imperative. It’s thought of at the beginning of their process, not at the end. These companies also understand that their future customers are 8 times more likely to engage with them when they see their content in their native language.”

Furthermore, integrating automation allows global companies to exponentially increase the speed at which they publish and localize content. “We have customers today that are contemplating 50-60 different languages simultaneously, so that’s a ridiculous scale, and now we’re seeing companies getting into the 200-300 locale range,” Michael says. “So we’re talking about hyper specific personalization at scale, and those are the things globalization automation can help you achieve.”

The future of Cloudwords and Uberflip’s partnership looks bright, as Michael says the integration will help more companies expand the reach of their content engagement in international markets, and promises to continue building on the integration in the future. “As we continue to evolve, as a platform and integration, we’ll absolutely be reaching out to our joint customers that are leveraging the automation and finding ways to continually improve the integration we’ve built today. So, I’m very excited about what we have so far, but certainly encouraged with where we’re going with it in the future as well.”

Previewing the Grow Global Awards

amanda.lee@cloudwords.com (Amanda Lee) — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 15:15:00 GMT

As Cloudwords commemorates our tenth anniversary, we are bringing together our global community of customers and partners to celebrate! On September 24, Cloudwords will hold our first-ever Grow Global Awards and bring together industry leaders and rising newcomers from all around the world in a truly global jubilee.

Our CEO and founder, Michael Meinhardt will host this virtual event, and announce the winners of the eleven awards we will be presenting to individual trailblazers, outstanding marketing teams, and stellar localization service providers. Watch our social channels to learn who are the finalists of our five team categories: the Global Scale award, Rising Star award, Revenue Impact award, Operational Excellence Award, and Global Excellence award.

Then, we’ll move to a fireside chat with Rob Bernshteyn, Chairman and CEO of Coupa Software. Rob will share insights from his new book, “Smarter Together: How Communities Are Shaping the Next Revolution in Business,” And, all attendees will receive a copy of the Smarter Together book!

After Rob’s presentation, Mariana Prado Cogan, SVP of Marketing at PTC, will talk about marketing and the globalization industry, especially her years of experience with global marketing and dedication in transforming PTC’s digital outreach. Mariana will also advise how to organize internal marketing teams around globalization goals, discuss lessons she’s learned over the years and preview her future goals for global marketing.

From the whole Cloudwords team, we want to thank you all for your contributions and partnership as we traveled the path from beginning as a rising startup to becoming the premier globalization automation platform. The past ten years have been an amazing journey for us. As we look back to where we began, the growth that we, our customers, and our partners, have made, is honestly remarkable. We’ll definitely be cherishing the lessons we’ve learned, and memories we’ve made as we move forward into a new decade.

We’re counting down the days until September 24th. Register for the Grow Global Awards. And keep an eye on our social media channels, we have more fun announcements and surprises waiting in the wings.

Globalization Automation Transforms Mouser Electronics

amanda.lee@cloudwords.com (Amanda Lee) — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 16:00:00 GMT

Once again, we had a stellar Ask Michael Anything webinar with Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt and the Globalization Expert, Aimee Smith of Mouser Electronics. Michael and Aimee chatted about the absolute need, benefits, and results of globalization automation in International Business.

Click here to watch Michael and Aimee answer a live Q&A about their experience and their advice with localization.

As the sole marketing automation manager at Mouser Electronics, a global distributor of electronic components, Aimee Smith juggles marketing content for 27 global locations and 19 languages. For her, globalization automation is an absolute must-have for working with marketing teams and customers worldwide. “It’s helped us localize and get the right languages to our customers, to make sure our customers get the sense we are a company right in their backyard,” she says. “Even though our corporate headquarters is in Texas, we want our customers to have that same feeling that if they’re in Munich, they’re going to get good service, because they’ve got things in their language.”

Before Mouser began integrating marketing automation tools into their communication processes, Aimee says translations were slow and very manual. “We previously had to pick and choose what languages we needed to translate in, and decide where we were going to get the biggest bang for our buck in translating for each region.” Issues such as the inability to track project status, lack of clarity on translation investment and spending, and cut-and-paste translations all contributed to Mouser’s dire need for an automated process. As Mouser began investing in marketing automation tools, Aimee explains that they became a Cloudwords customer early on due to the integration functionality.

Now, six years later, Mouser has shrunk their approval timeline, reduced their marketing costs, and exponentially increased output. “[Mouser] execute[s] anywhere between 40-50 emails per month, with about 20 landing pages that go with these different campaigns,” Aimee says, “Before Cloudwords, we were looking at three weeks to go through a translation process— trying to send these emails back and forth, find your translator, get it reviewed— well, now, our process is streamlined; the max is six days.”

Ultimately, Aimee champions the belief that the best way to connect with customers is through content localization. “We found that if we can localize it, make it in their language, make them feel like you’re listening to me— you can help me speak my language— then you’re going to get better engagement.”

Victory LAP part two; an Insider's Perspective

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:10:30 GMT

After nearly a decade in the localization services arena, I’m excited to move to the technology side of the industry and provide an "insider's perspective" on Steven's colorful Victory LAP blog posted last week.

As a customer advocate, passionate about creating the right solution for each client, my ability to align true customer-focused solutions with my sales teams has always been contradicted by the need to drive services revenue as an LSP. Enter Cloudwords and our services-agnostic approach to enhancing customer experience through connectivity, via our Global Demand Automation Platform!

It’s been readily apparent to me for a number of years that a platform like Cloudwords bridges a critical gap that isn't covered by traditional service providers or TMS technology. Focusing on the Experience and ROI, through direct connectivity to enterprise content platforms, aligns to the goals of global corporations. The ability to reach global markets quickly is critical to driving revenue growth, but isn’t effectively addressed by legacy service provider portals and TMS’s which focus on services and down-stream localization processes - the "black-box" in global marketing initiatives.

Eliminating the need to leave enterprise platforms to launch campaigns and content is critical to accelerating brand awareness. Being able to initiate multilingual projects, campaigns, and assets quickly, track progress, and continue with other mission-critical marketing initiatives insures in-market momentum is maintained. Cloudwords is dedicated to allowing marketers to position sales campaigns and content and shift focus to time-to-revenue.

Cloudwords’ continuously developed platform enhances user experience and allows companies to focus on their brand rather than the process. Cloudwords’ Experiences provide integrated visibility and control of content assets directly from the platforms designed to increase global brand awareness. In a rapidly expanding service industry, technology is critical to driving global success and increasing product visibility while decreasing timelines. It’s no secret; traditional services-based providers consider technology investments as a short-term focus and a way to get to the “win” of selling their core services.

I’m excited and proud to be joining the team at Cloudwords, and look forward to working with clients on a best-of-breed approach. Helping each client architect the right solution, focused on a combination of technology to complement their preferred service partners, is the passion that has driven my continued involvement in the localization industry!

Kevin Benson
Head of Sales
Cloudwords

Cloudwords University - Enroll Now

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 09:21:51 GMT

Cloudwords, the leading provider of localization automation software and solutions, has partnered with Marvel Marketers to develop and deliver a new training and certification program.

Modeled after Marvel Marketers’ Professor M’s Academy, which created the industry’s first-ever advanced Marketo training, Cloudwords University will provide new courses, a new certification exam, and new certification opportunities in a variety of specializations.

Vendor Training & Certification

This certification is designed for the Localization Project Manager who wants to expand their professional career and certify their knowledge of Cloudwords. These modules and certification will give you a complete understanding and proficiency of the Cloudwords platform from a translation professional perspective.

Customer Training & Certification (Coming Summer 2019)

This certification has been developed for the marketing professional who wants to further and enhance their career from a global perspective. These modules and certification will give you a complete understanding and proficiency of the Cloudwords platform from a global marketing professional perspective.

Internationalizing Email templates - Removing web development as a bottleneck

matthew@cloudwords.com (Matthew Jackowski) — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 09:14:22 GMT

When building internationalized email campaigns, it’s natural that web developers want to be involved in creating every version for each language. This allows the developer to ensure the visual quality of the email. However, the downside to a development heavy approach is that it can greatly affect the velocity of getting these emails sent. Many teams that follow this type of process find themselves blocked by developers availability.

Here’s an example scenario. Say I’m doing a summer promotion for the US and EMEA. I’ll want to have at least 3 to 6 different languages. Assuming I have my English version ready to go in the beginning of July, I’ll need to get the versions in other languages completed. Once I get my translations back from the translators, now I need web developers. But let's say I didn’t schedule this work months in advance like the developers like, so they try to fit it in. In this example I’m lucky I only wait a week (a “sprint” in development terms). But now they realize that they can’t fit in all languages in one Sprint so it will take two. I’m now about 3 weeks out, which is still “ok”. It’s mid August now, so a summer promotion is works. But now I find out that while the development has been completed, there is still additional testing that needs to be completed. And, oops, there’s a bug found, my email goes back to development. At this point it’s August now, no point in sending a summer campaign, so I decide to cancel the whole promotion.

A different approach is needed. And that approach is streamlining this process using cloud-based automation software. Instead of treating every language as a separate development effort, cloud automation tools allow us build the template in advance then we can focus on content and translations when we are building our campaign. With this approach the different languages simply change the visual layout of the content using well-defined styling. It’s important to note that this process doesn’t remove the web development concerns. Instead we shift the building and testing of the templates well *before* the email campaign. Then all I need to wait for it the translations on my final copy and I’m ready to send my summer campaign in the summer!

It’s important that the automation software you use has the capability to support this type of process. Here are some key features that you can look for that help to enable this process.

In-context review, you will still need to check your email for quality purposes, your cloud automation software should enable this check by a regional marketing representative.
character limitation support, every design will have its limits, its important to have a tool that helps the translators by giving them parameters around the text they are creating.
direct integration with your email tool, a lot of time gets wasted copying and pasting emails from system to system, instead modern tools should support creating localized emails automatically for you without the manual steps.

Contenders and pretenders - We care how people use our technology

matthew@cloudwords.com (Matthew Jackowski) — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 16:30:00 GMT

Let’s face it, localizing a large web site or marketing campaign for an enterprise company is a challenging endeavor. In any localization process, especially in a big company, there are often many people who get involved. To complicate matters, there are teams that don’t use the same tools and technology. This results in frustrating discussions like “I didn’t get the file you emailed me” or “I don’t have access to the right system”. Though these types of issues are easy to fix, where people and roles change frequently, they tend to happen repeatedly.

In order to address these types of simple, but continually repeated challenges, many translation agencies developed “connectors”. A connector replaces the method used to transfer content. For manual localization flows this is often email or even copy/pasting from the desktop. The problem that arises from these “connectors”, is that they do this by hiding details from the user. “If” they work, life is great, but when they do not work, users have little to no detail what to do or how to fix the problem. Unfortunately this approach has led to many people to be distrustful of technology solutions. I consider these solutions to be “pretenders”, meaning, on the surface they attempt to offer a quick fix, but once you actually try to use it, it simply doesn’t work or scale with your business process.

To avoid this situation a completely different approach is required. Instead of connecting systems in a simple way, it's critical to take into account the user's experience. The type of solution that leads to a fuller, “experience” to enable people to work effectively, empower them to make decisions and ultimately, allow them to reach their goals.

To be a “contender” means that you aren’t simply trying to replace an email workflow or an old FTP server. Instead, I lead a team at Cloudwords where we are focused on building rich experiences that include features such as in-context review, group collaboration, and notifications across over 40 different content systems.

