Today we have guest expert Gaëlle Callnin, Marketing Director for Denver, Colorado-based Virtual Words Translations. When I asked Gaëlle if companies can save money on translations, she replied, “Oh my gosh, yes!” and instantly began talking.

What follows are her seven tips for saving money when translating marketing collateral and other materials — both print and Web-based.

1. Translate only what is necessary — According to Gaëlle, not everything has to be translated. For example, you may have a large number of documents for a contract negotiation, only a few pages are necessary for the final contract to be translated, and some can be translated at the “gisting” service level, which is quicker and less expensive.

On the other hand, when you look at your Web traffic stats to see the ROI with regard to translated pages, remember that these numbers may not always be an accurate representation.

For example, US Hispanic readers will prefer to read product information in Spanish but culturally will often prefer to switch to English for the actual purchase because they don’t always trust that the Spanish provides the most accurate information or greatest discounts. Hence you may not need to translate the shopping cart pages.

2. Cut useless words — Because translations are based on a per-word rate, it pays to write in a concise style. A good copywriter or editor can help you eliminate superfluous words.

3. Send only “final” documents — According to Gaëlle, you are not saving time by submitting a document that’s “almost” done. As you know, documents go through multiple (and sometimes painful) revisions before they’re finally approved. If you expect your translator to keep up with these revisions, you’ll end up way over budget.

4. Have source files available — If you’re translating a printed newsletter or brochure, send your translator the Quark file versus a PDF. Sending the source file means the translation company can then provide you with a layout that conforms to European sizing (i.e. A4) — significantly reducing costs for additional design work.

5. Ask your provider about memory tool discounts — Technical material, such as user manuals, often has repetitive material or text. A good translation company will use tools to flag repetitive text and add it to a database — allowing it to easily be used again.

As the customer, you receive many benefits, including consistency in translation, and cost savings. Gaëlle says that when her company flags copy and finds a 100% match, they will use it and give the client a discount. Depending on the level of the match, they also provide tiered discounts.

6. Allow for plenty of time — When planning a translation project, a good rule of thumb is to estimate one day per 2,000 to 2,500 words. You’ll also have to include time for prep work, such as translating industry or scientific jargon.

7. Cheaper isn’t always better — Although you can find many excellent freelance or private translators, it does pay to use a company. According to Gaëlle, when you hire a company, a second person reviews each project.

When you hire one person, you get only that person’s translation — which is why a private translator’s rates are lower.

In addition, a good translation company will have individuals who specialize in a specific vertical and local to the destination country. For example, the Spanish spoken in Mexico isn’t the same as the Spanish spoken in Spain or even South America, and the Spanish used in healthcare isn’t the same as the same as the Spanish used in technology.

Gaëlle, thank you for these most awesome tips! In addition to translating traditional print materials, Virtual Words Translations specializes in translating online video, Websites, and flash animations. Please be sure to visit the company’s Website.

The media spends a lot of time telling us that our country is going to hell. Pick up any newspaper on any day and all you’ll see is gloom and doom.

However, despite the recession, I have never seen so much opportunity for companies creative enough to see it and nimble enough to act on it.

It’s easy enough to stick to what’s worked in the past, especially now when resources are tight.

But now is a great time to set your company apart by daring to be contrary.

Not only will your company stand out, you’ll probably end up being more successful than you imagined — as the three individuals cited below prove.

1. Steve Lightstone – General marketing wisdom states you need to find ways to get around an executive’s “gatekeeper” or assistant.

Some of these tactics include calling at 7:30 AM or 5:30 PM, when the executive is answering his or her own phone, or sending out three-dimensional mailers designed to get the executive’s attention.

Steve Lightstone, President of Corner Office Leads, knew there had to be another way. Instead of trying to get *around* the executive assistant, Steve asked, “How can we use this person to our clients’ advantage?”

The result is a marketing tactic that oooooozes respect for the executive assistant — and garners peer-to-peer appointments with the C-suite.

2. John Chambers – Instead of asking how to raise the company’s stock price or dramatically cut costs, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, instead asked how decision making could be spread far wider than any company had attempted before.

The reorg, according to a December 2008 Fast Company article, “Cisco Gets Radical,” involved over 500 executives and was massive, radical, and often bumpy.

The result? Decision making for the company is no longer top-down. Instead, leaders of business units now “share responsibility for one another’s success.”

This decision making is made possible by the open use of social networking tools, including blogging, videos, and a Facebook-style internal directory, by Cisco employees.

