This year’s African Languages Conference theme is “Harnessing African Languages for Digital Transformation and Social Justice.”

As technology continues to develop and infiltrate the continent, the conference will focus on the importance of African Languages in shaping that technology, making it accessible to all, and promoting cultural identity.

Taking place during African Languages Week (February 21 to 28, 2005), the conference will include sessions on language preservation, language services such as translation and interpretation, and education.

In its fourth year, the conference will be a hybrid event allowing attendees worldwide to participate virtually. If you are in Nigeria on February 21^st, you can attend the event in person.

Globalization Partners International is proud to be a Gold sponsor of this event.

To learn more about the conference, please visit the African Languages Conference website and check out Celebrating the Language and Cultural Diversity of Africa: AFLC 2025 Kicks Off This February

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For the second year in a row the M Resort Spa & Casino hosted the Intelligent Content Conference (ICC) in Las Vegas, NV. As a first-time attendee of ICC I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. GPI has attended several content marketing-focused events over the years and I was curious to see how this one differentiated itself from the rest.

Well, ICC did not disappoint. According to Gartner, “in 2020, content will become marketing’s biggest bottleneck.” ICC’s sole focus was to give marketers the right tools to create and deploy a new kind of content strategy, less copy/paste mentality and more format-free and modular by providing a fresh perspective on delivering content exactly where, when and how audiences like it.

The conference was designed specifically for marketers and offered something for everyone, from the novice looking to get their feet wet to the content wizard seeking to further optimize their already slick content strategy.

Aside from great keynotes and general sessions by industry leaders such as Google, Amazon and Salesforce, this three-day event provided several conference tracks to choose from and each focused on a different aspect of content. I attended sessions in the Tools & Technology, Core Concepts, Advanced Planning and Content Collaboration tracks and had great take-aways from every single one of them.

A Few Highlights

Say No to Grow: How Narrowing Your Focus and Defining Personas Can Fuel Growth, Rebecca Geier, CEO and Co-Founder of TREW Marketing.

Rebecca took us on a path of conceptualizing one’s content strategy along the funnel by basing it on personas and understanding the importance of defining your core position and message. She made a compelling point for “scaling up by narrowing down” and focusing only on what it is we know and do best.

Her tips were:

• Say NO to Grow
• Think Customer First
• Go Deep!

Digital Standards for Complex Multi-Site, Multi-Language and Multi-Channel Digital Presences, Kristina Podnar, Digital Policy Advisor, NativeTrust Consulting, LLC.

This session made an excellent argument for the need for digital standards across all web, social or mobile platforms and channels for global organizations as they still often fall short of producing consistently high-quality content. Rather than seeing standards as a hinderance to creativity, organizations must recognize that in the absence of consistent enterprise-wide standards, companies risk putting out uneven content resulting in poor customer experiences. Statistics from a QualityZ Online Survey further underscored this argument:

• 76% of websites have inconsistent branding, unpredictable navigation, reinvention of content and multiple content platforms.
• 82% of global websites display inconsistent translation, lack of localization, uneven content prioritization and inaccessible information.

How to Create a Messaging Framework that Resonates, Pam Didner, Author of Global Content Marketing.

As was the case with Pam’s excellent workshop on setting up and managing a global, content-first marketing team where participants learned how to cover the five elements of content marketing (strategy, content plan, team, processes and budget) when creating their own plan, this session helped answer the two questions marketers are asked most often:

• How much budget do we have?
• How do we position our products and services?

Her step-by-step approach included dissecting a company’s content marketing efforts (i.e. product features vs. benefits, messaging vs. value propositions) and then creating a messaging framework by using simple, yet highly effective templates to organize and personalize content to address customers’ needs.

To that point, many organizations, even very large ones, still have a long way to go before mastering content. CMI’s 2018 Content Management/Strategy Research underscored that fact. Of all the companies that were part of this research study, mostly larger and global in nature, over 90% considered content a business asset, yet only 20% could be categorized as advanced or expert in the field. The biggest challenges that remain are talent, technology, governance and budget. All too often guilty of delivering “the right message at the wrong time” the key to understanding the meaning of relevance (what we want to say vs. what they are interested in) is to constantly measure customer behavior and perception, as well as internal assessment. As Cathy McKnight from Digital Clarity Group said: “measure twice, then act.”

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Content Marketing World (CMW) 2017 brought thousands of marketers from around the world to Cleveland once again for a packed schedule. CMW offered sessions given by executives from Fortune 500 companies and leading content marketing companies who provided the latest in best practices, trends and advancements in digital marketing.

