Marketing Procurement

Locaria’s Procurement Guide to Global Content Purchasing: steps to success

Streamline

Locaria’s White Paper explores how we need to streamline the content creation process, ensuring pricing is meaningful for both parties.

Local language content is becoming a necessity for more and more companies as they seek international growth opportunities. 

According to the Common Sense Advisory’s ‘Can’t Read, Won’t Buy’ study, consumers from non-Anglophone countries overwhelmingly prefer content in their mother tongue.

Approximately 74% of respondents also say they’re more likely to purchase from the same brand again if the after-sales care is in their language. 

Over the last ten years, the global language service industry has doubled in size, reaching a total value of $46.9 billion in 2019. However, this has also meant that costs have risen for brands and procurement departments are being engaged to help drive down language service costs. As such, tech is needed to control budgets and scale in a feasible way. 

Despite this rapidly evolving landscape, the most commonly used model for purchasing localisation or copywriting services is still a per-word rate based on the known or estimated number of words to be localised or written.

In a bid to keep pricing ‘simple’, word rates are becoming highly opaque as they fail to represent the changes taking place in how multilingual content is delivered at scale, particularly for media and marketing. This leads to hidden costs. 

The purpose of Locaria’s White Paper is to help brands understand the true nature of multilingual content and understand what is driving costs for suppliers and how better questions can be asked: ultimately thriving for pricing transparency for purchasers of multilingual content or marketing services. 

Who can learn from it 

Procurement teams are increasingly involved in the supply management of content service providers, particularly as larger organisations seek to bring together all the different streams of content production to maximise any economies of scale, or streamline their processes, while also driving content consistency. 

The white paper, however, has a far reach and may be used by the following: Marketing Directors, Editors, Brand Managers, Ecommerce Managers, Media Planners, Paid Social Planners, and Heads of Planning are typically all involved in creating brand or advertising content using external suppliers. Likewise, Customer Service, Legal, Compliance, and even Distribution teams. 

Additionally, the paper is also great use to localisation Managers when seeking to manage their stakeholders and increase internal understanding of the economics driving language and content services. 

Takeaways 

The paper starts by looking at the building blocks of cost within the content production supply chain. As a first step, they review the global nature of the industry and the relative costs of languages, this delves into how economies of scale can be utilised to better manage costs. 

The second section looks at a key point of pricing negotiation for any purchaser of multilingual content and marketing services: output quality. This will explore how best to assess and manage content quality and make realistic trade-offs between costs and desired business outcomes, utilising a broad range of content creation methodologies. 

Locaria examines the specific needs of online content that must be addressed in order to deliver quality outcomes and how digital marketing KPIs can be used to put the customer at the heart of quality decisions. Within this, they explore pricing models, looking at where word counts drive costs and therefore should be the main purchasing unit, but also at other content types that accrue cost in a different way and need to be priced and managed. 

In particular, the white paper looks at marketing content and a performance-driven approach to production and pricing. Examining how new technologies are changing the content production supply chain and driving different costs for suppliers, they finally look at the shifting skill sets required to respond to the complex nature of multilingual content creation in an efficient way. They ultimately make the case for continued investment in human expertise to support the effective use of all the methodologies and new technologies now available. 

Their recommendations pick on the right questions to ask when looking for a supplier and negotiating contracts, and summarise the key points of the paper and call for both suppliers and purchasers to work together to increase transparency on the value add of each step of the content creation process, ensuring pricing is meaningful for both parties.

You can download the full White Paper here.

Locaria supports brands with global ambition to localise and transcreate content at scale. Their extensive multilingual talent network sits deep in-market, allowing centralised teams to get local insights, and in-market teams to feel fully supported. They use data and research to build objectively impactful content strategies.