At Cloudwords, our engineering team engages in deep customer development and strives to take into account the experience of our customer, including their translators, with our growing number of customer experiences.

There are a few very specific ways that we distinguish our approach to engineering design versus the “pretenders”.

We don’t “reinvent” localization technologies or terminology used by translation services. Instead our engineers are intimately familiar with standard specifications from the industry. This includes files and file formats (so, for example, we don’t define our own proprietary version of XLIFF).
We integrate with existing internationalization practices in the content system. For example, most modern content management systems natively support multi-language content, so we leverage this support in our integrations. This enables our customers to use all the native functions and features of that system.
We understand that there isn’t a “single” approach to building rich experiences with various content systems. Many “pretenders” build solutions that use proxies or browser plugins as a “shortcut” because this approach benefits the technology provider more than the customer.

Our goal at Cloudwords is to reduce the localization process friction and improve the complete supply chain from content requested to localization and back to the source content system. Rather than attempting to hide technical details in a connector, our goal is to enable our customers with deep and easy-to-use experiences that help them make better business decisions and improve the global conversation with their customers - in any language.

Translations and marketing segmentation - How to leverage language in your email campaigns

matthew@cloudwords.com (Matthew Jackowski) — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 16:30:00 GMT

Marketing segmentation for emails is difficult to get “right”. When you add multilingual content into the mix it gets even harder. One of the biggest pitfalls, however, is confusing language codes for marketing segmentation. In this blog post I’m going to talk about why these should be treated differently and offer some strategies for dealing with them.

So let’s start with a simple fact: languages are not countries. We often “confuse” country and language and treat them as the same. While there are many cases where is a “safe” assumption, there are many where it is not. In the US alone there is over 30 million Spanish speakers, its pretty clear that targeting everyone in the US “segment” with English content is going to lead poor engagement. This is the first part of the problem; split out language segments separately from geographic locations.

Next fact: Languages are standardized while segmentation is made up. In order to ease translation, languages are assigned a specific set of codes, these are often referred to as locale code. These codes are important to translators. They help the translators to determine exactly what language you are asking for. Conversely your segmentation doesn’t have to follow the same rigor. In fact it’s fairly common to see a single geographic segment actually have multiple languages. Often this leads well intentioned marketers to make up new codes. Going back to our example in the US where you are targeting Spanish speakers. It might make sense to have a es-US marketing segment to represent this segment, but avoid sending this code to the translator. Instead tell them the standardized language code you want (probably es-MX).

Hopefully you are convinced that marketing segment and language should be treated differently, so now lets look at a couple approaches that gets the right language to the right segment and results in higher engagement.

Keep a “mapping” of language locale code to each segment. If you think about it, every email *has* to have a single language (well there are cases for bilingual content, but thats a topic for another blog post). Because of this we can map every segment to a language. Now this approach might be a bit redundant because most of your segments might be the same. So build your mapping in the manner that keeps it simple to update and refer (ie only include non-English mappings for example). Also include a designation in the segment name so that you know that you should refer to the mapping.
Separate the content from the email segmentation to allow language to be independently associated. In this solution we don’t *have* to make language segments (unless we want to). Instead language can be determined by the subscribers information and our email templates fetch the associated language content. I like this solution because now we can use language locale codes and not have to worry about impacting our segmentation design. However for this solution to work our email templates need to become *smart* since they need to handle fetching the right language.

At Cloudwords, our customers use many different segmentation strategies. So we are accustom to supporting large enterprises marketing around the globe. That’s why its critical that we don’t act as a cloud service provider, but also as a partner. This ensures our customers are always well supported whatever approach they take.

Localization at "scale" using headless content management.

matthew@cloudwords.com (Matthew Jackowski) — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 16:30:00 GMT

Publishing content is changing. This is not a new statement since due to the Internet and social media the WAY content is consumed has been changing for quite some time. Unfortunately the “backend” of how content is created and managed has not seen much change. Many content management solutions have not changed much in recent years. Most content management systems still heavily rely on a relational database backend coupled with a front-end technology to publish web pages. This poses a challenge when you are attempting to manage multilingual content in these systems. More over having content at scale means dealing with multiple teams located in different countries around the world.

One solution is the evolution towards “headless” content systems. With a headless content management system, it only holds the content and media assets. Other components such as design layout, presentation and front-end templates are not included. Instead the content is “published” via API data services.

The benefit with this approach for developing multilingual web pages is that now you can de-couple the content creation and translation from front-end development. So, for example, translators can work directly on the text and image assets. But the development of the language specific pages can be handled by a regional team on a separate regional site. The headless content system acts as the central repository for all forms of content.

Here’s a more specific example. Say you were in a country that had certain regulations with regard to the languages that content was published in. Your website is required to have both English and French versions. With traditional content management the team that handles building the English content is often tasked with the french as well. Since it uses the same platform. Often this means a lot of development repetition and often the primary focus it put on the English pages with the French as just a simple translation as an after thought. With a headless system, you simply supply the developers with your APIs so you can give each team content filtered based on the language. Now the English and French can be handled by two different teams! Not only does this means to can run parallel language projects, but you can also ensure that each language gets the best focus and attention from developers.

At scale, when you are dealing with a large organization with many business units, this becomes even more important. In these cases you will want to separate out content not just by language but also by region. There are a few reasons why separating by region is important, but probably the biggest reason is due to regulatory requirements. Recent laws like the GDPR have forced online companies build region specific sites, or downgrade aspects of all of their sites. Having a site located in the region which follows the local regulations is a huge benefit to this approach.

At Cloudwords, we encourage the “headless” content approach. This approach represents many of the localization best practices we have been recommending to our customers for years. Cloudwords integrates directly with "headless" content management and provides the rich user experience features, like in-context review, that you would expect from a traditional approach.

Cloudwords and ON24 Establish Global Partnership

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 13:00:00 GMT

New commitment to joint marketing brings Cloudwords to Webinar World 2019, a global series of events presented by ON24

SAN FRANCISCO, CA., March 12, 2019 -- Cloudwords , the leading provider of
localization automation software and solutions, has established a global co-marketing
relationship with ON24 , the technology leader helping companies create live, always-on and
personalized digital experiences. . This new relationship will bring Cloudwords to ON24’s
marquee customer and partner event, Webinar World 2019 in three cities, San
Francisco, Sydney and London. Webinar World kicks-off in San Francisco today and
concludes on March 13th, Webinar World Sydney takes place May 2, 2019 and
Webinar World London is from October 1st - 2nd, 2019.

"ON24 has built an incredibly loyal global customer and partner base over the last 20
years, so partnering with them for Webinar World was a no-brainer" said Michael
Meinhardt, CEO of Cloudwords. "30% of the Cloudwords customer base leverages
ON24 for critical webinar and content experience activities and our joint vision is
completely aligned on the global enterprise customer. I am personally very excited to
watch this relationship continue to grow."

“Our mission at ON24 is to help marketers across the globe create data-driven digital
experiences that resonate with their audience,” said Lou Pelosi, VP of Business
Development and Partnerships, ON24. “Cloudwords is a critical partner for
realizing that goal, making it possible to localize webinars and content at scale.
Together, we’re innovating the way marketers engage with worldwide audiences, and
enabling them to turn that engagement into revenue.”

If you are attending Webinar World 2019 San Francisco, Sydney or London, stop by the
Cloudwords booth to receive your free offer! Our team will be ready to answer any of
your global localization automation questions.

About Cloudwords:
Cloudwords unleashes powerful project management capabilities to speed time to
market for global campaigns and localized content at scale. By connecting marketing
systems and automating project workflow, Cloudwords eliminates time-consuming tasks
and delivers unprecedented visibility into the localization process. With Cloudwords,
marketers realize the global value of their marketing technology stack, enabling the
delivery of more personalized content, in more languages, to more customers at a
speed and quality impossible to achieve with manual processes. Visit
www.cloudwords.com to learn how global brands like Amazon Web Services, CA
Technologies, and Palo Alto Networks use Cloudwords. Headquartered in San
Francisco, Cloudwords is backed by Storm Ventures, UMC Capital and Marc Benioff,
founder of salesforce.com .

CONTACT: Michael Meinhardt, michael@cloudwords.com

About ON24, Inc.
ON24 is on a mission to redefine how organizations engage with their audiences,
powering interactive, data-rich webinars and content experiences that help people
connect on a more human level and make smarter business decisions. Through the
ON24 Platform, marketers can create live, always on, and personalized digital
experiences, understand audience behavior and turn that intelligence into action.
Informed by more than a billion engagement minutes -- including 12 million polls, 1.3
million surveys, 1.5 million conversations, and conversion of over 17 million resources --
marketers drive more revenue from ON24 webinars than any other digital channel.
Headquartered in San Francisco, ON24 has a wide global footprint with eight offices in
key regions, including London, Munich, Singapore, Stockholm and Sydney. For more
information, visit www.on24.com .

CONTACT: Keith Chapman, keith@chappublicrelations.com

Bluprint

michael@cloudwords.com (Michael Meinhardt) — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 09:15:00 GMT

Cloudwords Expands into Europe with New Customer Success team and Partnership with BluprintX

New customer success team in Europe will support a growing list of customers and certified partners

SAN FRANCISCO, CA., March 5, 2019 -- Cloudwords, the leading provider of localization automation software and solutions, has expanded into EMEA to continue to develop better relationships with the growing customer, and this initial team will be focused on Customer Success. The majority of Cloudwords daily users are based outside of North America and we proactively built a core team to on-board, enable and support these users on their timezone. In addition to our recent team expansion, we have also partnered with leading EMEA based Martech agency BluprintX, which will enable current and future Cloudwords customers to realize more value in their Marketing Technology strategy and ultimately, Cloudwords, faster.

"As the demand for the Cloudwords platform continues to grow, we need to ensure we have the proper team structure in place, globally," said Michael Meinhardt, CEO of Cloudwords. "This new Customer Success team, which will be based in the UK, and our partnership with BluprintX is a massive win for the global enterprise that continues to optimize their global marketing technology stack."

“We are very excited to partner with Cloudwords and help the global enterprise customer, realize their business goals faster.” said Lee Hackett, CEO of BluprintX “BluprintX continues to expand globally, so this new partnership with Cloudwords supports our strategy to become the leading provider of marketing strategy, support and content creation for companies that truly care about optimizing their global go-to-market strategy.

About Cloudwords:

Cloudwords unleashes powerful project management capabilities to speed time to market for global campaigns and localized content at scale. By connecting marketing systems and automating project workflow, Cloudwords eliminates time-consuming tasks and delivers unprecedented visibility into the localization process. With Cloudwords, marketers realize the global value of their marketing technology stack, enabling the delivery of more personalized content, in more languages, to more customers at a speed and quality impossible to achieve with manual processes. Visit www.cloudwords.com to learn how global brands like Amazon Web Services, CA Technologies, and Palo Alto Networks use Cloudwords. Headquartered in San Francisco, Cloudwords is backed by Storm Ventures, UMC Capital and Marc Benioff, founder of salesforce.com.

CONTACT: Michael Meinhardt, michael@cloudwords.com

About BluprintX:

BluprintX is one of the world’s leading authorities in Martech, Salestech and Data use. Our purpose is to make marketers excel in their technology and data use across the globe. We want you to pull every ounce of value out of your investments and change the very heart of your business. We empower you to face the reality of your modern customer and make outstanding returns, because we want you to be the hero in the end.