Instead of being a top-down company mired in “it’s always been done this way” thinking, Cisco is now a “laboratory of connectedness and productivity” where rank-and-file employees are being trained to actually use the stuff they sell. (Imagine that.)

3. David Meerman Scott — In his latest e-book, Lose Control of Your Marketing, Scott writes:

I’m often confronted with the issue of how to measure an online initiative’s results. Executives at companies large and small as well as marketing and PR people tend to push back on the ideas of a World Wide Rave because they want to apply old rules of measurement to the new world of spreading ideas online.

. . .

To create a World Wide Rave, forget about sales leads and ignore mainstream media. Instead, focus on spreading your ideas. Make your information totally free, with no registration required.

As a marketer, David could have written an e-book that included information on how to make most people agree with him — that is, he could have included the new rules about social media while also covering his butt by saying, “Yes, B2B is different and therefore, while social media is great, you still need to collect those sales leads.”

Instead, he stands out by delivering advice that’s contrary to accepted wisdom — and continues to build his reputation and business.

Now, what are you going to do today to be different?

Last week I had the chance to talk with Paula Phelan, Ph.D, founder of Nadel Phelan, Inc., a Northern California PR firm that works with business-to-business companies.

We talked about social media’s role in the marketing mix, why marketing is essential during a recession, and how you can use marketing to help your clients help their clients.

DH: Paula, B2B thought leaders are debating the value of social media. Some say the ROI is minimal (i.e. leads and sales) while others say it definitely works. What do you think?

Phelan: I’m in the middle. In the B2B space, you have to use social media tools, like blogs, to deliver market and industry insight and knowledge. Your customers aren’t looking for “what I did today” fluff-type posts.

When considering social media and its value, you have to look at the entire marketing mix. Trade shows, outreach, seminars, webinars, advertising, direct mail and email all have their roles — as does PR. Social media is essentially PR. Ultimately it’s the least expensive and best method to reach your audience with a specific message without a lot of effort.

DH: How can marketing people work to ensure their budgets don’t get cut during a recession?

Phelan: You can find lots of reports that will tell you not to go dark during a recession, but the truth of the matter is, it is very easy to cut your marketing budget when resources get tight. A manager or business owner might think, “I need a salesperson knocking on doors and closing deals, not more marketing.”

Yes, you do need salespeople, but salespeople have a specific function, and that function isn’t about educating your prospects or building your company’s credibility. This is marketing’s function.

If you’re in a place where every dollar counts, then everything you do should have value. This means that marketing has a real opportunity to assist sales teams to sell more to additional customers — and you do that by finding out how you can help your clients sell to their clients.

Marketing needs to ask, “What is it that our customer’s need to win more deals? How can we position our products and services differently? What are the key benefits that haven’t really explored? How can we change our verbiage so that we’re offering solutions from an ARPU (additional revenue per user) perspective?”

DH: What do you see companies doing wrong with regard to marketing in a recession?

Phelan: Good question. I see them throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, and I see them choosing marketing tactics based on cost. A VP might say to marketing, “You should be doing this” and marketing agrees without really thinking about how the tactic fits into the overall business plan or strategy.

DH: What advice do you have for marketing professionals right now?

Phelan: Have objectives and measure and evaluate everything. You have to know where you’re going, and where you’ve been, to see if you’ve moved the needle.

Two, maintain your strategy and don’t get distracted by tactics — especially those that don’t have value. Just because “everyone” is doing something doesn’t mean you have to, too. On the flip side, don’t turn to the least expensive tactic just to save money.

Three: Be consistent. Just because you can get a great deal on a tabletop booth at a tradeshow doesn’t mean you should do it if tradeshows don’t fit into your overall plan.

Paula, thank you for this advice. It’s spot on!

According to an October 2008 survey of 189 marketing professionals by Forrester Research (Making Social Media Work in B2B Marketing), B2B marketers continue to rely on traditional digital marketing methods to drive leads — including e-mail newsletters.

Yet, given the rise of blogs and other social media tactics — and overflowing e-mail inboxes — you might wonder if something as lowly as the e-newsletter is still a viable tactic.

The answer is: most definitely. Think about it. Despite the buzz about social media, email remains the #1 activity on the Internet. This means that all of us check email, read email, and respond to email constantly.

Plus, not everyone reads blogs or has a LinkedIn/Facebook account. I’ve had PR and marketing professionals tell me they never read blogs but they continue to read newsletters, something I realized based on my own experience.

Although I have this blog and Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts, I still have people subscribing to my e-newsletter every single day.

