As a marketer, localizing and translating your content based on consumer mobile usage can have a huge effect on your overall content strategy.
As reported by MobiForge, Keynote/Adobe conducted research on consumer mobile behavior in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. At the time of the study, Japan took the lead in mobile device usage, with increases expected in the United States and Europe. However, the most interesting research highlights the activities mobile users perform on their devices. Here’s what you need to know:
Location Services
Some top mobile activities include web browsing, sending text messages, taking photos, and accessing news. In the United States, however, consumers’ primary activity was accessing maps and directions. In other words, people needed to find out where places were and how to get there even more than they needed to access their social networking sites and read news.
It is unlikely this trend will stay confined to the United States, since mobile usage is even heavier in some global markets. Additional data from MobiForge shows China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Nigeria all boast markets with more than 100 million mobile subscriptions. This means every business needs to think about making location-specific information, such as maps and directions, available in the target languages of its key consumers.
Beyond Maps and Directions
This is not just about translating maps and directions so customers can find your business. It’s important for online shopping, too. How, you ask?
Well, if your site is already working out the availability of an item in a particular area, what the shipping distance is, and the cost of shipping (all of which use location services as a starting point), why not translate that information for the customer, in his or her preferred language? After all, people are happiest making purchases in their own language, so localizing your apps and other mobile-optimized content—including following local conventions for units of measurement and distances—will improve your chances of making the sale.
Translating maps and directions will help you keep up with this consumer mobile usage trend, and will also improve your visibility in local search results, putting your website in front of more customers.
Image source: Bigstock
Resource: MobiThinking
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