Localizing Content for an International Audience
Creating targeted marketing content in a single language can be challenging. Try translating and localizing that content into five additional languages, and the challenges go up exponentially.
This is the situation Trello faced as they scaled their content marketing strategy to serve an international and multilingual client base.
At first, Trello’s English-language blog was hosted in WordPress. But WordPress was poorly suited for content translation and localization.
Amanda Alvernaz, International Marketing Manager for Trello, explains:
“We tried to scale to other languages in WordPress, but it wasn’t very intuitive. It was really hard to carry out our content vision across all languages.”
To address these issues and others, Trello implemented the HubSpot CRM platform and almost immediately benefitted from massive efficiency improvements. For example, they were able to automate their translation process, freeing up 20-30 hours a month for more high-value tasks.
Amanda and her team were so impressed by these improvements, they were keen to take things even further.
“We were doing well with Marketing Hub, but we felt we could be doing even more with it,” says Amanda.
Specifically, the team wanted to improve the localization of their content. With their current site design, the team couldn’t indicate to Google that content was localized, which impacted organic search traffic.
“We couldn’t tell Google that our content was localized and in what language,” says Amanda. “It was a technical issue that we could only resolve by bringing in a development team, and we didn’t want to put our resources in that.”
The current website design also couldn’t smoothly transition users to the same piece of content in different languages.
For example, users reading a blog post in English and wanting to switch to Portuguese would be taken to the blog home page (instead of the same article) when they selected “Portuguese” as their language.
Further, Amanda and her team were keen to get more tracking information and data insights so they could start targeting content to different stages of their sales funnel.
“We wanted to see what content people were viewing, what they were clicking on, and how many were converting,” says Amanda. “Our current web design was getting in the way of that.”
Given all of these factors—and the fact that the website was looking dated—Amanda and her team decided the time was right for a redesign.
Website Redesign Unleashes the Power of the HubSpot CRM Platform
Trello’s website redesign has empowered Amanda and her team to fully deploy the capabilities of HubSpot Marketing Hub.
Localized content to drive organic traffic
Today, Amanda and her team are easily and efficiently localizing their blog content.
With Marketing Hub, they can automatically indicate to Google that the content is high quality, translate it to the users’ preferred language, and localize it for a specific area or region. This, in turn, is driving more organic traffic to the Trello blog.
Improved user experience across languages
In addition, users can now move smoothly from blog content in one language to the same blog content in another language without having to return to the blog home page.
“Users can view a page on our website in one language and the same page in another language in just one click,” says Amanda.
Targeted content based on sales funnel
The redesign is also allowing Amanda and her team to easily personalize and target content to match Trello’s sales and marketing funnel.
For example, the team is using Marketing Hub to display different call-to-action buttons on the Trello blog depending on where users are in their customer journey.
“If you’re a Trello user and logged in, you won’t see a signup button,” says Amanda. “Instead, you’ll see a banner that’s targeted to your use case. It’s another important way we’re personalizing the user experience.”
The team is using this targeted content to move contacts to the next stages of the pipeline by offering free trials and special promotions. They also include a CTA that directs people to a salesperson or demo.
Marketing Hub makes managing the personalization of this content easy.
“We created a global solution field in HubSpot that allows us to change a banner across all pages, which minimizes our efforts to keep the blog up to date with new CTAs,” says Amanda.
Newsletters in six languages
Amanda and her team are also using a HubSpot API to connect with its email provider and send out its newsletter in six different languages to nurture existing contacts. It’s something they couldn’t do before, and the HubSpot API allows them to do it using the tool most convenient for them.
Insights into content performance
As they’d hoped, Amanda and her team are also getting insights into how content is performing, which provides valuable direction for future content creation.
“We can track banners across all pages,” says Amanda. “We can see how many people clicked, how many viewed the landing page, and how many people converted—and we can break it all down by type of offer.”
No need for a development team
Just as importantly, Trello can implement all these Marketing Hub capabilities without having to bring in an expensive outside development team.
Amanda and her team can do almost everything themselves because the HubSpot CRM platform is so intuitive. If they do need technical support, they have their HubSpot customer success manager and technical consultant as resources.
“With HubSpot, it’s easy to localize content without getting into the code,” says Amanda. “For example, our pages now automatically have Ahrefs that tells Google the language the post is in and its source, which is something we were missing before.”
Integration with other applications
Amanda and her team are also big fans of Marketing Hub’s ability to integrate with other applications, such as its email provider and Smartling for translation, which helps keep all Trello teams connected.
1M Page Views Per Month
Thanks to its newly designed website and the power of the HubSpot CRM platform, Trello is now easily localizing its content. As a result, it’s attaining over one million page views per month, with about 40% of traffic attributed to localization.
“To be honest, most of our effort goes into our English content,” says Amanda. “But even so, our localized content still accounts for 40% of all blog traffic, which is impressive.”
Organic traffic is also up 30%, which is again attributable to localization with the HubSpot CRM platform.
The user experience has also improved, as evidenced by users spending 15% more time on page—a clear indication that users are being served relevant content that corresponds with their position in Trello’s sales funnel.
Amanda couldn’t be happier with the web redesign that allows her team to more fully realize the power of the HubSpot CRM platform and Marketing Hub in particular.
“Translation isn’t an easy thing to do. Localization isn’t an easy thing to do. But HubSpot makes it easy for us to scale and bring in more traffic across multiple languages,” says Amanda.
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