With company budgets getting tighter and tighter year-on-year, justifying your spend is becoming more important than ever. Budgets set aside for translation related activities are often some of the first to be slashed, despite the growing importance of providing your customers with information in their own language.

So how can you make sure you safeguard your translation budget? As with anything – you need to prove the Return On Investment (ROI) for the outlay. A lot of Sales and Marketing activity can be justified by showing the end results, so why should localisation efforts be any different?

Let’s look at a relatable example:

If your marketing team produces a whitepaper on “Advanced Localisation” and translates it into German – it’s likely you’ll be able to see exactly how many people have downloaded the German version from your website, via your CRM system or website analytics tool.

You can then use your CRM to check the average selling price of your product in Germany, as well as the standard conversion rate of leads to customers.

By doing this, you can then place a monetary value on an individual lead, even if it may not close for an unknown amount of time.

You can then compare this individual lead value against the cost it took to translate the Whitepaper, and you can then prove that your localisation spend played a major contribution to the bottom line of your German marketing efforts.

Hopefully your Management team will fully support your localisation spend, but it’s good to know that if you ever need to justify this spend, you have some concrete figures and data to rest on.

Retaining your localisation budget is essential for global growth, so make sure you can prove its value with real-world business metrics.