Venturing out from our headquarters in the UK and offices in the US, Switzerland and the Middle East, our reach truly is global. Our dedicated teams of strategic consultants and certified technicians will focus on transforming your people, processes, technology, data and content, so you’re ready to face this rapidly changing world, fast.

CONTACT: Louise Matthews, louisematthews@technicalmarketing-pr.com

Cloudwords University

michael@cloudwords.com (Michael Meinhardt) — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 11:00:00 GMT

Cloudwords Invests in Customer Success with New Training and Certification Program

A new partnership with Marvel Marketers will enable Cloudwords Champions to enhance their skills and professional experience.

Cloudwords, the leading provider of localization automation software and solutions, has partnered with Marvel Marketers to develop and deliver a new training and certification program.

The advanced curriculum is part of the company's continued investment in customer success and commitment to meet the growing demand for Cloudwords-certified marketers.

Cloudwords for Adobe InDesign

michael@cloudwords.com (Michael Meinhardt) — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 10:10:29 GMT

Tired of reviewing InDesign^® translations in PDF and text documents?

There is an easier, faster way!

Mark-up, edit, and approve your company’s InDesign-based translations directly within
Cloudwords OneReview in-context interface, saving you time, effort, and all without the need to
purchase or learn InDesign^®.

Don’t believe us?
Try Cloudwords for Adobe^® InDesign^® for free for one month. If you love it, keep it!

Building global campaigns with Marketo & Cloudwords

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 18:27:20 GMT

About this Webinar

Global prospects are far more likely to convert to customers when they are engaged through campaigns that are delivered in native languages. This simple ambition of delivering consistent multilingual campaigns often proves an insurmountable challenge for marketers around the world.

Hear how Microsoft leveraged Cloudwords & Marketo to reach customers and prospects in over 100 countries and 30+ Languages. Sending millions of emails globally and reduced end-to-end process to less than 40 days which previously took 2-3 months.

...and we have more success stories to share with you.

Specifically you’ll learn how to:

Eliminate ‘cut & paste’ from your program build
Simplify the process of translation
Increase the ROI for your campaigns

Speakers

Michael Meinhardt
CEO, Cloudwords

Peter Bell
EMEA Marketing Director, Marketo

In partnership with

Cloudwords for Adobe InDesign Offer

michael@cloudwords.com (Michael Meinhardt) — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 14:30:00 GMT

Tired of paying for DTP? There is a better way!

50% off the Cloudwords for InDesign experience!

Cloudwords eliminates the frustrating and slow manual process of saving your InDesign documents as pdfs, such as flyers, brochures, presentations, and ebooks, in order to localize, review and edit them.

Cloudwords at DMEXCO

michael@cloudwords.com (Michael Meinhardt) — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 12:30:00 GMT

On September 12 & 13, DMEXCO will be the central meeting place for all the key players in digital business, marketing and innovation. More than 1,000 companies and over 500 top speakers will be presenting innovative and forward-looking developments and trends.

A 2-day event being held at the Koelnmesse in Cologne, Germany. It's an event where everyone working in digital marketing and media industry gets to meet.

So let's DMEXCO together and discuss how the Cloudwords platform can help your business overcome the scaling challenges of global marketing.

Speaker:

Meet our CEO, Michael Meinhardt
Global Marketing Made Easy - in any language!

GLOBAL BRANDS TRUST CLOUDWORDS

The world’s leading brands and future global brands trust the Cloudwords platform to overcome the scaling challenges of global marketing.

Where do we meet?

Remove Friction from the Customer Experience: Contenders vs Pretenders

matthew@cloudwords.com (Matthew Jackowski) — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 13:56:08 GMT

There are a few very specific ways that we distinguish our approach to engineering design versus the “pretenders”.

1) We don’t “reinvent” localization technologies or terminology used by translation services. Instead our engineers are intimately familiar with standard specifications from the industry. This includes files and file formats (so, for example, we don’t define our own proprietary version of XLIFF).

2) We integrate with existing internationalization practices in the content system. For example, most modern content management systems natively support multi-language content, so we leverage this support in our integrations. This enables our customers to use all the native functions and features of that system.

3) We understand that there isn’t a “single” approach to building rich experiences with various content systems. Many “pretenders” build solutions that use proxies or browser plugins as a “shortcut” because this approach benefits the technology provider more than the customer.

Be Brave. Be Authentic. Deliver Customer Value.

scott.schwalbach@cloudwords.com (Scott Schwalbach) — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 13:00:00 GMT

In the last blog post we wrote about our core values and a renewed focus by the entire organization. We outlined these core values as:

Customer Success First
Excellence in Everything
Results Oriented

We also mentioned trust and that we strive every day to not only earn but build upon that trust with our customers, our partners, and each other. Without our values and the trust we strive to earn, we would not be able to continue to grow as both a company and as individuals.

Your Journey is Our Journey

Our customer journey starts from the very first engagement. Through thoughtful discovery, clear communication, and deference to the unique needs each of our clients brings to the table, we work to understand their ‘why’. From that "why" we work to execute the best integration experiences, best business processes, and best localization process in the industry.

We work with our customers to build automation into their processes. For customers with existing technologies, we strive to understand how you use these systems today and how Cloudwords can best integrate with those systems to help you meet the needs of tomorrow. Through thorough discovery, we document your current processes and work with your team to devise a new process and help put them in action.

As you put new processes in place, the Cloudwords team is there to walk hand in hand to ensure that you are successful. Our Customer Success Managers ensure there are open lines of communication and are empowered to reach out internally to anyone at Cloudwords from CEO to interns, with the goal of Customer Success First.

Partnership in Progress

It’s often cliché for vendors to say “they aren’t just our customer, they are our partner” without actually partnering. For our clients to be successful, we have to be an integral part of that success. For every campaign, our customers rely on Cloudwords to bring their content to market faster with less manual effort.

By providing personalized hands on training to teams across the globe, success with our platform only increases. From Project Requesters to Project Managers, Budget Approvers to Field Marketers, Cloudwords works with customer teams in every timezone. We expand that partnership by working closely with other service providers on training, process, and best practices ensuring a seamless end to end localization process.

Most importantly, we work with our customers to bring new features to the Cloudwords platform. By engaging and partnering with our customers, we can align our roadmap to meet their growth goals and be ready for the next generation of automation and workflows.

Cloudwords – 8 years and Going Strong!

michael@cloudwords.com (Michael Meinhardt) — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 11:57:25 GMT

On the eve of the 8^th year, May 25^th, since starting Cloudwords, I found myself reflecting on the some of the ideas that have helped guide the company since its inception. In short, Cloudwords is in the strongest position the company has ever been – financially, strategically and poised for growth. This is great news for our customers, partners and investors.

We recently refined our company core values at our most recent Quarterly company meeting and I wanted to share them:

Customer Success First
Excellence in Everything
Results Oriented

Customer Success First – every internal business process, code of technology we write and partnerships we develop are focused on putting the customer at the center of our universe.

Excellence in Everything – our teams focus on performing at the highest levels, even when we are tired and it would be easier to take a short cut. We aren’t doing this because it is easy, we do it because we know we are making an impact.

Results Oriented – there are many paths to success and although we enjoy the journey, the only thing that matters are the results – are our customers getting maximum value in our partnership, are our customers reaching their personal goals and finally are our customers better today with Cloudwords than they were yesterday without us.

Cloudwords was founded to help companies create multilingual content – faster, cheaper and at an amazing quality. We’ve continued to execute on this strategy and now are the leading provider of applications to multinational companies who need to develop and maintain multilingual content to better communicate with their global customers.

Customer Experiences vs. Integrations (Connectors)

From the first day of our existence, we knew we needed to make it easier for the teams creating global content to do their jobs, at scale. Over the past 8 years, we’ve developed over 40 integration points into source content systems. These customer experiences lead the industry, which is why the world’s largest brands trust Cloudwords to help them scale their global content business processes.

We have seen a trend in the localization industry where other companies, primarily technology-enabled translation services, have an “integration” into these same systems. On one hand, they too recognize the need to maintain these relationships, but they are building integrations or connectors, that might be functionally correct – meaning some content can flow back/forth – but they miss the point entirely. The point isn’t to create a functionally accurate or technologically correct integration, but to create a customer experience that is easy to use, fast globally and most importantly, scales for with the customers requirements.

A word of warning, don’t be fooled by these imposter “integrations” or “connectors”, nothing in the business world is free. If they are trying to give you these integrations for free, or nearly free, in lieu of using their translation services, rest assured they haven’t spent much energy developing the best possible customer experience. If you find yourself in this type of situation, make them show you “how” it works. Perhaps even take it for a “test drive” yourself. Just remember, find a partner you trust, has delivered across a similar business use-case in the past and be sure to check their references. It is pretty easy to spot the “pretenders” from the “contenders”.

Contenders focus on your business challenges and will help you achieve your goals

Pretenders will make excuses, fail to meet your expectations and ultimately help you miss your goals

Why v. What – Simon is right: focus on the why

The best companies focus on your “Why”, not your “What”. We wake up every morning focusing on helping our customers achieve their own personal “why”. We have a customer today that runs over 2,000 campaigns, across 35 languages – 70,000 campaigns – per month. This is great, but “what” they do is less relevant than “why” they do it. Cloudwords enables these companies to execute the “what”, but we exist because of their “why”. In this case, the “why” for this large multinational company is to drive revenue faster – globally. Our teams are focused on helping our customers realize their own “why” and when we help them execute everyone wins. In the example above, we helped that customer improve their “why” which resulted in an improvement of their global revenue by over 9%. That is 9% of a company that was already doing $100’s of Billions of dollars globally.

Trust – the most valuable currency in the world

Companies do business with companies they trust. People do business with people they trust. Basically the world runs on trust. We strive everyday to continue to earn the trust of the market, our customers and partners. It isn’t always easy, but we always land on the side of the highest integrity. We may not always win every opportunity because of it, but our team knows that in the long-run Cloudwords will continue to lead.

Marketers Helping Marketers: The Underlying Theme at Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit

richard.blatcher@cloudwords.com (Richard Blatcher) — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 17:00:00 GMT

At Marketo’s Marketing Nation user conference, keynote speaker Will Smith’s advice was to always ask, “What can I do to help you succeed?” versus more selfishly thinking, “What’s in it for me?” His message resonated with me as I spoke with our customers at the event, reinforcing my sentiment that marketers are generally encouraging of their peers, and happy to share how they’ve found success, even when they have to first explain how they failed.

The opportunity to spend four days speaking with our customers and learning more about how they use Cloudwords was invaluable. Moreover, the opportunity for customers to speak with each other was beneficial to them because they garnered additional insights about how the platform is leveraged, and had a chance to share global marketing tactics and tips that can only be discussed when both parties use the same technology to address similar challenges. Namely, how to speed and simplify the localization process in order to go-to-market faster.

Launched in 2013, Cloudwords’ integration with Marketo is one of our most popular connectors and used by many of our customers who market to global audiences. In fact, global-facing companies like Microsoft, Hach Company, CA Technologies, and Pentaho presented informative sessions at the Summit this year, sharing how they’ve built a technology stack that incorporates Cloudwords as the “global piece” that enables them to create and deliver multilingual campaigns at scale.

