Though translation organizations provide language services, there is an extensive marketing process in place that enables them to cater to customer needs effectively and efficiently. This process includes a series of steps that first allows firms to identify and conceptualize the customer problems. Once they do that, the next step is to critically analyze the market opportunities.
Once translation services understand the opportunities that they are going to avail, the next step would be to design the marketing materials so that your desired audience could be reached. Very few organizations, namely Chinese translation services, actually enable a complete marketing process. Because it demands a lot of resources, time, and effort.
In this article, we will discuss one of the most important steps in depth via examples. So let’s start.
Situational Analysis
In the process of Situational analysis, organizations attempt to identify the market opportunities. These opportunities are found vis-a-vis analysis of the internal and external factors that are affecting or will potentially affect the business in both the short term and long term.
For situational analysis, many translation firms, especially French translation services, use a framework approach for analyzing external factors. Let’s take a look at one of these frameworks;
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5C Analysis
Company
In this aspect, the company looks for the internal factors that may affect their business. In this scenario, a translation firm will look at its organizational processes as a whole. Secondly, it will determine whether it wants to establish in-house services or outsource the translation work.
Thirdly, it will also try to capitalize on its strengths. This will enable them to decide the type of services they want to offer. It can be simple document translation services or specify their domain to popular languages such as French translation services, or legal translation services.
Collaborators:
In translation services, collaborators play a significant role in how the organization runs its operations. Since it’s a service-based business, everything is based on the links created between partners and translators. Especially, when the organization has hired freelancers o work on a translation project.
The relationship the firm has between the managers and the translators is the sole aspect that is responsible for the success of a language translation firm.
Customers
Customers or the target audience is one aspect of this framework that cannot be compromised. The target market is always the center of attention for a translation firm. Companies that do not pay attention to the needs of the target audience, end up delivering mediocre content.
In translation services, the entire translated content has to be adapted with respect to the cultural constructs of the society. If your translated content offends the customers of the target market, it will not only damage your reputation but will leave a bad taste in the minds of the consumer. And you will never be able to replenish that.
Hence, there is a reason why Chinese translation services are able to maintain such a positive relationship with the target audience. That is because they intend to consist full fledge market research that helps them understand the cultural intricacies, and preferences of the target audience.
Competitors
Since the evolution of globalization and the internet, more and more businesses are attempting to expand their presence in the global market. For this endeavor to be successful, they need the assistance of translation services. Hence, various translation agencies are appearing on their scene and trying to offer accurate translations at minimum rates. This has emboldened higher competition.
Therefore, translation agencies have to capitalize on their point of difference, to stand out from the crowd. If they don’t, then any other agency will probably take them over, since the market space is too tight. When agencies like French translation services are offering impeccable translated content, it is very important to stay sharp so that you don’t lose your market share. Hence, first understand what your competitors are doing that you aren’t, then strategize a plan to offer something different from them.
Climate
Last but not the least, the climate is one of the most important factors in the process of situational analysis. This aspect describes the context of the target market. If the climate of the target market is not encouraging, you cannot do business there, no matter how impressive your portfolio is.
The political, legal, economic, and social boundaries are the external factors that you have to abide by rather than figuring out a way to bypass them. Moreover, you have to research on what are the trends in the target market. Meanwhile, also consider the scope of translation in that target market.
Sometimes the legal restrictions within the target market are not popular for huge investments. Thereby, ensure what you are getting into. And as a translation service, whose ultimate goal is to help other businesses to penetrate foreign markets, it would be a shame if you are not successful in understanding the socio-economic environment of the target market.
Conclusion
In this article, we tried to explain the step of situational analysis that every firm, regardless of the industry that it is in, has to adopt in order to succeed.
Situational analysis is the process of analyzing the internal and external factors that can affect the business.
Every organization that wishes to penetrate a market has to know about the challenges that it might face in the future. Hence, it’s imperative to prepare yourself for any problem that you might encounter. The framework of 5C analysis helps you do exactly that.