This year’s theme was A World of Stories. The presenters structured their sessions to tell stories of real life experiences, which resonated well with audiences.

Many of the stories centered on large companies, which was insightful, but I heard from a few attendees that it would be good if the show could offer stories from smaller companies that would better reflect their situations.

The session highlights I found most noteworthy were:

• What Exactly Does a Truly Global Editorial Calendar Look Like, with Stan Miller from Rockwell Automation. Stan not only provided a view of his monthly editorial calendar, he
• also provided the attendees with a view of the global workflow that he and his team follow and the challenges and solutions they have found along the way to create a mature content program.
• Implementing a Global Influencer Program at a Large B2B Enterprise, with Amisha Gandhi from SAP. Amisha showed her path to creating a successful influencer program at SAP and how her taking the risk to do so has had a strong ROI for the SAP bottom line. She explained her thought process behind decisions, a few of the hurdles she faced and the road to ultimately succeeding so much that a new position was created for her to lead an ongoing influencer program at her company. I would not be surprised to see a book come from such an interesting journey she took.
• Be the Exception: How Brilliant Marketers Find and Follow What Makes Their Stories Different in a World Full of Average Content, with Jay Acunzo from Unthinkable. Jay provided one of the day one keynotes. He was given this honor because he was voted the best session presenter last year at the show. His keynote proved he was quite worthy of the honor. His keynote set the stage for the rest of the show and its initial energy. Jay provided a few case studies that were quite interesting and inspiring, such as how a small New York state coffee company owner sought advice from multiple experts to save his local coffee business. Each expert gave the same recommendation to change the coffee bean he was roasting, but upon considering his actual customers’ needs, he chose to go with his gut and changed his business focus, while staying with the bean he had been using. In a short time, he built a thriving e-commerce business. He made a case that following traditional best practices and expert advice is not always the best route to take. Going against the traditional ideas, you may find new avenues for success.

Summary

I met a lot of great people at the show and look forward to returning to Cleveland for the next CMW to learn the latest developments, trends and stories from the content marketing industry.

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To get your website to the top of global search engine result pages, SEO strategies are vital. You are likely deploying SEO techniques for your native language website however, adapting your strategy to include global SEO will help your global audiences find your website when they are searching in their local languages.

In this blog, I will cover some tips to make sure your multilingual website is localized and optimized for your global audiences.

Choose Your Target Audiences

Narrow your scope to target the audiences who represent your best opportunities. The world is a very big place and rather than casting a giant net, spend some time finding the locations that you deem best for your products or services.

There are a couple of ways you can identify the audiences who have a growing interest in what you offer. One way is to use your analytic tools to find the geographic locations where your website gets the most traffic from. You can also narrow down which pieces of your content or website pages perform the best in those markets. If you are entering a market where your brand is not well known, you can research how competing brands perform in that area to benchmark how you may perform there.

Once you determine the locations and languages you will target, you will know which search engine to optimize for. Google has the largest market share globally, but other search engines have a higher market share for local searches, like Baidu (China) or Naver (South Korea).

Localize Your Keyword List

Conducting keyword research to understand which words and phrases are part of the local dialect, slang and day-to-day vernacular is essential. As an example, people in the United States and the United Kingdom both speak English, but differ in the way they call certain items. in which words they use for items. Americans go on vacation, while Brits go on holiday. If you are a US-based travel company trying to attract customers from the UK, it would be important to know this difference when developing your keyword list. The spelling of the same word can also vary, localize vs. localise, for instance.

These localized keyword lists will help you create optimized content, descriptions, titles, image alt tags, URLs, etc.

Determine your URL Structure

Determining which domain structure to use for your multilingual site can be confusing. Do you create a subdomain, subdirectory or country code top-level domain (ccTLD)?

ccTLDs are two letter ISO country codes that show search engines in what country or territory a website is registered. This is a good strategy if you are targeting by location, rather than by language. Some ccTLDs require you to be a citizen to register that domain. An example of this is: www.globalizationpartners.ae.

Subdirectories are directories stored inside another directory. You can create multiple pages for each of your targeted languages and they don’t require separate hosting. An example of this is: https://www.globalizationpartners.com/blog/.

Lastly, subdomains are separate sites associated with your primary URL. These can either be specific to your targeted language or country. They can be hosted separately, but exist within a generic top-level domain. An example of this is: https://www.globalizationpartners.com/resources/.

Summary

If you are launching a website localization project, global SEO should be a part of the discussion from the very beginning. Your goal should be to create a website that allows your global audiences to find your products or services when searching in their locale and language. The above tips are just a few things to consider in order to create a fully optimized multilingual website.