“Cloudwords plugs into Marketo, pulls the assets and puts a workflow around it, then sends content to your translation provider to ensure it’s correct the first time and pushes it back directly into Marketo… One of our favorite technologies that helps us operate at the scale that we do… “ -- Charles Eichenbaum, Microsoft, during his session ‘Building in Marketo for Global Enterprise Scale’

“Cloudwords has been a huge advantage for us in managing the actual translations… A great tool… wonderful to work with, they’ve really partnered with us, listened to what our needs are when it comes to localization so that they’re making our process more effective, managing what could be an insurmountable number of assets, and helping us keep things contained and manageable.” -- Becky Bradberry, Hach Company, during her session ‘Getting Your Global Marketing Teams to Work as One’

We truly appreciate the support of our customers and their willingness to their share experiences. These sessions also sparked a dialogue among customers and other attendees about how speaking to your audience in their preferred native tongue is key to generate demand in regions beyond our borders. But in order to accomplish this task at scale, integration between your marketing automation platform, such as Marketo, and a translation automation platform, like Cloudwords, is essential.

At the Cloudwords booth, visitors had the chance to submit their names in a raffle to win a trip to Europe. I’m pleased to announce the raffle winner: Chelsea Aleckson from Plantronics! Congratulations, Chelsea, I hope you enjoy your vacation!

For more information about how Cloudwords accelerates global go-to-market timelines for Marketo users, and to start a free trial, visit https://www.cloudwords.com/marketo. Let us know how we can help you reach your global marketing goals.

5 Must-See Sessions at Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit

richard.blatcher@cloudwords.com (Richard Blatcher) — Thu, 05 May 2016 19:15:40 GMT

As we prepare to head to Vegas next week for Marketing Nation Summit 2016, Marketo's annual user conference, our team scanned the sessions to select presentations we'd most like to attend. Packed with marketing industry thought leaders, and even celebrities like Will Smith (!), there are certainly plenty of intriguing topics on the agenda.

Here are our top 5 picks:

Building in Marketo for Global Enterprise Scale: Learn How Microsoft Uses Marketo
Tuesday at 3:30pm, Room 306/307
A worldwide market dominator, Microsoft's session is sure to attract both B2B and B2C global marketers interested in leveraging Marketo to manage regional campaigns - tricky for a handful of markets, let alone 100 countries. Arrive early, this workshop has limited seating!

Creating a Platinum Level Event Experience!
Wednesday at 9:30am, Room 311
Event marketing - so much work! But the payoff is worth it if you do it right. Presenters from CA Technologies and Marketo will share how to leverage marketing automation for event success. Leveraging technology to improve efficiency? We're onboard with that.

Do Your Buyers Care What You Have to Say? Building Relevant Dialogues With Your Content
Wednesday at 10:30am, Room 320
Marketing experts from SnapApp, Blackbaud, Cisco, and Pentaho - an impressive line-up - will share their tips to make marketing content stand out with relevant, valuable content that resonates with buyers. (Localization, anyone?)

Customers: The Prospect You've Forgotten
Wednesday at 2:00pm, Room 314/315
Working hard to keep customers happy is one thing, but how does marketing to them help? In addition to potential increased revenue opportunities within the company, customer advocacy and referrals are often the best way to find new prospects. Looking forward to learning more at this session by ReadyTalk.

Getting Your Global Marketing Teams to Work as One
Thursday at 11:30am, Room 320
This topic is certainly near and dear to our hearts: "Perfect for those that want to learn how to bring visibility to content on a global level." Our friends at Hach and Kapost have global experience and insight into creating marketing campaigns at scale. Good stuff.

Don't Miss the Expo Hall
As an event sponsor, our team of global marketing and localization experts will be on-hand at booth #S825 to demonstrate how our platform integrates with Marketo to speed, scale and simplify the localization process so marketers can reach more global markets more frequently. Many of our customers use Cloudwords for Marketo to deliver localized content and campaigns to multilingual audiences worldwide, including Hach, Pentaho, Oanda, Cornerstone OnDemand, Taser International, Anaplan, OKTA, Sherwinn-Williams, Tektronix, and many more. In fact, Marketo is a Cloudwords customer, too. Its web development team uses Cloudwords to localize its global websites. (Read the case study here.)

Did I mention We're Giving Away a Trip to Europe?
Visit our booth and enter the raffle to win a European vacation!

See you in Las Vegas!

First World Problems: 4 Modern Global Marketing Challenges

richard.blatcher@cloudwords.com (Richard Blatcher) — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 18:38:28 GMT

In our modern lives, if you see one of the above icons, it likely causes you a lot of anxiety. We rely on technology in our daily lives so much that the thought of no Internet, or a stalled device,or no cell service, or no battery power, means we’re not digitally connected to the world around us.

As modern marketers, we make a living ensuring our companies are digitally connecting and engaging with our customers—ensuring each touchpoint is personalized and optimized to our audience’s preferences for delivery at the right time and for their device type.

While I can’t solve your daily device and digital connectivity issues, if you’re a global marketer and the following four modern global marketing challenges resonate with you, take a look at the Cloudwords platform and consider how our global marketing solution can considerably reduce your global marketing anxiety!

4 Challenges Leading to Modern Global Marketing Anxiety

1. Too much martech - what are the essentials?

With more than 3,800 marketing technology tools to choose from, it’s overwhelming to think about researching and selecting new solutions to help streamline your stack. Before you buy more, first take a look at what you have and ensure it all works together—who knows, it’s possible you’re not using one or two of the solutions to its full potential. Cloud-based solutions continue to add new capabilities to address customer needs. Chances are, your marketing automation platform can do a lot more for you than just email campaigns.

Second, make a martech blueprint and evaluate the processes associated with each tool. By ensuring three or four integrate and communicate, you’ll be much more efficient. Once you identify a need, be sure the solution you choose will work with your existing stack. With a strategic blueprint in place and using your tech to its fullest potential, you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish with a limited amount of resources. Increased efficiency helps alleviate anxiety!

2. Too much noise - how to make my content relevant?

Thanks to mobile devices and the explosion of apps making everything accessible and available at our fingertips, everything a company publishes online or posts on social media sites is accessible to everyone, everywhere—and that includes audiences around the world. Which is why mobile-friendly, smart, simple messaging is critical. Minimize the marketing jargon, and “humanize” your content so you can talk to your customers clearly and with meaning. Localizing content for target regions further increases engagement—so start with simple messaging that can be easily translated.

3. Running out of time - how to scale?

I’ll start with a recent product example to explain: hoverboards, those wacky two-wheeled riding gadgets, sold like crazy ahead of the holidays. The manufacturers capitalized on global demand and couldn’t sell them fast enough. Of course, we all know what happened next—malfunctioning devices blew up or caused fires, the media covered it extensively, and now sales have slowed or stopped altogether in some regions.

The modern marketing challenge here is that we often have only a small window of opportunity to take advantage of consumer demand. It’s essential to build into our strategy and plans a requirement of agility. Marketers need to be able to act on a dime, to pivot with agility, and implement tactics more quickly when necessary. In our modern economy, three months to get a campaign out the door is too long. The market and the demand will have changed, or worse, your competitor recognized the opportunity and entered the market first.

4. Running out of opportunities – where to launch next?

With the proliferation of mobile devices and increased access to the Internet worldwide, more customers are online in new regions than ever before. In fact, smartphone ownership in emerging and developing markets has increased from 21% in 2013 to 37% in 2015. Marketers are increasingly finding new ways to reach and engage audiences, but if you’re only communicating in English, you’re missing an opportunity to influence more than 80% of the online buying audience! Did you know Fortune 500 companies based in the U.S. generate more than 50% of their revenue from overseas markets? Clearly, the opportunity to generate demand and revenue exists—don’t limit your ability to grow by restricting your target markets to the U.S. and English-only audiences.

In today’s global economy, modern marketers have an opportunity unlike ever before—to connect globally in our customers’ preferred language, on their preferred device type, and at any time of the day. Why not maximize your technology to do it better, faster, and more efficiently? And with any luck, you won’t run out of battery power in the process!

Don’t Let These 5 Translation Review Challenges Slow Your Global Growth

ashish@cloudwords.com (Ashish Agrawal) — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 20:13:34 GMT

When it comes to the translation workflow, the review process is the final, most critical stage: It’s the time to ensure:

Translations are accurate;
The intended meaning rings true;
Text reads fluidly in its new language; and
Copy layout fits the template.

However, if you’re using manual techniques or traditional processes to review translations, this stage is likely the most frustrating phase of your translation workflow, and, let’s face it: Just. Too. Slow. Many translation management systems claim to have tools that streamline the review phase, but none compare to Cloudwords’ OneReview…

We recently held a webinar with the translation management experts at Rockant to provide an in-depth look at Cloudwords’ innovative and industry-leading collaborative editing tool, OneReview. OneReview speeds and simplifies the translation review process by solving the pain points most commonly associated with this phase of the translation workflow, and much more. View the on-demand version here.

Too Slow Means No Go

For global marketing, content localization is essential to communicate with customers and engage prospects. However, if your global campaigns are delayed due to review phase hold-ups, it’s time to tackle those challenges with new cloud technology capabilities that eliminate outdated, manual operations and significantly accelerate the review and editing workflow.

Here are the top 5 translation review challenges cited most often by marketing and content managers:

Inability for all managers, reviewers, translators and other stakeholders to access, view and make edits and suggestions collaboratively.
Inability to manage and track the status of translation reviews, and who is responsible for each phase, which creates bottlenecks and causes delays.
Inability of reviewers to access content in a CMS or marketing automation platform, requiring multiple files to be sent back and forth via email, creating “version control” issues… and more delays.
Inability to view both the translation and original source text side by side for comparison.
Inability to see “in context” how the newly translated copy impacts the layout of the asset, such as in an email or webpage.

OneReview Puts Everyone on the Same Page

View the on-demand webinar below to learn how OneReview puts managers, reviewers, and translation providers on the same page. By optimizing the review process, automating the workflow, and providing true in-context review and editing capabilities, OneReview shortens the review process from weeks to days or hours, which means translations can be completed faster and marketing content can be delivered on time – helping you reach global go-to-market goals.

Don’t let outdated translation management techniques and review practices impede your global growth and ability to generate new revenue opportunities. Contact us at discover@cloudwords.com to learn more.

Meltwater + Cloudwords Webinar: Marketing Takes a Seat in the C-Suite

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 17:53:29 GMT

Senior marketing execs want to know: How can I achieve influence and credibility in the boardroom?

When the media intelligence experts at Meltwater approached Cloudwords to address this question, we were thrilled to partner with them to collaborate and share insights about how marketing execs are increasingly influencing the C-Suite, particularly when it comes to expanding a company’s brand overseas. On Wednesday, April 13, at 11am PDT, our global sales and marketing VP, Richard Harpham, will present a webinar with Meltwater, titled, Think Like the C-Suite: Expand the Role of Marketing.

Multiple factors are changing the role and responsibilities of the marketing exec—technology, for one, has given marketers the ability to track behaviors, analyze data, and connect it to outcomes, allowing them to directly tie marketing’s activities with its bottom line impact. Modern marketers need to identify and leverage a variety of technological tools and solutions including marketing automation, content platforms, sales enablement, localization management and media intelligence tools—to build a cohesive marketing stack and integrate marketing activities with the business as a whole.

