Interviews, insight & analysis on digital media & marketing

Brands are hindering global growth by failing to localise marketing

As new research reveals a significant amount of businesses are missing out on global opportunities by failing to go multilingual, enterprise CMS leader Storyblok has partnered with Lokalise, a leading AI-powered translation tool, to enable brands to localise content faster and easier than ever before. 

Lokalise is a continuous localisation and translation management platform that leverages AI and algorithms to perform automated translation of text or speech from one language to another. As a result of the new partnership, companies like CoachHub are able to use the Lokalise integration to seamlessly translate content in Storyblok into multiple languages, leading to a 25% reduction in time spent on content management.

The launch comes as research suggests that a stark number of businesses are limiting their ability to expand into international markets by failing to prioritise localisation. A recent global Storyblok survey amongst 500 marketers revealed that 79% of companies publish content in only 1-3 languages in their CMS. The largest percentage (35%) publish content in just one language.

Yet at the same time, 43% said translating and localising content is extremely important, and only 7% said it’s not important. 81% also agree that publishing content in more languages would help their customer acquisition efforts, while 44% of that group said it would be a ‘huge help’ for those activities. 

This is comes as previous Storyblok reveals that providing content in a second language significantly increases the growth rate of traffic: adding 1 to 3 extra languages can lead to up to a 26% growth rate in a 3-month period and a 24% growth rate in a 6-month period 

Fortunately then, it would appear that AI has part of the answer with an overwhelming 90% stating they would consider using it to translate content in their CMS into more languages. Storyblok’s integration with Lokalise makes this possible by bringing AI-powered translations into the CMS.

Petr Antropov, Co-Founder of Lokalise, shared: “It’s fascinating to see the size of the gap between companies that offer their products and services in only one language (35% of the survey’s participants), and, say, half of Lokalise’s 3500 customers that run their offers in eight or more languages. Thanks to recent technological developments which made localization no longer a challenge but an opportunity, that gap will not stay for long, and we’re excited to play a part in the change.”

Barry D’Arcy, VP of Partners at Storyblok, said: “Enterprises understand the value of translating their content, but many fail to prioritize it because the path forward appears to be unclear or overly complicated. Our partnership with Lokalise makes translation and localization a natural part of content workflows. 2024 should be the year that more businesses finally take multilingual content experiences seriously.”