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GPI had a great and very informative time exhibiting at B2B Online in Chicago in early May. This conference has been steadily growing in attendance year after year and it is easy to see why. Nowhere else can manufacturers and distributors learn more about how to create and implement digital strategies, specifically for B2B, in order to remain competitive, relevant and successful in today’s ever-changing digital landscape.

This was GPI’s first time at B2B Online and we were amazed at the caliber of exhibitors, keynote speakers and panelists. Digital strategists and ecommerce executives from some of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands provided invaluable insight and practical tips for manufactures and distributors to take back home and apply.

During this three day event, we had the pleasure of speaking with many manufacturers and the various agencies that support them about the challenges B2B companies face now that they realize B2C expectations are filtering through to the B2B world. Those expectations will only continue to grow as the clientele becomes savvier and, naturally, more demanding.

There were several sessions and case studies on display that did a wonderful job highlighting those challenges and provided great insight into how they tackled them.

A few of the sessions that were of particular interest included:

FIRESIDE CHAT: Defining the B2B Customer: Who’s Researching & Who’s Buying: Elizabeth Ubell, VP & President, Marketing, ecommerce, and Medium Customers, W.W. Grainger

Her presentation addressed a major issue for many B2B companies: identifying your customer. Unlike B2C, you may have multiple people involved in the buying and decision making process with one person doing the research on your site, another making the purchasing decision and someone else entirely who is the name on the account.

The challenge is to understand who you are really talking and marketing to, and how to create target messaging that will resonate effectively to the researcher, the decision maker and the purchaser.

Transforming the B2B Customer Experience with Data-Driven Commerce: Gilbert Moreno IT Section Manager, National Instruments Corp

In his keynote, Gilbert focused on the challenge many organization face when trying to manage complex product catalogs and make the delivery of timely and relevant product information an integral part of the B2B buying experience. He demonstrated how the deployment of new technologies and innovative thinking allowed National Instruments to simplify the customer interaction while at the same time, providing technical buyers all necessary product information by subscribing to a data-driven commerce experience transformation.

One thing I found particularly interesting and useful as it covered a wide variety of topics of relevance, were the Interactive Roundtables that were hosted on both main days of the event, Monday and Tuesday. These roundtables (11 total) truly provided something for everyone. They were broken out into small groups and attendees were invited to join two different roundtables for 30 minutes each, depending on their focus or interest. The roundtables addressed topics such as Organization Design for Marketing & Sales Alignment in Decentralized Organizations, Manufacturer Strategies for Content Success, Engaging Your Salesforce to Increase Online Sales and What Manufacturers & Distributors Need to Know About Modern App Development in Today’s API Economy.

Both my colleague and I attended several that sparked very interesting and lively conversations, and we came away with a much better understanding of the unique requirements B2B selling companies have in the manufacturing and distribution space.

We are already planning for next year’s B2B Online conference and look forward to seeing you there again!

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Globalization Partners International is excited to announce we will be a sponsor at B2B Online next week in Chicago. B2B Online is for leading manufacturers and distributors to come together in one of the busiest business hubs to learn ecommerce and digital strategies.

The show takes place May 8^th-10^th at the Chicago Renaissance Downtown. Each day has its own digital-focused theme. Day one is Customer Acquisition & Omnichannel, day two is Engagement & Customer Experience Optimization and day three is Retention & the Customer Journey.

A few of the sessions we are most excited for include:

• Keynote: Executing Your Go-to-Market Strategy Digitally: 5 Crucial Considerations. Senior Executive, IBM.
• Panel Discussion Revolution: Staying Focused On Omnichannel As You Grow Your Global Brand. Aimee Davis, Eastman Chemical Co., Michelle Fields, Brock White, Steve Gryzmkowski, BDI.
• Case Study Revolution: Digital to Digital Conversations – Alignment between Manufacturer and Distributor. Matthew Guardiola, Panduit.
• Panel: Don’t Be a Commodity, It’s Not Worth the Price. Senior Executive, InRiver, Jody Yeganeh, Lawson Products.

We are looking forward to learning what’s new in digital and ecommerce strategies and connecting with people who are looking to add localization to their plans. If you are attending B2B Online and have plans to create multilingual content for your website, stop by table T6 (near the exhibit hall entrance) to discuss GPI’s website translation connectors and how we may be able to help you.

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GPI had the distinct pleasure of exhibiting at DrupalCon for the very first time and meeting many of the wonderful partners and users that have been part of the loyal Drupal following for so many years. Drupalists from all over the world descended upon Baltimore to learn about the latest Drupal has to offer to its vibrant community of developers, designers and end users.

