Why is Transcreation Important for Going Global with Direct Selling Campaigns?

Transcreation, on a basic level, is the idea of creative translation.

It’s a common term in marketing and advertising circles and the idea is to seamlessly relocate advertising campaigns, marketing messages and other literature to global audiences to ensure they can appreciate the nuance of each piece of content in their native language.

Cultural differences play a huge role in any successful direct selling campaign, but this is magnified when you’re looking to amplify your products, messages and communication to a larger, global audience.

Pinpointing what’s important to your audience in new territories, ensuring clean lines of communication with both potential customers and vendors, is absolutely key to your success overseas.

What is Transcreation?

Over the past few decades, cultural and societal shifts have created a brand-new frontier of technology innovation. While this has allowed even the smallest of direct selling operations to expand their global reach, this does present its own challenges, which is where quality transcreation comes in.

Transcreation is a flexible means of adapting content and marketing material from one language to another, whilst maintaining the style, tone and messages, and reflecting cultural nuance and references to each target language.

For marketing copy, translation and transcreation should now be considered as one and the same. When marketing translation is done correctly, it will incorporate all the elements of transcreation within it. This means that you certainly need to consider the right kind of translation agency when looking to take your direct selling business overseas.

Transcreation in Direct Selling

Usually, when attempting to crack foreign markets, there are three typical options for businesses:

• Translate an Active Campaign.
• Run Entirely New Localised Campaigns.
• Run International Campaigns in a Variety of Languages.

However, the best option for direct selling is actually a mixture of all three of these options. While, yes, transcreation is more work and will involve a bigger up-front cost; as we’ve already explored, it’s more than a worthy investment.

In fact, if a business neglects to hire the right translation business for these projects, they may end up falling flat in various territories, where their message isn’t culturally relevant, and even worse still: offensive.

Many of the biggest brands in the world have fallen foul to this in the past.

Direct selling is built on mutual trust, which is why it’s so important to get these messages bang on the money.

At Anglia Translations, we are registered members of the Direct Selling Association, with over 17 years working within the Direct Selling Industry. We manage a huge network of translators across the globe, who translate into their mother tongue and live in the country they share their language with.

This way they’re abreast with the latest language, colloquialisms, and relevant cultural references. Our translations reflect not just the contents within the original message, but also the originality, feeling and cultural appeal.

Takeaways

In any form of marketing, it’s about finessing your messages, targeting the right audience and maximising your impact. In direct selling, where competition can often be incredibly fierce in new territories, this can be the difference between success and failure.

From the word go, you’ll need to be able to engage effectively with distributors, inspire loyalty within your community and find a way to stake a claim in the very centre of your desired markets.

Transcreation can be complex and very nuanced, which is why it’s so important to have the right partner to guide you through.

As an ISO9001: 2015 accredited translation business with many years of specialisation in the direct selling industry, we’re ideally placed to help nurture business success abroad.

If you have any further questions on what we’ve covered in this blog, or you’re interested in hearing more about any of our other services, get in touch today.