So what can you do to build a successful marketing organization to not only drive growth and revenue for the company, but also ultimately put you squarely in position to influence the C-Suite?

Join us for the webinar to learn how to:

Drive business with insights, agility and growth
Use personalization and localization to drive revenue
Leverage modern accessible technology and skills

With more than 20 years of experience launching and leading products into global markets, Richard will share the necessary skills and tools marketing execs need to achieve and maintain credibility with the CEO and the C-level execs in the boardroom.

Register for the Webinar

How to Measure Your Global Marketing Price Tag

scott@cloudwords.com (Scott Yancey) — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 19:00:28 GMT

How much does your organization spend on localization? Does your estimate include your regional websites, product and sales materials, and all your global marketing efforts company-wide?

If you don’t know, or can take a guess but are unsure, you’re not alone. Localization of global marketing content is often a highly decentralized process within organizations, creating inefficiencies in both time and money spent on the globalization of marketing programs.

For example, a corporate marketing team at headquarters may be in charge of budget allocation, but leaves its regional teams to manage vendors and translation projects locally. I routinely see this framework, and unfortunately it leaves marketers in the dark when it comes to insight into how much they actually spend on localization, including:

Payments to translation vendors;
Employee time spent managing projects (at HQ and in region);
Process efficiency (or inefficiency) when it comes to delivering content to market;
Whether enough content is reaching markets fast enough to meet lead and demand generation goals; and
Whether multilingual assets, such as Translation Memory, are being leveraged.

Localization is a $39 billion industry. Mid-sized companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars localizing marketing content each year, and large global enterprise organizations invest tens of millions of dollars a year. Yet many are unable to accurately track the dollars spent, and most critically, they have little insight into how localization impacts global marketing results and what the ROI is of their global marketing efforts.

Entering new markets successfully—and maintaining market share in existing markets—requires ongoing analysis of marketing budgets and metrics to know whether you’re spending money wisely reaching target markets and audiences that matter most to your company, or spending money to localize simply because you think you should.

Analysis of your localization process and spend should be a priority as well. You may be surprised how many global companies are translating content into the top 10 languages because they think that’s the best way to reach the most customers. It may be, but there are other factors to consider. For example, do you have opportunity or market share in MENA? If not, why are you translating into Arabic?

In addition to better understanding which languages you should be investing in, you need insight into how efficient your localization process is, or isn’t. How long does it take to turn around a simple localization project, such as an email campaign? What about a more complex project, like an entire website? An inefficient localization process significantly impacts your bottom line. Time spent managing localization projects costs valuable employee hours as team members try to keep track of multiple projects through outdated manual processes like email, spreadsheets and FTP sites. Bottlenecks can increase project turnaround times, such as delays in the review process, further decreasing productivity and impacting critical go-to-market timelines. But most importantly, it’s essential to recognize that delays in getting content to market to reach target audiences directly leads to significant missed revenue opportunities.

To get a better idea of how to measure your localization spend and ROI, we suggest the following metrics:

Spend Metrics:

Spend per language
Spend by content type
Spend by country or region
Spend by product or service
Leverage of Translation Memory

Efficiency Metrics:

Project completion time
Identification of bottlenecks in the localization process
Amount of time marketers are spending managing localization projects
Number of assets or campaigns getting to regional markets
Value of each additional selling week for a campaign delivered earlier in local language

To increase productivity and maximize investments, global marketers need better visibility into their localization process. Cloudwords offers advanced analytics to help you monitor your localization spend, time-to-market efficiencies, and Translation Memory utilization in real time. You can monitor your translation spend by content source, department, language, vendor and more. As a result, you can better understand your translation process, see the evolution and ROI of your Translation Memory over time, and track the speed and effectiveness of global marketing efforts by region.

Don’t be left in the dark. Shine a light on localization and use your newfound knowledge to track progress and measure metrics. And if you need some guidance and a translation automation platform like Cloudwords to help you meet your goals, email our team at discover@cloudwords.com, we’re here to help.

5 Reasons to Take Your Digital Content Global with Cloudwords for Adobe Experience Manager

richard.blatcher@cloudwords.com (Richard Blatcher) — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 18:53:08 GMT

Timely, personal, consistent messaging in all the languages of your customers—join us at Adobe Summit next week to learn how Cloudwords for Adobe EM helps marketers deliver localized web experiences better, faster, and more frequently. Our customers’ key areas of concern when it comes to improving global marketing efforts are efficiency, cost, and opportunity. And by leveraging Cloudwords technology, they are experiencing significant savings and improvements—customers are localizing content three to four times faster and generating more leads by increasing the number of campaigns they are able to launch.

As a partner and event sponsor, we’re gearing up to showcase our integrated solution, Cloudwords for Adobe EM, connect with customers, make new friends, and share with marketers how easy global go-to-market can be. Our team of marketing and localization experts will be available to provide global content marketing tips, tricks and best practices to help organizations create and deliver localized digital web and mobile app experiences within the Adobe EM platform.

Following our top 5 reasons you should consider leveraging Cloudwords for Adobe EM to engage global audiences, increase brand consistency and awareness, and generate new opportunities for revenue growth in existing and new global markets. If you’re planning to attend Adobe Summit, stop by and see for yourself – we’ll be in booth #10 in the Innovation Showcase area of the exhibition floor.

Technology developed for marketers. Cloudwords is the only pure technology platform integrated with AEM that is designed from the ground up with the customer’s needs in mind. If you use Adobe EM to manage your websites and digital assets, and need to localize content for international markets, Cloudwords was designed for you.
Deployment is quick, easy and intuitive. Cloudwords connects to your AEM instance, immediately delivering enterprise-ready translation management for all your Adobe digital experiences.
Create and deliver localized content WITHIN Adobe EM. With one click, select the content you want translated in AEM and Cloudwords takes it from there. Once content is translated, Cloudwords returns the content to your AEM templates so you can review and edit the translated copy in context and within the proper layout.
Speed global go-to-market timelines. Cloudwords’ automated workflow gives marketers unprecedented power to quickly and easily create and update digital content and experiences on a global scale. Even the most complex and dynamic sites are localized with greater efficiency and ease than ever before.
Global brands use Cloudwords for AEM. Companies like Palo Alto Networks, CA Technologies, Thermo Fisher, Zimmer Biomet and Power Integrations use the Cloudwords-Adobe EM solution to roll out websites and digital properties faster and more efficiently in the native languages of their customers and target buyers. (Learn how Palo Alto Networks reaches global audiences faster in this case study.)

We hope to meet you next week at the Summit – please stop by, say hi, and join the global conversation! Make sure to follow us on Twitter @CloudwordsInc and use the hashtags #Cloudwords and #AdobeSummit to tell us how you’re reaching your global go-to-market goals.

A Global Marketing Vision Beyond Translation: Palo Alto Networks’ Success with Cloudwords

richard.harpham@cloudwords.com (Richard Harpham) — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 18:00:00 GMT

“Cloudwords helps us think of globalization as a process that starts at the beginning of marketing content creation. This global thinking saves the company time and money in the end.” - Bernadette Javier, Web Marketing Manager at Palo Alto Networks

With an ever-growing global customer base, the Palo Alto Networks marketing team recognized a need for a more efficient, cost-effective localization process to better serve its multilingual audiences. One of the fastest growing security companies in the market, Palo Alto Networks initially selected Cloudwords to help them build localized websites for target regions. The company especially liked the Cloudwords platform because they were able to continue to use their existing translation service provider without disrupting their overall localization process, but are also able to identify new vendors that matched new content and language needs.

As a pure technology platform without bias toward any specific translation service provider, Cloudwords gave Palo Alto Networks the opportunity to bring together as many vendors as necessary to translate all elements of their websites through integration with Adobe Experience Manager—from ad banners and landing pages to form fields. And through Cloudwords’ vendor marketplace, the marketing team is able to regularly compare quotes from a variety of high quality localization service providers.

In addition to website localization, Palo Alto Networks also values Cloudwords’ “Campaign Manager” feature. Campaign Manager provides Palo Alto Networks with an at-a-glance, comprehensive view of all content assets within one marketing campaign that spans geographies, departments, and customer touch points. This multi-channel, multilingual view allows the team to plan, execute and track the localization of all marketing content required for a global campaign launch. Campaign Manager helps the team collaborate on campaigns for different languages; group projects together to better manage multiple vendors; and easily track project status to ensure all assets are translated and delivered on schedule.

“Cloudwords’ platform has simplified and scaled a highly complex yet really valuable business process for us. Now, managing localization projects is easier for the team, we can choose vendors for the best results, and the automated interface between Adobe EM and Cloudwords saves marked time and pain,” said Bernadette.

By developing a strategic, globally-minded plan early in the process, Palo Alto Networks is able to identify the accurate themes that will resonate with each target region worldwide, and ensure that all localized campaigns and websites are delivering the right messaging, regardless of language.

“Cloudwords enabled Palo Alto Networks to begin building a more extensive global localization strategy. We can now customize our own campaigns within our respective regions, resulting in increased global brand consistency,” said Bernadette. “Since Cloudwords is vendor agnostic, we have preferred translation service providers for each language, and since all vendors access and contribute to our translation memory, projects are much less costly and turnaround times are much faster, which is directly attributable to the growth of our translation memory.”

To learn more about Palo Alto Networks’ success with Cloudwords, read the full case study.

Localization Trends in the MarTech Landscape

scott@cloudwords.com (Scott Yancey) — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 17:00:00 GMT

As CEO of a SaaS company that intersects both the marketing technology and translation space, I have the unique opportunity to have conversations with both partners—martech leaders like Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle—and global customers like CA Technologies, Sherwin Williams, and Qualtrics about their global sales and marketing strategies. Our discussions often focus on the state of global marketing tools and tactics and how marketers can ‘do global better.’ As such, I thought I’d share my insights and perspectives on where I see marketing and localization trends going in 2016.

Increased C-Suite Recognition of Localization as a Revenue-Generating Process

I frequently hear from marketers that they are working to elevate and reinforce within the C-Suite the importance and impact content localization has on global audience reach and revenue. Localization can and should be a key revenue driving performance indicator (KPI) used to measure the success of the company’s global go-to-market efforts. As more companies realize the value an effective global content process has on the success of their marketing efforts, it will increasingly become a benchmark by which more companies seek to measure global marketing success.

Preeminence of Marketing Localization

With the resurgence of email marketing and popularity of content and digital marketing, the volume of content marketers are creating to drive demand is exploding. Marketers that implement the power of personalization in their marketing efforts are engaging audiences more effectively. But marketing leaders are realizing their new content strategies and personalization techniques aren’t scaling around the globe, and that directly impacts their ability to cover and drive demand in all regions they serve. There are solutions for this challenge.

Cloudwords customers who are localizing content on a global scale are able to deliver the same personalized experience across all global markets and regions. That means more content, more frequently in the preferred or native languages of their target audience—resulting in significantly increased engagement, demand, and lead generation as a direct result. They place significant value on localization as a key factor in marketing personalization, and I believe this is a trend that will continue to grow in the coming year.

The Beginning of MarTech Consolidation

There are already more than 1,800 marketing technology tools available to marketers, according to Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape, and I expect new technologies to continue to be introduced as the demand for better, more efficient ways to engage audiences grows. However, I predict we will see the beginning of marketing technology consolidation through mergers and acquisitions.

