Are there still manufacturers that don’t do exports? Hardly. The overall share of sales generated abroad is steadily increasing. This explains why many companies have set up multilingual websites.
These companies gain a significant competitive edge by addressing potential customers in their native language. With each additional language, they increase the number of sales leads from the corresponding countries by a factor of 3 to 5.
But there are still companies that carelessly give away this potential in B2B sales lead generation because they walk into the language trap. Read this article to find out what it’s all about and how these companies can still get their act together.
Inhalt
▶ B2B sales lead generation – another company falls into the language trap
▶ Successful B2B sales lead generation with multilingual content on specialist portals
▶ The importance of specialist portals for worldwide B2B sales lead generation
▶ Why do specialist portals have such an enormous reach?
▶ Example: LUMITOS’s Chemistry Channel for a multilingual reach
▶ What does it take to have your content appear in multiple languages on specialist portals?
▶ My recommendations
B2B sales lead generation – another company falls into the language trap
At a meeting hosted by a trade association, a marketing manager lamented her plight to me. Stefanie’s story will show you how dangerous the language trap is in B2B sales lead generation.
Stefanie was a marketing manager at a successful export-focused SME. Over the years, she and her team enhanced its website with relevant content. She had been able to convince the company’s founder that a bilingual website was not enough to attract customers in Spanish and French speaking countries. First, Spanish language content was added to the website, followed by French content. The number of sales leads from where the languages are spoken increased year by year. Everyone was happy about the success of Stefanie’s measures.
All of a sudden, things got restless. The company’s owner wanted to retire and sold to an American group. Hard times began for Stefanie.
The new owners turned the company on its head. “Costs have to come down, the return on investment has to increase.”
One cost item was the multilingual website, which the new boss regarded as dispensable. “The whole world speaks English. A monolingual English website, like we’ve had for 20 years ourselves, is perfectly sufficient,” Stefanie was told. “We’ll keep the English content of your website and save ourselves all the translation and maintenance work from now on.”
That was three years ago. The old, multilingual website was “switched off” and only the English language content was integrated into the group’s website.
It wasn’t long before Stefanie saw a steady decline in sales leads from Latin America, Spain and France for “her” products. “No wonder,” she thought, “potential customers prefer to search in their native language. The content on our English website is invisible to these people.”
I felt sympathy for Stefanie. After all, I’d had a similar experience years ago as a marketing manager.
At the time, I looked for a solution to a similar problem and eventually found one. I compensated for the loss of “my” multilingual website by advertising on third-party specialist portals with a multilingual reach. This didn’t work the same way, but it did get me significant numbers of sales leads from French and Spanish speaking countries again, and at reasonable cost.
Successful B2B sales lead generation with multilingual content on specialist portals
Multilingual websites make companies visible to potential customers around the globe and increase their sales. Surprisingly, only about 50% of websites are bilingual.
If you want to generate more sales leads from around the world, there are two options:
- 1. Continuously expand your own website to include more languages, which will generate more sales leads in the medium term. This, however, is time-consuming. Content must be created in all the languages and regularly reviewed.
2. Offer your most important content in additional languages on specialist portals with a multilingual reach. This can be done very quickly and requires very little effort.
To give you a feeling of how effective multilingual advertising on third-party specialist portals is, here are some examples based on the specialist portals hosted by LUMITOS.
The importance of specialist portals for worldwide B2B sales lead generation
Third-party specialist portals bring suppliers and users together. They attract users by editorial content such as industry news. In such an editorial environment, suppliers can introduce their company, present their most important products and share know-how in the form of white papers or webinars.
When potential customers wish to participate in a webinar or request information from a supplier, they fill out an online contact form. The respective supplier receives the data and may use it for further communication.
Companies that advertise on specialist portals such as CHEMEUROPE.COM continuously receive sales leads.
Depending on the amount of advertising they place, suppliers can achieve impressive results: within 12 months, top advertisers get up to 45,000 page views and 1,400 sales leads this way.
Why do specialist portals have such an enormous reach?
The usefulness of third-party specialist portals in B2B sales lead generation is essentially determined by two factors:
- 1. The number of active users on the portal.