As a first-time participant and exhibitor, we very much appreciated Drupal putting together a First Time Attendee Social, which served as an orientation for DrupalCon newcomers to help navigate all the event had to offer. Connecting with other local agencies was an additional bonus.

During this three day event, we had opportunities to meet with many partner agencies and Drupal adopters and learn first-hand about their experiences working with this open source CMS. We were pleasantly surprised about how many times the topic of localization and multilingual website deployment came up during our many conversations with non-profits and educational organizations who recognize the need for providing native-language information on their sites to their international visitors.

The conference came with a surprise show opener for us: the hilariously unique Prenote that seems to be a recurring tradition for DrupalCon. Following several keynotes on day one and day two were a number of sessions that put the whole range of the latest Drupal developments and capabilities on full display.

The emphasis on Drupal’s multilingual support was very encouraging and really impressed upon me the fact that Drupal can be an excellent choice as an open-source CMS for international companies and global organizations who aim to reach a wider multilingual audience.

As a result, I was not surprised to see several sessions on the schedule focusing on international/multilingual topics. A few sessions that were of particular interest were:

Optimizing Your Site For the World To See: International SEO, which provided a great overview of the state of SEO in 2017, real-world tips on optimizing for international SEO, and in-depth information on the Drupal modules that one can deploy to help with global SEO. Using search engine friendly Drupal 8 as the basis, this session covered the following topics:

• Setting up the right configurations for success
• Maintaining content across multiple languages
• Dealing with duplicate content for websites with multiple dialects
• Common use cases for country and language level optimization
• Nuances between search engines like Bing and Google
• The Drupal Modules that will help you get there

Another session that naturally piqued my interest was:

Multilingual in Drupal 8: A soup to nuts guide featuring VisitTheUSA.com and Habitat.org.

The session outline included:

• Which modules to enable
• Configuring fields for translation
• Which fields should I allow to be translated?
• Using the Translation Interface to translate strings
• How do I translate menus?
• How do I translate taxonomy?
• Configuring “Language negotiation”
• “Gotchas” with translation you need to know
• TMS examples – Lingotek & SDL
• Case study examples from Habitat.org and VisitTheUSA.com

The session provided a plethora of practical information and step-by-step instructions on how to figure out which Drupal 8 modules to enable and how to configure them in order to fully internationalize your website property, how to translate text strings and what kind of Drupal integration you can expect from your translation service provider.

I feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to represent GPI at DrupalCon this year and look forward to many future events where we can continue to engage with this incredibly vibrant and creative community!

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The GPI team is looking forward to being in Baltimore next week for DrupalCon. This is our first year sponsoring and we are excited to network with clients and meet new people, all while learning what’s new with Drupal.

Drupal is a free, open source content management system (CMS) used for building digital experiences. DrupalCon will be held at the Baltimore Convention Center April 24^th-28^th and is the largest Drupal event each year.

The conference will have 12 session tracks with topics for developers, designers, strategists, coordinators, editors, translators and more. Topics will address things like UX, DevOps, project management and PHP.

The tracks we are looking forward to most include:

• Business and Strategy
• Core Conversations
• Drupal Showcase
• Horizons
• User Experience and Content Strategy

GPI Translation Services Connector for Drupal

GPI will be located at booth 545 to talk about your, or your clients’, Drupal websites and how translation can help you reach larger audiences.

GPI’s Translation Services Connector for Drupal streamlines content exports and imports allowing for the initiation of web content translation workflows with a single click. Users get access to a range of helpful reports to track and manage their website translation projects through GPI’s award winning Translation Portal.

If you will be at DrupalCon, stop by and see us at booth 545 to discuss your localization strategy.

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Spring is a time for new life to bloom. So it is appropriate that the Magento Imagine conference was held in early spring. I now have a new view of where Magento is positioned in the eCommerce ecosystem.

While some large clients have used Magento for years, in my opinion, smaller companies have made up the bulk of their customer base. However, after attending Magento Imagine last week, it is clear that the companies now attending the show are more enterprise in nature than the small family retailers I was more likely to meet at previous shows.

What Changed?

Demandware is still the high-end eCommerce system leader, but from talking with the companies at the show, I repeatedly heard that for a lower price point, Magento is a solid option for their needs as they have added a number of capabilities and they could not justify paying more for another system when Magento meets their needs.