The explosion of martech tools is overwhelming and unsustainable—no industry can support so many technologies. Further, given recent Wall Street woes and the decreased confidence in China’s economy, I see marketing organizations investing more on the martech must-haves with broad capabilities, and less on the tools built for a unique solution.

In turn, more established martech players, such as leading marketing cloud providers, will recognize the opportunity to provide marketers with a holistic marketing stack that delivers both the must-have capabilities and unique solutions, and the number of players in this space will be reduced.

Do Global Better

The need to drive business worldwide is not a trend, it’s a requirement—companies that ‘do global better’ will find new opportunities for revenue in previously untapped markets. Today, U.S. companies conduct almost as much business overseas as they do in the U.S. Close to 50% of production, sales, and profits are from overseas business. That is a trend worth sustaining, investing in further, and capitalizing on.

Marketing Experts Ann Handley, Scott Brinker, Jamie Gutfreund and Sanjay Dholakia Discuss 2016 Predictions

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:44:07 GMT

Cloudwords is pleased to be a sponsor or Marketo's upcoming webinar, 2016 Predictions: What Tomorrow's Marketer Needs to Know Today, and would like to invite you to join us as a panel of marketing experts from MarketingProfs, ChiefMarTec, Marketo, and Wunderman share insights into what they think the upcoming trends and predictions will be for marketers in 2016.

During the webinar, experts will share their thoughts on:

The emerging trends marketers should be aware of
Key challenges marketers will face in 2016
Critical skills for success in 2016 and beyond
Practical takeaways marketers can implement today

Here are the webinar registration details:

Title: 2016 Predictions: What Tomorrow's Marketer Needs to Know Today

When: Thursday, January 28th at 10am PT / 1am ET

Who: Sanjay Dholakia (CMO at Marketo), Jamie Gutfreund (Global CMO at Wunderland), Scott Brinker (Co-founder & CTO at ION Interactive and Founder of cheifmartec.com), Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs)

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER (Don't worry - if you can't attend, sign up anyway and we'll send you the slides and recording!)

Important Cloudwords Features & Functions You Don’t Want to Miss!

ashish@cloudwords.com (Ashish Agrawal) — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:31:34 GMT

Cloudwords Added New Features, Enhanced Capabilities, and Expanded Integrations for its Growing Customer Base in 2015

The Cloudwords team thanks its customers for a fantastic 2015! The localization process is critical to our customers’ global operations strategy and necessary to effectively engage customers and prospects in regions worldwide. To meet our customers’ needs for a superior translation automation platform, Cloudwords added new features, enhanced existing product capabilities, and built new native integrations with more than 20 industry-leading platforms to make localizing content easier, less time-consuming and more effective.

Cloudwords by the Numbers

2015 was a year of amazing growth and achievement for Cloudwords. The following stats highlight the rapidly growing adoption of Cloudwords’ technology:

A Year of Integrations

Key to Cloudwords’ success—and our customers’ success—is the ability to connect with any platform to streamline the translation workflow and eliminate the tedious copy and paste routine that takes up too much time, is fraught with errors, and hinders global growth. In 2015, Cloudwords introduced more than 20 native integrations with leading cloud-based platforms and services, including:

New Features & Enhanced Product Capabilities

As always, the Cloudwords team continues to build on the platform to further improve core features and functionalities. Cloudwords Enterprise Edition now offers ‘Collaborative Review Workflow’, a new capability ideal for global marketing teams who need to review translated assets (e.g., in-market marketing managers, brand managers, etc.). The new feature allows the Project Manager to assign multiple users to review assets for a particular language, and also enables full control over the review workflow with the ability to dynamically add and remove reviewers, view status of reviews, extend the review due date, or end the review early, among other capabilities.

Further, Cloudwords delivered significant advancements for its Marketo and Oracle Eloqua integrations, as well as new Project Management capabilities for all editions, including new options for different workflows, such as file-by-file workflow, collaborative review workflow, and bidless project.

Cloudwords OneReview

The industry’s leading collaborative review and editing tool, OneReview’s advanced technological capabilities make it the easiest way to review and edit translated content. OneReview enables multiple collaborators to make necessary or suggested edits to the translated asset, even if it’s a webpage or an email. In addition to new and enhanced user experience capabilities, OneReview now offers additional features to further enhance the review process in all Cloudwords editions.

New Resources

If you’re interested in learning more, recently released Cloudwords Customer Success Stories are accessible online:

And check out Cloudwords recently released eBooks:

Register for the Webinar on January 27 at 11:00 AM PST

Join us for a Cloudwords webinar to learn more about these new features and capabilities and hear tips and best practices from the team. Sign Up Here!

Stay in Touch and Get Updates from Cloudwords:

New Years Countdown: Our Top Blog Posts of the Year

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 23:44:44 GMT

As the year draws to a close, we decided to take a look back at our top blog post from 2015. With blog posts ranging from global marketing best practices to how to be more persuasive, we hope we shared some valuable and entertaining insights. Take a look at some of our best posts below!

10. How To Get What You Want: 5 Ways to Be More Persuasive

9. The Local Glocal: The Market Next Door

8. What Does Elvis Have to Do With Indian Language Translation?

7. Going Global? Don't Forget To Pack These 6 Essential Items!

6. The Spooktacular Costs of Doing Global Wrong

5. Getting Back to our Roots at Dreamforce

4. What Does Your Company's Selfie Say to the World?

3. How Iron Mountain Scales Globally to Drive Localized Demand

2. Early Adopters of New Marketing Technology Earn Bragging Rights

1. 75% of the World Can't Read this Post

Looking forward to much more content in the new year!

Cheers,

The Cloudwords Team

Honored to be Among the Best of the Best in Cloud Computing

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 23:08:28 GMT

When it comes to trending topics in the tech world, “big data” might win again this year, but I think “cloud computing” has to be a pretty close second. While cloud-based platforms and services are relatively new, the advantages and benefits they provide have long been established as core business values: increased productivity, lower costs, and improved time to market.

These tenants are the foundation of Cloudwords platform, which is why we’re pleased to be a finalist for the Cloud Awards, a program which recognizes organizations of any size, including start-ups and government bodies, from across the globe for excellence and innovation in cloud computing.

Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson commented, “The Cloud is all about adding value in a lean, cost-effective way, utilizing the latest technologies and methodologies to benefit the end user. That’s what we are continuing to see in 2015.” This year the program received entries from more than 300 organizations, with submissions from the USA, Europe, Canada, the UK, Australia, Asia, and the Middle East.

Cloudwords will continue to innovate and build on our platform to meet the needs of enterprise organizations that need a better, more efficient way to localize content for global markets. It’s what we’ve always done, and will always do—which is exactly why we’re proud to be recognized for our platform. It’s a nice feeling to be congratulated, so kudos to all the Cloud Awards finalists for being the “best of the best” in the cloud computing space!

The Rise of Content Marketing Makes the Old School TMS Obsolete

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 22:53:50 GMT

It’s no surprise that content marketing as a process for both B2B and B2C marketers to produce and publish information to influence buyers, generate leads and increase sales has significantly grown as its own category of marketing. A key element to successful content marketing is high frequency digital content -- blogs, emails, landing pages, infographics, eBooks, and more, that is created and delivered regularly to keep content fresh and audiences engaged. And, of course, marketing automation software makes it all possible. However, the same technology that has made content marketing proliferation possible, has also made global content marketing go from hard to impossible.

The Content Curve
To illustrate the range of different assets and content types content marketers need to create, translate and deliver globally to keep all regions selling, I’d like to share a graph created by the CEO of Kapost, Toby Murdock. Murdock developed the Content Curve to represent both the length of the content and the frequency it is created and delivered over the course of a month.

: The Content Curve (image from the Kapost blog)

As Murdock points out, all these different types of content are important to reach and engage a diverse audience at various points along the customer journey and path to sale. Creating and delivering several “short-form” assets within a week or two is a typical process for a marketing team at any size organization, thanks to marketing automation. Just as content marketing technology and social media platform integrations are essential for marketers to speed the creation and delivery of these assets, so too is the speedy translation that will enable them to get this same content to multilingual audiences in global markets simultaneously. But how?

A Look Back at Traditional Marketing
Before the rise of Content Marketing, marketing automation software, and the explosion of digital content, marketing and product teams developed campaigns and collateral that were designed with a long shelf life. These included traditional sales and product collateral, such as brochures, catalogs, technical data sheets, white papers, case studies, and such. Printed or not, they were meant to be used for long periods of time and were only updated a few times a year.

For Fortune 500 companies that had the staff and budget to invest in global marketing and the translation of materials, the time, money, and effort was worth it because the materials would be useful for a significant period of time. These global organizations also had access to Translation Management Systems (TMS). These solutions were developed by translation vendors to support the localization of copy-heavy materials (i.e., had the most amount of words, cost a lot to translate, and had lengthy turnaround times). The purpose of the TMS was either to 1) optimize the translation vendors’ business model by streamlining the translation process for the translators and in-house localization teams; or 2) streamline the internal localization team’s engagement with their translation vendors and content reviewers. Both of which are valid and important goals.

However, TMS solutions were traditionally very expensive and cumbersome to deploy and use, which limited their installations mainly to Fortune 500 companies. It could be argued TMS solutions did an adequate job of helping those organizations localize traditional, long-form product, sales and training content, but it’s entirely clear the TMS is not designed, efficient, or cost effective for today’s massive modern marketing tactics and technologies.

Global content marketers are creating and delivering multiple types of assets repeatedly over the course of a few weeks, which means they need to translate and localize content quickly and at scale for all the languages of their target markets. They need modern methods to move content from their content systems through to their teams, translation vendors, expert reviewers, and other stakeholders, and back into those systems ready to deploy within hours or days, not weeks or months.

Use the Right Tool for the Task
How can we expect tools built in the early 2000’s designed for text-heavy product, sales or training content; users who are specialists in translation; and infrequent delivery schedules to be relevant or useful for today’s fast-paced modern marketing machine?

Do we expect sales reps to use financial software like Quickbooks for expense management, or support reps to use Marketo to send emails to their customers? Of course not. So why would marketers want to use old (or new) TMS tools to get marketing content translated? They require a solution explicitly built for the marketer’s (or any business user’s) needs, one that supports their content technology stack and workflow first and foremost. And that solution should then work with the systems used by their translation team and agencies; it’s not a zero-sum game.

To put simply, the TMS was not designed to meet the requirements of today’s content marketers who need frequent, high volume content localization with short turnaround times.

Reach Global Audiences at Scale
According to CMI, 88% of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing, and 51% plan to increase spending on content marketing in the next year. Regardless of the length, volume or frequency of the content, in order to reach global markets, messages need to be translated and culturally relevant if your goals are to maximize demand generation, brand awareness, and revenue around the world. So without a Translation Automation Platform connected to the marketing technology marketers already use to create and deliver content (such as marketing automation software, CMS, and Web CMS platforms), marketers’ global reach is stunted and they’ve tied one or both hands behind their backs for delivering global success. Quick localization turnaround for all content for all languages is essential to win and compete in today’s global economy.

This is what Cloudwords was designed to do. Welcome to the modern age of localization for the modern company.

To learn more, download our eBook, 8 Great Reasons to Own a Translation Automation Platform.

