TeamAll businesses need investments to grow. It is unavoidable. This is especially true for small businesses. Some companies, even though they have a ton of potential, will always be small or take forever to grow because they do not want to “waste” money investing on their business. Many refuse to spend money and then there are others that really do waste a ton of money investing in everything and anything and/or in poorly implemented tactics.
However, in this post we will be talking about translation as an investment and why you can safely invest in it to grow your business.
It is cheap
Unlike many other marketing strategies, translating your content is a lot cheaper and it adds to your business’ value. Also, it is important to note that you only need to translate documents, posts, texts once. There are no recurring fees or monthly expenses. No. You pay for what you get and it is not that expensive.
When looking for translators, sure, you can look for agencies/companies that provide these services for you at a premium rate. They charge more because they create a big workflow, making sure that the translated texts pass through several eyes. Usually, there is the translator, editor, QA and final reviewer, and some companies encourage open communication between all roles. Naturally, this attention and quality demand for higher rates.
Nevertheless, you can find your own translators and get the service a lot cheaper. There are translators offering $0.01 per word, which I would not recommend. Most of the time they will just machine translate (google translate) your content and deliver it to you. You can find hard-working translators on sites like Proz.com. The average rate is $0.05 to $0.08 per word. And more often than not it is high-quality work.
At first, you might even think that it is not cheap at all, but you need to consider that it is a one-time fee. After that, you will have content available for other parts in the world. If you end up spending hundreds or a couple thousand extending your reach to the rest of the globe, the potential is endless.
Good for your image
Another reason that makes translation such a safe investment is how good and professional it looks. As a multilinguist, I always notice when businesses cater to different languages. When a company has different languages available — and I mean content translated by humans and not the automated Google Translate option that some websites offer —, they look a lot more professional. 
They look successful, they look global.
Let’s not forget that translations are evergreen, as in, they are not seasonal, their usefulness does not expire. Once your content is in other languages, you can leverage it and strengthen your business.
Sometimes it is not how much you spend on your brand or ads; it is how you spend it. You can even run some campaigns focusing on different languages and cultures, making your business look international and deeply invested in your consumers.
You can even couple this tip with what I’m going to explain next.
The power of analytics
If you have an online business, then you know or are used to checking out your analytics. It is the tool you use to check your website’s traffic. With this tool, on top of seeing what your visitors are checking out, engagement and all that, you can see from WHERE they are coming. You may be wondering why this is important. Let’s see.
There are thousands of languages in the world. And there is only a handful that are widely used. However, if you are looking to invest in translating your content for your business, but you are lacking funds to hire several translators, you can resort to your analytics to see what is worth investing in. In your analytics tool, you can check out the countries that are visiting your website, the number of people or percentage. With this information, you can make an informed decision.
Let’s imagine that your business is all in English but only 60% of your traffic comes from English-speaking countries. If 30% of that traffic was coming from Spain or Mexico, making your services, products or content available in Spanish would totally skyrocket your business.
Final thoughts
All businesses have to make hard decisions and decide where their hard-earned money needs to go. This is especially difficult for small businesses that do not have the budget to experiment what works and what doesn’t.
Still, you should always be checking on your analytics and see from where your consumers are and live. Translation of your content just might be what you need to boost your business’ revenue.