Magento 2 appears to be a success with many new and updated capabilities, such as being a capable CMS, offering a native checkout system, improved search, catalogs, analytics, easier to develop for and improved design options.

Imagine

The show title “Imagine” now has more meaning that in the past, at least to me. The Magento team has done a wonderful job in advancing the product over the past 12-24 months.

The conference sessions were well presented and offered a varied choice of topics for marketer and developer tracks. A few of the sessions I made sure to attend were:

• Internationalization: Steps to Take and Mistakes to Avoid, with Le Creuset and Blue Acorn
• Magento 2: Lessons Learned and Successes Earned by a Leading Baby Brand, with Munchkin and Guidance
• Achieve Business Nirvana with Magento Digital Commerce, with Oliver Sweeney and Magento

The Commerce Conversations room is what I enjoyed the most. It was held in a large room full of round tables to allow people to discuss a wide range of topics that the table elected to talk about with each person able to provide their unique input whether a service provider, Magento staff or end client/merchant.

Magento Imagine has shown me that Magento’s goal is to be an equal contender with more expensive systems. With Magento 2, they are stepping up and should be a real consideration for companies seeking an eCommerce system with a solid feature set and strong performance.

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The fact that we haven’t attended Adobe Summit in a few years made it all the more exciting and special to see what technological revelations Adobe had in store as a leader in the digital experience realm. With promises to experience the future of digital with three full days of labs, sessions and top notch events, Adobe surely did not disappoint. This year’s Summit, hosted in Las Vegas, had over 100 partners on full display and the conference hosted well over 10,000 attendees from around the world.

The conference was indeed (almost) all business – The Experience Business. CEO Shantanu Narayen and GM & EVP took us on a fantastic journey, which allowed us to ride the next wave of enterprise transformation.

Reminded by CEO Shantanu Narayen that “preserving the status quote is not a strategy” Adobe pushed the boundaries of the previously unimaginable to deliver unparalleled experiences through their Marketing Cloud that promises:

• Fluid Experiences
• 1-Click Personalization
• Campaign and Creative Cloud Integration
• Rich Mobile Push Notifications

I think the video clip below captures quite beautifully what these experiences look like. Get ready to be amazed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_oPBDb2kLk

This three-day event provided valuable lessons and insights for everyone, whether it was hands-on labs for developers, customer experience and cross-channel marketing tracks for marketing executives and web strategists or the programmatic advertising track for advertisers, agencies and marketing decision makers.

Listening to guests from National Geographic and T-Mobile, who turned the entire mobile industry on its head, we learned how Adobe enables brands to “deliver the experiences consumers not only expect but demand today”.

Some of the session highlights I particularly enjoyed were:

The New Travel and Hospitality: A Digital Transformation presented by Mike Brunst, Hospitality Go To Market Lead for Accenture, and Barry Goldstein, CMO and Chief Digital Officer of Wyndham Hotel Group.

The digital revolution is transforming the entire hotel/hospitality industry and Wyndham is no exception to this phenomenon. This session explored Wyndham’s strategy for reinventing the customer journey “from booking to checkout and beyond”, and not just for the US market but, as Goldstein emphasized repeatedly, with the global customer in mind. Wyndham relaunched their new global website with fully localized language versions to cater to their multilingual clientele.

Start with Structure: Creating a Site for your Global Business was a hands-on lab led by Ian Reasor and Mathias Siegel, which provided step-by-step instructions for global website creation.

Engaging Everywhere: Delighting Global Customers with Localized AEM Sites. In this session attendees learned how Adobe Experience Manager’s native localization architecture can help leverage translation management tools seamlessly, and coupled with an agile translation strategy, render higher quality and expedited time-to-market, as showcased by global brands such as IHG and OCLC.

Day two’s general session revolved around The Emotion of Experience.

John Mellor, VP of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing, and CMO & EVP, Ann Lewnes showed us how an emphasis on the emotional aspect of designing meaningful brand experiences and great story telling transforms entire organizations and brands. Who better to exemplify these attributes than Pam El, CMO of the NBA, and Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning?

Pam took us through a vivid journey of how the NBA became the most watched and followed brand globally by digitally engaging the 99% of the world’s population who will never have an opportunity to see a live NBA game. Pam brought the NBA’s new motto This Is Why We Play to life by bringing down the house – what a powerful and moving presentation!

Speaking of sports and great story telling, few can deliver a more authentic and sincere rendition of their journey than Peyton Manning. The audience listened intently as he recounted his many highs and a few lows of his long and illustrious career and the many lessons learned along the way, while never losing his sense of self, his humanity and humility, and of course his sense of humor. A real class act!

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