What is the secret behind the successful websites of well-known brands? The moment you visit the Dutch version of the website of Coca Cola, Nike or Nescafé, you are immediately presented with relevant content. But if you visit the Peruvian, Czech or German version of these sites, you get to see a completely different website. Some homepages are completely adapted to certain holidays, while others emphasize local initiatives or the effects of Covid-19. When developing the web content, these companies took into account what was relevant to their audience at the time. They did not simply have their website translated, but they tailored their website to a completely different audience.
You've probably heard that Coca Cola uses a different recipe for each country or that McDonald's products are prepared slightly differently everywhere, based on tastes in different regions. Sometimes even completely new products are introduced to the market that are specifically aimed at locals, such as Coca Cola with soft-serve ice cream (Hong Kong) or McDonald's lobster burger (Canada) and calzones with tomato and mozzarella (Italy). With this product strategy, a company plays to local attention and builds a better connection with the local target audience. This strategy also works for website content.
Nike's marketers looked not only at what works for a particular audience, but also at what does NOT work. After the 2016 European Football Championship finals, for example, Nike used a photo of the winning Portuguese soccer team for most homepages. Only the French website featured a different photo.
Why? The French national team lost to the Portuguese. Nike's marketing team assumed, perhaps correctly, that the French preferred not to be confronted with this loss. So to avoid a negative experience with the brand, Nike chose to put a different image on this page.
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Nescafé also deals strategically with global cultural differences: they focus on different coffee cultures. There are different coffee traditions all over the world: sweet coffee in a flower-patterned cup in Istanbul, a quick espresso at the bar in Rome or a welcome coffee in Brazil. These different traditions have led to different ways of talking about coffee.
Being able to correctly describe that special coffee moment is crucial, and Nescafé has put a lot of effort into this. Each country has its own homepage with its own look and welcome text, tailored to the local audience. Nescafé thus shows that it knows both the language and the culture.
Big brands are rightly investing heavily in a multilingual digital presence. 75% of consumers prefer to store on websites in their own language. This means that a translated, localized website is crucial to an international marketing strategy. These brands are trying to create a localized impression with their website that does have the same look and feel and marketing power as the original website. For this, not only the correct country language is important, but also the language of the target audience. Such websites are then completed by unique, locally relevant content.
The gist of these examples of great brands is that researching your audience gives you a big advantage. A marketing strategy is much more effective if the website is more precisely tailored to the audience. So don't translate a website literally, but have your website translated by a translation agency experienced in marketing translation. Sometimes you can achieve your goal even with minor adjustments, but we recommend learning from Nike to avoid embarrassing misses.
