Three Reasons to Translate your Site in French

There is simply no denying that the digital revolution has opened up the borders where commerce is concerned. No matter what size your business may be having a website is vital, but some businesses do not take advantage of the possibilities of translating their site into languages other than English. French is one language that is often overlooked, yet it is one that can potentially increase your customer base. As one of the more powerful economic forces in Europe, France remains important where international sales are concerned.

Paris Old Metro Signboard

French language Experts in London – source

 

Why translating your site in French?

Every business, online or otherwise, is dependent upon reaching a target audience that is interested in the products or services it provides. Where the internet is concerned this is of vital importance. Consider this fact: 83% of the French population uses the internet, and it has been proven that if you offer readers a site in their own language they are five times more likely to purchase from you. The sheer number of potential customers just within France cannot easily be overlooked, and there are more benefits to consider.

Canada and Further

It should not be forgotten that, in addition to France itself, the language is the first form much of the population of Canada; indeed, it is a fact that, across the world, 75million people have French as a first language. This is a figure that implies a very large target audience that you need to tap into. Both France and Canada are well-developed and thriving commercial centres, and with the world of internet commerce growing all the time, you need to be on the ball when it comes to attracting these international customers.

Not only are France and Canada important countries for international commerce, but having a website in foreign languages, including French, shows that you are interested in the people who speak that language, and they will appreciate your courtesy in taking the trouble to give them a French language site. A major player in the European Union, and in Europe itself, France cannot be overlooked in terms of major potential sales gains, and it would be beneficial to translate your site into French to capitalise on this opportunity.

The Role of Language Media LTD

Language Media Ltd is a web translation company based in London. We are French language consultancy experts when it comes to French language content copy writing, blogging, adwords management, SEO and translating. If your company wants to target the French speaking world we can help translating, search engine optimising and create new content for your company.

Why You Should Translate Your Site in Italian

Emergence of Italian e-commerce

With over 63 million Italian speakers worldwide, today Italy is one of the fastest developing e-commerce markets in the world. Being third after China and India in terms of digital shopping growth rate, Italian-speaking consumers have been consistently creating a high demand for online retail businesses.
Since the beginning of e-commerce upsurge in 2010, the number of regular Italian e-shoppers has grown dramatically and is approaching 10 million at present time; this amount continues to rise as consumer confidence increases and internet shopping becomes a way of lifestyle.. Since English is a foreign tongue for most Italians, translating content into the native language of your potential customers might be a vital step of the marketing strategy and brand exposure.
Below are a few prominent reasons for launching your website in Italian:

Italian Flag

Italian Language Experts in London – source

 

Overall Digital Market Penetration

Digital penetration in Italy has made a grand leap in recent years as online shopping has become a growing trend: in a country where 60% of the population have regular access to the internet connection, millions of buyers are making virtual purchases on a continual basis.
During the next two years from today the percentage of online shoppers is likely to exceed the 50% of the total population, while the number of transactions will reach beyond 180 million. As digital devices such as tablets and smartphones become more affordable web shopping intervenes into daily routine of Italian consumers. Meeting their satisfaction expectations by offering a translated version of your website is a most certain way to enhance user involvement and, potentially, boost your sales.

Growing E-commerce Opportunities

As an emerging market, Italy has a noticeably higher growth perspective than mature markets which are beyond an active extension phase.
While the vast majority of consumers still choose PC as their primary means of purchasing goods online, usage of tablets and mobile devices gradually becomes part of the e-shopping custom. Mobile apps accessible in the Italian language should benefit both users and business owners who are most interested to support the trend. Since mobile e-commerce spreading pattern is very similar to the PC shopping tendency, investing in apps and mobile pages translation should pay off in the long run.

Rising Consumer Confidence

Italian e-commerce proves to be on a steadily developing track backed by the rising consumer confidence. Whereas the digital shopping spree mostly influences younger sectors of the population, the prospects are that people aged 35 and up will fit the online shopping scenario. Consumers familiar with internet shopping have their own habits and expectations – comprehensive content and navigation are usually the most common ones; making your website available in the user’s native tongue may, therefore, be the decisive factor in the purchasing process.
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The inception of e-commerce and online buying patterns have reshaped retail business models all around the internet world: targeting international audience imposes optimization adjustments, one of which is providing web-content in the prospect’s mother language; being the fourth most populated country in Europe with an intensively growing virtual shopping tendencies, Italian market is becoming a lucrative target for trading companies and global retailers.