Influence Your Audience by Speaking to Their Heart

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 22:50:07 GMT

"By 2115, it’s possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today’s 6,000,” according to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Columbia University linguistics teacher, Dr. John McWhorter. While many acknowledge that the de facto language for global communication—business or otherwise—is English, it’s undeniable that the seven billion people in the world speak a language other than English in their everyday lives. (In fact, while English is the third most widely spoken language, it’s only the native language for about 5% of the world’s population, and only about 30% of the world’s population speaks English with some degree of competency.)

English will never dominate our planet completely—that’s a good thing, since languages are what bond families and societies from one generation to the next.

Languages are living, and always evolving as words and verbs change as a reflection of the way new generations communicate in the same way modern technology changes our modes of communication. As global marketers, we can use language to our advantage by recognizing these nuances and localize content not simply to communicate, but to truly engage.

Making Emotional Connections Will Win Customers
My headline references one of my favorite quotes. Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

From a business perspective, the extra effort to communicate with customers and prospects in their native language is beneficial, including message relevance and accuracy, as well as striking an emotional connection that strengthens your brand’s investment in the market. And that doesn’t strictly apply to global organizations that reach beyond our borders, as we’ve previously noted, there are plenty of diverse populations here in the U.S. that prefer to communicate in their “mother tongue,” even if they speak English fluently.

Statistics Tell Us
• 72.1% of consumers prefer to spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language
• 72.4% of consumers said they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language
• 56.2% of consumers said that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price
*Common Sense Advisory

As we enter the holiday season when people reconnect with their hometowns, regions, friends and families, communicating with your target audience in their language, while also using culturally relevant references—not just in language, but also popular trends, celebrities, images, music, and sports—is critical to engaging and influencing your audience, and thus they are more likely to take notice of your products and brand. Don’t miss out on real revenue opportunity by overlooking the language they speak with their families at home, not just in business.

Finally, think again about that last statistic… language is more important than price for half your prospects. Those of you planning a promotion to drive end of year revenue might consider extending your multilingual tactics rather than discounting. It could translate to even more success and goodwill to your bottom line!

How Iron Mountain Scales Globally to Drive Localized Demand

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:26:14 GMT

Guest Post by Leslie Alore, Head of Global Marketing Operations & Automation at Iron Mountain

Modern marketers from across the globe attended Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience Europe event in London last week to discuss best practices and learn new marketing strategies from peers and experts alike. As head of global marketing operations and automation at Iron Mountain, I was honored to have the opportunity to present and share how our company leverages Oracle Eloqua and Cloudwords to create and deliver global campaigns at scale.

Iron Mountain is a global storage and information management company spanning 36 countries on five continents. More than 156,000 organizations in every major industry and of all sizes—including more than 94% of the Fortune 1000—rely on Iron Mountain to store and manage their information.

To reach, engage and support global prospects and customers effectively, we support 16 languages. Our centralized marketing teams develop programs, messages and content for all markets, but for optimum effectiveness, content is customized at the local level. However, we were challenged to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver world-class tools and processes that support global scale and drive local demand gen. Why? The translation approach we had in place was holding us back.

Consider, for example, that a single global campaign deployed in eight languages may leverage…
• 5 pieces of content
• 10 web pages
• 15 emails

Which means someone was manually creating…
• 40 pieces of content
• 80 web pages
• 120 emails

All of the repetitive, manual work required to manage and deliver localized content required 180 hours of work (or 4.5 weeks). Not only is that inefficient, it’s clearly not scaleable for multiple, simultaneous global campaigns.

Since we use Oracle Eloqua to automate our marketing campaigns and Sitecore for web properties, we are able to integrate Cloudwords directly into our marketing tech stack. It’s a perfect fit. Through direct integration, Cloudwords automates the workflow and eliminates manual copy and paste processes, saving a significant amount of hands-on time required for staff to move content in and out of systems, and freeing up our marketing team to focus on more important tasks.

In addition to saving time, there are cost benefits too—Iron Mountain expects to save an estimate of $133,000 annually on translation. Benefits of Cloudwords include:

• Automates content creation in multiple platforms, eliminating manual content replication
• Multi-vendor bidding drives costs down, and centralized translation memory reduces long term cost of translation
• Intuitive workflows and interface makes training, administration and oversight easy
• In-context reviews reduce revisions and delivery timelines

Global marketing isn’t easy, there are a lot of moving parts to manage, but the Cloudwords platform speeds and simplifies the localization process so our team can get more global campaigns to prospects faster, which means increased demand gen on a global scale. It doesn’t get better than that!

Want Great Global Content? Find a Great Translator

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:21:28 GMT

As a good marketer in the digital age, you probably know how to find the right partner for a lot of your needs, from programmers to event planners. Chances are you have less confidence about how to do the same for a key aspect of your global content marketing campaign: Finding and engaging a great translator.

As you have certainly seen from infamous global advertising translations gone wrong, messaging that is incorrect as a result of poor translation or localization can undermine the entire investment you’ve made in the content and the campaign, not to mention your brand’s valuable reputation.

One of the most important things to consider when hiring a localization service provider (LSP) or an individual contractor is whether they understand the cultural aspects of your market in addition to fluency in the language. Look for a native speaker who grew up (or has spent a lot of recent time) in your target market. The more specialized your industry jargon – think medicine or law – the more important it is to find an expert in both the language and the industry terminology. As you would expect, the steeper the learning curve the higher the cost.

Keep in mind that although many translators are accredited or certified, there is really no overarching set of standards or government licensing/accreditation rules to which translators are required to adhere. So instead, you need to look at other ways to gauge competence and quality, ranging from independent audits and referrals from trusted peers, to reviews and evaluations posted in online communities. Cloudwords provides a marketplace of pre-screened, professional vendors, and customers are able to post reviews on service and completed projects, so you get firsthand information about quality and performance.

Although it’s always important to maintain open lines of communication from the first project query to the last review signoff, it’s especially critical with translation projects. It sounds cliché but there is truth to it – much can get lost in translation. Therefore, it’s important to share content, standards, style guides and other multilingual assets with your translator in an easy-to-use, organized manner that all stakeholders – across your organization and the vendor – can access. A translation automation platform will help manage communication, streamline processes, and provide accurate reporting, such as cost per word and translation memory data.

If you want to expand your business globally, or even just add languages to domestic campaigns, a great translation service provider and a great translation automation platform go hand-in-hand.

For tips on how to find a great translator or LSP, download our new guidebook, 8 Keys to Finding a Great Translator.

The Spooktacular Costs of Doing Global Wrong

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:16:45 GMT

Investing in a global marketing strategy can be a major undertaking, both in terms of actual costs (localization of campaign assets) and productivity costs (employee time), but the return on investment can be exponential when it comes to opportunities for increased revenue and market share. However, getting globalization right is critical, because now more than ever, global marketers are on the frontlines of revenue growth and need to consider the impact on sales their campaigns generate.

By reaching global markets, marketers and sales reps can engage new audiences, nurture more leads, and close more deals. However, marketers can no longer think about globalization as simply translation of materials—that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s time to think of globalization as a business process that can—and should—be optimized, just as companies are optimizing their sales, finance and HR processes to decrease costs and maximize efficiency.

Beware of Pitfalls
When it comes to generating demand and filling your sales pipeline on a global scale, inefficiency is a marketer’s worst enemy—it’s costly, slows the team down, and puts many opportunities to capture global revenue out of reach. When it comes to getting globalization right, what you don’t know can stunt your company’s growth instead of drive the revenue you want. Don’t let the hidden costs of globalization hold you and your company back.

Sidestep Silos: Are the marketing materials Corporate invests time and money to produce and deliver actually being used by regional teams? If they’re not useful (i.e., relevant for their regions’ target audience), it’s possible regional teams are taking it upon themselves to produce materials that are culturally relevant and localized. This decentralized approach leads to silos and results in wasted time and money. Overcome organizational challenges from the start by bringing together stakeholders from corporate and regional teams to collaborate and determine strategy before content and materials are developed.
Avoid Translation Trade-offs: Compromising on how much, or when, marketing campaigns and content get localized for key markets hinders potential for growth. The longer it takes to deliver your content to your target markets, the more competing messages your sales force will have to position against, and the longer it will take to capture market share and revenue in those markets. Invest in localized content for all your multichannel campaign assets to reach key target markets concurrently.
Dodge Inefficiency and Duck the “Time-sucks”: Have you ever tracked your localization spend? Not just the dollars spent paying translation vendors, but have you tracked the productivity costs associated with employees tasked with managing an inefficient localization process? Decreased productivity by marketing teams is a time suck and wastes valuable marketing dollars. Their creative minds and talents are better spent developing marketing campaigns, not tracking the status of localized assets. Moreover, inefficient processes lead to bottlenecks and increase go-to-market times—which means your competitor could be going to market faster and capturing potential revenue before you. Ouch.
Stop Paying Twice (or More) for Translation: The two largest cost drivers for localization projects are the number of words you need to translate and the amount of time it takes the vendor to finalize the document so it reads properly. You can save money and time with one very valuable asset: Your translation memory. Never heard of it? I’m not surprised; it’s the best-kept secret in the translation business. Translation memory is a database of a company’s previously translated words and phrases. It’s valuable because if you’ve translated something once, you should never have to pay to have it translated again. Typically, translation vendors manage this asset, but how do you know if they’re leveraging it and passing the savings on to you? You may not know—which is why YOU should be the owner of your translation memory database.
Don’t Dilute Your Brand: If you’re using different terminology or telling different stories in different markets, your message gets diluted, or worse, completely mistranslated. Either way, you can end up giving the wrong impression in some markets and jeopardize your entire global investment. Take advantage of your multilingual assets, including centralized multilingual glossaries, corporate style guides, and of course, your translation memory database, to ensure consistent messaging and a strong brand presence.

Gain Global Rewards
Many companies fail to engage successfully in international markets because their global marketing strategy and localization process haven't been optimized, and their globalization investments get side-swiped by hidden costs along the way. Collaborating among teams, localizing multichannel assets, creating efficiencies in your process, and leveraging all your multilingual assets will get you on your way to getting global right. With the proper strategies in place, you’ll soon realize better ROI, faster time to market and increased market share.

So go ahead and get started, the world is waiting for you — don’t let your competitors get there first!

A version of this article originally appeared in Sales & Marketing Management.

The Lesson I Learned from Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:01:33 GMT

Whether your company sells software or fleece hoodies, there is a core set of questions we need to ask to drive product creation and development.

I recently arrived at this conclusion following a surf trip near Puerto Nuevo, Mexico – if you surf, or have ever tried, you may feel as I do that the sport is one of the most challenging, but most rewarding activities you’ll try. During my latest trip, I had a scary experience involving currents trying to take me out to the ocean combined with an untimely calf cramp. When I finally made it to shore, I was relieved but also euphoric, and as a result felt emboldened to completely dive deeper into the sport. Based on a friend’s recommendation, I bought a book called “Let My People Go Surfing” written by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of leading outdoor adventure gear company, Patagonia.

Despite the title, this book actually has very little to do with surfing. Chouinard, an avid climber and surfer, founded the company in the 1950s to support his love of climbing and all-around adventure seeking. Despite his reluctance to expand, the company grew from humble beginnings to a global leader providing a range of products that outdoor enthusiasts depend on—from snow gear to wetsuits.

Although I didn’t get many surf tips from the book, it is a treasure trove of information I can take back to my job in the tech world. Of the book’s business-focused themes, I found the principle questions that help drive the design of Patagonia’s products, which are some of the best products on the market for the outdoor adventurer and risk sport enthusiast, most interesting and applicable to my daily job responsibilities.