2. The number of subscribers who receive one or more newsletters each week.
The number of active users is strongly influenced by the availability of interesting, multilingual content. This, in turn, has a positive effect on the number of newsletter subscribers, which grows continuously as a result. Both these factors ensure that advertisers gain valuable sales leads.
Example: LUMITOS’s Chemistry Channel for a multilingual reach
The Chemistry Channel covers three specialist portals for the chemical industry and its suppliers:
- ▶ The German language portal chemie.de with 5.4 million users annually.
▶ The English and French language portal chemeurope.com with 1.1 million users per year.
▶ The Spanish language portal quimica.es with 2.6 million users every year.
Additional languages boost the reach of specialist portals
Content in four languages can address significantly more potential customers than monolingual or bilingual portals. This supports advertisers in their worldwide B2B sales lead generation efforts.
If companies place their third-party advertising in only one language, they are giving away sales leads. A comparison of several product presentations has shown just how great the effect of multilingual content is.
Companies that advertise their product in English, German, Spanish and French average 250% more sales leads than companies that advertise their product only in English or German.
Multilingual product presentations pay off in B2B sales lead generation
Portal newsletters as impact multipliers
When companies book a product presentation on the portals of LUMITOS’s Chemistry Channel, several references in the corresponding English, German and Spanish newsletters are included, as long as the company makes the content of the product presentation available in all these languages. So what happens if a company doesn’t make use of this? Let’s take a look at three cases:
Case A
A company orders a product presentation and provides the details in English only. The product gets a reference in three editions of the English-language chemeurope.com newsletter with its 27,000 subscribers. The advertising message thus reaches only the English-speaking subscribers
Case B
Another company supplies the details for the product presentation in German and English. The product is now presented in three editions of both the German-language chemie.de newsletter with its 28,000 subscribers and the chemeurope.com newsletter with 27,000 subscribers. This alone increases visibility by 100% without the advertiser having to pay more.
Case C
A marketing manager has understood the benefits of multilingual content. He delivers the content to compile the product presentation in German and English. In addition, he books to be present on the Spanish language portal quimica.es. He doesn’t have a professional translator for Spanish at hand, so he has the content translated by LUMITOS.
Subscribers to the chemie.de, chemeurope.com and quimica.es newsletters see the advertised product on three occasions in each. The company thus reaches the 28,000 German speaking, 27,000 English speaking and 16,000 Spanish speaking readers of the newsletters.
This increases visibility by a remarkable 260% over Case A. This company makes maximum use of the potential the portals’ newsletters offer for B2B sales lead generation.
Newsletters in multiple languages allow companies to increase their international B2B sales lead generation enormously.
What does it take to have your content appear in multiple languages on specialist portals?
As a marketing manager, I always used third-party specialist portals with a worldwide reach to amplify B2B sales lead generation. For a favorable cost-benefit ratio, I focused on our most important products. I asked myself:
▶ Which of my product lines sell best?
▶ Which is the most important product within each product line?
Depending on the number of product lines, this resulted in five to ten products.
For each product selected to represent a product line, we provided the following details to the administrator of the specialist portal:
▶ Headline
▶ Short product description with the most important features and benefits
▶ Meaningful images
If not already available, we had our German content translated into the target languages English, French and Spanish. At 150 euros per language, this was less costly than expected.
My recommendations
Addressing potential customers in their native language will give your company a significant competitive edge in B2B sales lead generation.
To get underway on this path, I recommend this proven approach:
- 1. Analyze your product portfolio. What’s the most important product within each product line?
2. You’ve identified one to three important products? Then provide the descriptions and images for all the products in a single go.
3. You’ve identified four or more products? Then provide the materials for them in batches at certain intervals, not all at once. This will get you your first sales leads sooner.
4. Order all translations together. This helps the translation agency with its planning and you might get a volume discount.
5. Keep track of the incoming sales leads. Which countries do the inquiries come from? This will help you gain experience that you can use to your benefit in later projects.
If you want to find out how multilingual content can help you generate more sales leads in your chemical, life science or food & beverage company,
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