The Role of Language Media LTD London  and the Italian Language.

We are a multilingual expert company based in London. We can help you with your Italian language online and web marketing efforts, Seo, copy writing. If you need new content for your Italian website we would be glad to help your company to gain new clients. We have proven track of Italian language SEO success and adwords management.

 

The Benefits of Expanding Your Site to More Languages

How many people are you reaching with your website in the language it currently is in? Many business people create excellent websites and do a great deal of SEO so that they can get ranked by Google but they ignore one thing; that they should be reaching out to more people than just those who can read and understand English. Allowing translation on a website opens up a world of possibility in terms of the number of people you can get to buy from you. Imagine how much your sales would increase, if for example, the people in China and India could read and understand your website. The numbers are in the billions. Converting even a fraction of these would change the bottom line of your business. By not having what we can call international website content, you are seriously limiting the potential your business has to make you rich.
Mind Your Language: 01/01/07

multiple languages will help your business – source

Another thing to take into account is that people generally like to be addressed in their own language. The sense of foreignness is dispelled. They are much more likely to open up to your message if they feel that you are one of them. And once they open up, you have every chance of converting them into prospects and even customers.  It doesn’t matter that they may have a glimpse of English or even that they can read it and understand it very well. A millionaire in Nairobi who knows English and who is looking to buy something online will most likely look at the websites that are in his traditional Swahili language; it just feels a lot more familiar to him and familiarity breeds trust. Now, imagine that he is happy with the product or service and starts to talk about it with his other rich Nigerian friends; won’t they buy from you the next time they need it? It doesn’t cost much to have your website translated. There are many services that create multi-lingual content for websites, and they translate most of the world’s popular languages, at least the ones that are spoken by multitudes.
Translation buys you one other advantage; you may inadvertently discover entirely new niches that you would have missed entirely. A whole new group of people could discover you and start buying from you simply because they are looking for your product or service and your website is in a language that they can understand. You can then work on growing these new niches so that you can reach out to even more people. And remember, the number of people who speak English in the world are less than those who speak other tongues so the potential for your sales to exponentially increase among non-English speakers remains huge. Even cornering a small percentage of non-English speakers who consistently buy from you will see a big jump in sales.
To conclude, translation is worth the money and the time that you will put into it. Having multi-lingual doorways will open doors that you otherwise never have known existed.

Three Twitter Tips For Small Businesses

Small businesses really need a social media marketing strategy as much as large corporations need one.  It may even be more important for a small business owner to take the time to get their name known on a large forum such as Twitter.  This can seem like a huge undertaking but actually once you get going it’s quite easy to keep up with.  There are a great many mistakes that small businesses can make to undo all the good their social media campaign offered the business.  If you follow the tips below, you won’t make any mistakes and your Twitter will become a favorite with your followers.

Twitter

Twitter might help your small business to find new clients – source

 

Keep it Real

You never want to lie or to offer anything that is not true on your Twitter feed because this produces a lack of trust between you and your followers.  Just keep it real and tell it like it is to a certain degree.  This doesn’t mean that you should use your business account as a platform for your personal opinions, you have a personal account for that, but when it comes to your company be honest.  If you are asked for something that you cannot provide, rather than saying you can do it and then outsourcing the project for a profit, send your follower a link so they can do it on their own.  This saves your customers’ money and they are more inclined to purchase from you at a later time.

Build Lasting Relationships with Customers

It is important to build lasting relationships with your customers so they want to continue following your business feed.  For instance, if you own a restaurant and a customer tweets about how great the food was, retweet their post and thank them for it.  You could go as far as to engage them in a conversation about what their meal was and what about it they liked the best.  Offer them a small discount for posting about your company.  You can also do this in the brick and mortar building.  Any diner who tweets about your food automatically gets ten percent off their meal.  This tactic works in any industry and builds a lasting rapport with your followers.