As a Sales Engineer at Cloudwords, a Translation Automation Platform, I’m constantly in the middle of Sales and Development for features, enhancements, and roadmap twists and turns. The questions Chouinard presents in the book resonated with me and I realize now those questions can and should be discussed regularly, no matter what your product is. Here are a few key questions from Chouinard’s book that may help guide product development at your company:

Is it functional? At the end of the day, clients just want the product to work the way you say it will.
Is it multifunctional? People love it when one item, tangible or intangible, serves multiple purposes. Is there a way to build this into your product with out sacrificing its core purpose?
Is it as simple as possible? Are we resisting the temptation to create something over the top? They say simplest solutions are often the best ones.
Is it an innovation or an invention? Are you improving on someone else’s design, or creating something from scratch yourself? In the SaaS space, novel functionality only lasts for an instant. We’re working diligently to always stay one step ahead of the competition, market direction and, of course, improving on some ideas that already exist.
Is it art? I love the fact that there is a category of professionals whose sole purpose is to improve the aesthetics and ease of use of software. It’s important and a great reflection of how companies invest to continually improve products and experiences long after the initial sale.
Are we designing for our core customer? Roadmaps can have some crazy twists and turns. Is the next design or enhancement developed for the people you originally set out to help? I love the battles between sales and engineering on this one. Our dev team is fiercely protective of our roadmap, but some great features that are universally popular with our client base were born thanks to prospects proposing functionality.

I’m looking forward to the next surf trip, but until then anticipate helping to shape our product each and every day. Along the way, I’ll be thinking about Chouinard, how he faced design challenges in Patagonia’s formative years, and how I can help Cloudwords make smart decisions with our product.

What Does Your Company’s Selfie Say to the World?

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:52:50 GMT

A great website is a reflection of a company’s persona and how it wants to be viewed by the world: Its brand, positioning, and core values are characterized by the images, tone of voice and design aspects incorporated into the site itself. To put it in today’s photographic terms, a website is basically a company’s “selfie” available for a global audience to see.

This begs the question: What image does your company’s selfie portray to potential customers?

Companies doing business on a global scale and with a global target audience need a website that clearly states: “We’re open for business, and we speak your language.” Why? Here’s one good reason: 84% of B2B consumers surveyed in non-English speaking countries were more likely to purchase products online if information is in their native language. (Common Sense Advisory)

I Get it, It’s Difficult
True, localizing multiple versions of a company website for regional markets is not as easy as snapping a few photos on your iPhone. But consider the payoff when done correctly: more than 85% of the world’s population does not speak English. If you can reach them in their language with a message about your company that resonates, you will be rewarded with global brand recognition, message consistency, and, of course, an increased source of leads and revenue.

Take Marketo, for Example.
Marketo operates in three international markets: EMEA (United Kingdom, France and Germany), APJ (Australia and Japan) and North America (U.S. and Canada). They offer six localized versions of the Marketo marketing website to better engage with the international audience who visit. Nice.

Marketo has their global presence up and running now, however, they initially faced a typical challenge for any web development team: How do we deliver a consistent, high quality and up-to-date web-based experience across all target markets?

As Easy As… Snapping a Selfie?
Alright, maybe not that easy. The product team at Marketo was already using Cloudwords to localize materials when a senior lead on their web team began investigating how Cloudwords might help address issues with their website translation process.

I encourage you to read the case study to learn more about Marketo’s successful implementation of Cloudwords, but -- *spoiler alert* -- Marketo is now in full control of their localized sites, getting content translated and updated in 3 to 5 days versus 2 to 3 weeks, a time savings of 75%.

Perhaps most importantly, however, is that their professional, high quality, localized sites reflect the image Marketo wants to portray to the world: “We deliver personalized experiences in the local languages of our customers and prospects, and are committed to investing in global markets.”

LocWorld29 in Silicon Valley
If you’re planning to attend LocWorld this week, Cloudwords’ CEO, Scott Yancey, and Marketo’s senior manager of web development, Rick Redondo, will be presenting this very case study on Friday, Oct. 16, at 10am at LocWorld Silicon Valley at the Santa Clara Convention Center. They’ll also share website localization best practices and strategies to optimize the process. If you’d like to speak with Cloudwords at the event, let me know.

Click here to read the full case study, and contact Cloudwords to find out how we can help your company improve it’s global-facing selfie.

5 Steps to a DIY Global Content Operation

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:48:14 GMT

As a marketer tasked with expanding to new markets, it might seem like you’ll need to spend a lot of new resources and talent to build your global content operation. But it ain’t necessarily so.

With what you already have, plus a good plan, the right tools and a dose of patience, you can build a great “DIY” operation.

DIY at work is pretty much like DIY in your home workshop: Get a plan, study it, make sure you’ve got everything you need to start, and then take it on step by step. Our basic plan, which is detailed in The DIY Guide to Taking Content Global, has just five steps that will get you results:

#1) Strategize it! Work with your people in every region to link business goals, customer needs, and regional considerations to a content strategy for all the relevant markets and languages. Remember – this is a global operation, so don’t try to create the strategy from headquarters. That’s like forgetting half the parts for your home DIY project: Neither of them is likely to hold together well.

#2) Design it! You’ve got a strategy – that’s the big picture. Now, lay out the parts, the content. Make sure they all fit together, and that when you assemble them you’ll get the outcome you want. Make sure to consider all the regional needs and demands and come up with guidelines for everything. You’re doing the equivalent of mixing English and metric measurements in one home project, so you need to have a way to keep the whole thing aligned. Remember the old carpenter’s wisdom: Measure twice, cut once.

#3) Build it! Pull your team together – after all, you need a lot of different expertise for a big project, right? – and create the content, the channel strategy and the workflow. Make sure everything from the channels to the copy and design work is relevant to each region and handled by the right expert. You’re building something to suit a unique space, so you want folks looking at all the angles to make sure everything fits perfectly.

#4) Deliver it! Get the content out there and in front of the people who need to see it. And remember that this is a pretty big undertaking, so just like a big home project, it makes sense to have some extra hands to deal with the load. A translation automation platform like Cloudwords can make this a seamless process.

#5) Check it! You’ve put version 1.0 of your global content operation into play. But you’re not done yet – you still need to see how well you did. How are things working in each market? What went right and what do you need to fix? These answers are vital because they go right back to step one; just like a home DIY project, maintenance is what gives your work longevity.

Again, technology like the Cloudwords dashboard can help you understand results and make changes.

Getting Back to Our Roots at Dreamforce

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:44:03 GMT

I very rarely hear people refer to the “World Wide Web” anymore. In the ‘90s we were obsessed with sites like Yahoo, the burgeoning idea of e-commerce, and “going online” to use AOL to email friends in faraway places. The Internet is truly worldwide and has connected—and greatly impacted—countries and economies in multiple ways, from access to information to entire businesses built purely online.

Today, our business culture has become obsessed with social media and cloud-based automation platforms accessible at our fingertips to connect us with everyone, everywhere—colleagues, business prospects and even strangers—around the world. However, while the WWW has created a global economy, it was clear from my walk through the Cloud Expo at Dreamforce’15 last week, that few companies (read: none) were promoting solutions with a global user base front of mind.

Saleforce’s Dreamforce conference has grown to become a tech industry phenomenon, featuring speakers from global tech companies like Microsoft, Cisco, YouTube and Uber. Salesforce is a global powerhouse after all, with a presence in every major geographical region. In fact, a USA Today article reported this year’s show, the 13th, attracted attendees from 78 countries, yet there was little or no accommodation of non-English speaking guests.

At the Cloudwords booth, our team spoke with attendees from all over the world—Argentina, Burma, Brazil, Canada, France, India, and Switzerland to name a few—fielding questions about globalization best practices from companies big and small. B2B heavyweights like Oracle, Siemens, and Intel; consumer leaders such as Coca-Cola and Mattel; and smaller, local businesses like the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center and Visit Orlando, were all interested in learning how a Global Content Hub like Cloudwords can help them execute business worldwide. The big question… “I’m buying and implementing all these highly efficient sales and marketing automation platforms, but how do I now reach audiences with multilingual content?” Of course, we were happy to explain how Cloudwords can help, and we left the conference even more galvanized in our belief that companies will increasingly demand technology to solve this issue.

Dreamforce may not be billed as an international show, but digital has no borders. And like the World Wide Web twenty-some years ago, it brings companies, customers and prospects together to learn, network and expand their business opportunities. As Salesforce and Dreamforce continue to grow, it will be interesting to see whether the sponsoring and exhibiting companies that make significant investments to attend will respond to the growing demand by international customers for solutions that work the way they do—globally.

A #DF15: The Indisputable Worth of a Global Content Hub

lucas++++@cloudwords.com (Cloudwords) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 19:38:30 GMT

This week tens of thousands of marketing, sales and tech professionals have descended upon San Francisco to attend Dreamforce, Benioff’s now-legendary cloud technology conference that takes over the city every fall. It sounds cliché, but people do come from all over the world (78 countries, in fact!) and from all different industries to attend. At the Cloudwords booth in the Cloud Expo, I enjoy listening to the challenges many marketers face as they lament about the slow, old school approaches they use to translate marketing content.

Yes, “enjoy” seems a harsh way to describe my feelings while listening to someone’s troubles. However, the joy comes when our team of globalization experts demo Cloudwords and they experience the “wow” factor – the moment when they realize there is an easier way – a much, much easier way – to localize content.

Hearing people at our booth talk about how difficult it is for them to get localized sales and marketing materials to regional sales teams not only on time, but in sync with other regional markets, I ask, “Well, what marketing automation software are you using?” The responses I get usually include a blank stare.

Making the Connection

Why does it matter? What does localization have to do with marketing automation, and what difference does it make? Because connecting your Translation Automation Platform to your marketing automation solution – whether it is ExactTarget, Marketo, Pardot or Eloqua – speeds the translation workflow from content creation to content delivery by 80 percent.

In fact, connecting Cloudwords with the marketing technology you already use is the best way to create a Global Content Hub, and just one reason of many to own translation automation software.

Discover 8 Great Reasons

On Friday, along with my colleague and tech expert Micah Dulak, I’ll be presenting a session at the Dreamforce Partner Theater to share the business-building benefits of a Global Content Hub like Cloudwords, including how it can help you:

Increase conversion rates
Integrate existing content marketing technology systems
Update assets in deployment-ready mode
Get to market faster
Reduce errors and risk
Add accountability and collaboration
Manage translation spend
Maintain a consistent brand around the world

Join us!

Innovation, inspiration and idea sharing – these are the underlying themes we’re hearing throughout the Cloud Expo, and Cloudwords is proud to be a part of the excitement as a Salesforce partner and Silver sponsor. If you’re attending Dreamforce, stop by the Cloudwords booth in the North Hall at N1240 – you can sign up to use Cloudwords basic package for free and get a chance to win a trip to Paris. (If you’re not at Dreamforce, you can also click here to sign up.)

In addition, we are offering free 90-day access to our Salesforce Marketing Cloud connector, or whichever marketing automation solution you already use, if you sign up for Cloudwords’ free basic package at our booth. With your content marketing tech connected to Cloudwords, you can start localizing your email campaigns with just a click. It’s really that easy.

So stop by and say hello, bonjour, hola, etc!