Never Spam Your Followers

Once of the gravest sins that a business can make is spamming their followers with a plethora of tweets intending to drive traffic to a website or brick and mortar store.  Twitter should be a fun place where you customers and followers can find something of value out of your tweets.  Even if they only get a laugh out of a tweet you made you are engaging, not spamming them.  While you can certainly use Twitter to promote your company, there is a huge line drawn between what is considered spam and what is considered a good tweet.  Learn it and know it if you want to keep your followers.

Small businesses everywhere are learning the benefits of having a good Twitter account where they can get real with their customers and build lasting relationships with them too.  Just remember to keep the spam posts to a minimum or you may find your company no longer has a Twitter account because you’ve been reported.  Nobody has time to fight a spam claim so just make sure that all your communications are top notch and you’ll do fine.

Samantha Murphy is a huge Twitter fan. When she’s not sharing her day with the Twitterverse, she also likes telling others how they can get more from Twitter via her articles.

Online Reputation Management For Medical Practices

Reputation has a direct correlation to the success of your medical practice and the number of patients you’ll have flowing in and out of your office. This is nothing new to the business world, but as online reputations are gaining more and more importance in today’s internet-obsessed world, it’s worth taking another look at.

Today, many people rely on internet searches to find health care providers, and a large majority of those potential patients will be easily swayed to and from medical practices by positive and negative reviews. Creating a good online reputation takes a large investment in time and energy, but with the growing emphasis on online reviews and ratings, it is ultimately worth it.

Potential patients that search for you on the internet will be immediately impacted by their results. If you don’t have an online presence at all, they will consider your practice not quite legitimate and unprofessional. A simple star rating, put into comparison with other medical professionals’ online ratings, could quickly and simply determine whether or not your practice is even up for consideration. Here are some basic tips for managing your online reputation to give the best impressions to potential patients online.

 

Dr Frank Scott Gordon (1877-1959)

Medial practices need to manage their online reputation – source

 

1. Confidentiality

This is probably the most important thing to consider when interacting with patients online, since confidentiality violations have some of the most serious consequences out of anything that could hurt you online. Review your HIPAA agreements, and, as a general rule, never share anything specific or personal about their information or procedures.

2. Take emotions out of your responses.

It hurts to read negative reviews, whether they’re true or not. And, unfortunately, it is impossible that 100% of your patients will have a 100% positive experience at your practice 100% of the time. Everyone gets negative reviews, and that fact actually makes your profile seem more credible when you have some negative reviews compared to if all of your reviews are raving about your brilliance. Before responding to a review, give yourself a day or two to make sure that emotions are filtered out of it. You want to respond as civilly and professionally as possible.

3. Respond Wisely

It doesn’t need to be said that it is important to respond and reply to reviews, both positive and negative. This gives you a chance to show gratitude to those who are promoting you and an explanation to those who haven’t had a good experience. However, remember that you won’t be able to please everyone. Do not get involved in extensive arguments online, pointing fingers and slanting insults; this makes you look childish, and while your accuser may not have much to lose by continuing this flame war, you do. Beyond one or two responses at most, let the issue go, and if you can identify the patient, just give them a call to discuss it in a more private and personal manner.

4. Ask your patients for feedback.

Actively encourage your patients to post feedback online. The type of patient most likely to take their own initiative to take the time to post a review online is one that had a negative experience. However, by encouraging your patients to post reviews will boost the number of positive reviews and thus balance out the overall perception of your practice.

Olivia Lin writes for Austin Oral Surgery, an oral surgery clinic always looking to maintain its reputation.

Search Engine: The Most Powerful Marketing Tool Ever Invented

Digital marketing is rapidly taking place of traditional advertising: newspaper ads, radio and TV are not as popular as they were a decade ago. There are several good reasons that stand behind company’s choice to run Google Ad Words campaign and pay for sponsored links rather than invest in a newspaper promotional text. Traditional commercials principal is “the more the better” focusing primarily on massive exposure, being unable to track and measure user engagement in the advertised product. The internet, however, allows following people’s online activity and displaying targeted ads based on user search history.

Here are three main reasons why search engine proves to be the best marketing tool.

Being Online Is Vital From Marketing Perspective

Web search is the most popular way of receiving and sharing information of any kind. Statistic shows that the majority of users check out local stores and businesses on the web before making a call or visiting the place. Companies with highly ranked websites significantly benefit from the search engine and the search process, as they are easily found by potential customers. This is why every business and organization today finds it essential to maintain online presence: a website, a blog or a social page.

Targeted Audience On A Global Scale

Traditional marketing, such as TV commercials or advertisement boards, is usually applied to the masses without considering the interest of a particular consumer. This results with high exposure but low involvement rate. Local promotion activities such as mass mailing or flier distribution have their own disadvantage, being restricted to regional populations only. Unable to target the potentially interested customer, 90% of these leaflets and letters end up in the garbage.

Internet marketing, on the contrary, allows tracking users’ activity on the web and building an online behavioral pattern for each individual. Based on cookies and cache data files, Google Ad Words, for example, displays only targeted ads on the browser page – ads that go in line with the user’s browsing history and search queries. People who see these ads have been previously looking for the keywords mentioned in the commercial text. The relevance is what makes the difference and increases the chances the ad will be clicked through.

Cost-Effective: Control Your Expenses, Monitor Your Data

The enormous range of marketing campaigns available on the internet gives a business owner the freedom to determine their actions according to the budget, scale and goals. Google Ad Words PPC, for example, has flexible pricing model varying from $0.1 to $1.5 per single click. Keyword research tools help identify the most influential and competitive keywords and price them accordingly.

Most of the campaigns include search engine optimization (SEO). Every webpage has its own rank based on keywords, tags and links. Google Webmaster Tools is a free, user friendly application which allows monitoring website activity and experiencing with keywords in order to improve the page placement.

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Web marketing has several significant advantages over traditional advertising. Cost, flexibility and targeted ads are the most recognizable ones; however, other benefits lay under the surface: the customer feedback system, multiple content formats and social features – to name a few.

Getting acknowledged by users and search engines requires time and dedication, but in the end of the day the effort is definitely paid off.

 

 

 

 

 

How The Web Is Changing The Wine Industry

Like every industry alive today, the internet is changing the wine industry. While selling wine online is difficult, wine has found a number of interesting and unique niche’s in online communities from tasting chats on Twitter to huge Facebook daily deal site’s specifically tailored to wine.

That being said, the wine industry is being changed inexorably by the internet, perhaps in more ways than anyone can count.

Here’s what I see:

Easier Access for Winemakers:

We are undoubtedly in the era of superstar and travelling winemakers.  Perhaps never before in our history has the ease of travel made it possible for winemakers to consult on multiple continents during the same growing season. We won’t even start to talk about the huge number of winemakers spending part of their year in California and the other part in Chile, that’s happening more and more every year.  Part of the ease has come about because the internet allows the instant transfer of information.  Winemakers can now login to their computer from anywhere in the world and not only see a live view of fermentation in action, but also understand the exact measurements of heat, sugar levels and much more from that fermentation.  No longer will winemakers waste time driving to the winery, only to find that fermentation hasn’t started yet and that they should come back tomorrow. That access and information can allow a winemaker to pick and follow fermentation Sauvignon Blanc in Bordeaux one week and then Napa Valley in the next, only to do the same months later when red wine grapes come in.

Cheaper Wine:

We’ve all seen the rise (and usually the fall) of daily deal sites like Groupon.  The wine industry has done well on many of those sites and they are without a doubt, part of the reason we’re seeing cheaper wine.  That being said though, the pressure placed on wine prices by the internet goes much further.  There was a time when a single retailer in San Francisco could put a specific wine on sale, without anyone else having any clue about that arrangement.  Now, because of the internet and sites like Wine Searcher, a single retailer can be responsible for driving down prices of a wine across the entire country.

Better Consumer Choice:

A generation ago there were about 20 nation wide distributors of wine.  Those 20 companies were able to largely pick winner’s and losers in the world of wine, by deciding the wines carried at virtually every restaurant, wine store, grocery store and drug store in America.  After the economic bubble burst in 2007 though, that number has shrunk to 4 nation wide distributors.  Luckily, the internet allows consumers the ability to exchange information with each other, talking about who is making good wine and who isn’t.  If you want information about an obscure vineyard you passed on your last trip to Italy-the internet is going to be the only place to find something like that.  Of course, online you’ll also be able to see the wines available to you locally from that winery and how much they cost.

Mark Aselstine is the owner of Uncorked Ventures, an online wine club based just outside of San Francisco.