(But, just because people still subscribe to e-newsletters doesn’t mean they’re reading them. If I get tired of a company’s e-newsletter, for example, I don’t unsubscribe, I simply delete it without reading it.)

If you’re a marketer who has been putting out an e-newsletter for years, now is a great time to look it over to see how you can re-invigorate your publication, and your audience, too, with the following tips:

1. Look at your email stats for the last year.

• How many people subscribed?
• How many unsubscribed?
• How did subscribers find your newsletter or what prompted them to sign up?
• If you use your e-newsletter to get people to take some sort of action, such as downloading white papers or signing up for Webinars, what percentage of your subscribers did so?
• How often was your newsletter forwarded to others?
• How often was content in your e-newsletter posted to blogs, appear in Twitter posts, or reprinted or mentioned in other e-newsletters or trade publications?

2. Survey your readership.

Set up a simple survery using one of the free tools available, such as Zoomerang or Survey Monkey. Constant Contact now offers survey capabilities, too.  

Keep the survey short and sweet so that you don’t waste people’s time. (I like to keep my surveys to ten easy questions that can be answered in two minutes or less.) 

Ask your subscribers how often they want to receive the newsletter and what topics they want to read about. If you’re a larger company with multiple products or business units sending out one e-newsletter a month, ask your readers if they would like content written just for them.

3. Make your newsletter a priority.

Newsletters tend to fall through the cracks, I think, because they’re seen as “fluff” versus revenue generators.

For an e-newsletter to be successful — that is, to generate leads and ultimately sales — you have to make it a priority. This means you publish it on time all the time, that you continually develop new content for it (and not use warmed over press releases), and that you analyze your statistics in order to explain to management why the e-newsletter is a necessary marketing tactic.

Done right, B2B e-newsletters are a great way to stay top-of-mind with prospects not yet ready to buy and maintain relationships with current clients. It’s why I’m still publishing mine and have been doing so for the last eight years.

For additional information about email marketing, be sure to download the following reports and articles (which came to me via e-newsletters — ha!):

Exact Target: No Executive Left Behind: 10 Things Your C-Suite MUST KNOW About Email Now

SilverPop: Spam: What Customers Really Think

ClickZ: 10 Reasons to Be Thankful for E-mail by Karen Gedney

Are you a B2B marketer with an e-newsletter success story? If so, I’d love to feature it on this blog. Drop me an email at: info@dhcommunications.com

I spent the weekend preparing for the presentation I’m giving to the Yankee IABC group tomorrow evening.

For weeks now I’ve been collecting data, references, and articles about social media. Because I’m speaking to a business audience of corporate and PR types, I wanted to be sure to justify the business rationale for expending time, energy, and resources in something that many old-time marketing gurus will tell you has little, if any, business ROI.

But, remember that scene in Star Wars Episode 4 (or, the original Star Wars movie for those of you of a certain age, <ahem>) when Luke Skywalker pushes away the computer in order to use the “Force” in taking his shot against the Death Star?

That’s how I felt when I decided to forego the data, the references, and the articles.

Why? Because it no longer matters how many people are Twittering, blogging, chatting, and networking online.

What matters is that enough people are doing it that they can take down a company and its product in little over 48 hours — which is what happened to Johnson & Johnson and its Motrin product this weekend.

According to the NY Times, J&J introduced its “mom pain” campaign online. In an ad targeted to young moms, the voice-over talks about the pain moms go through in order to carry their babies in a sling. The ad copy goes on to say some moms do it to look fashionable. Uh oh!

In a matter of hours, a firestorm erupted on Twitter, with hundreds of moms protesting. (You can read the whole run-down in the NY Times article and the Forbes.com article.)

Long story short, if you’re a marketer, small business owner, or a consultant to them, you MUST get onboard with social media.

I don’t care if only 2% of the people in your space are talking online. These people may be very well talking about you, your products, and your company — and you may not like what they are saying.

If the powers that be at J&J had had a clue, they would have caught this fiasco when it began.

Social Media Quick Start Tips

1. Set up Google Alerts for your company name, brand names, product names, heck, even your CEO’s name. As Peter Shankman points out in his blog post, just one Google Alert would have alerted someone at J&J that people were talking about their ad campaign.

2. Find the influentials who know what’s going down 24/7. Peter Shankman, Guy Kawasaki, Jeremiah Owyang, and David Meerman Scott are just a few of the people who have their fingers on the pulse of the social media world. Follow them on Twitter and read their blog posts — what they write about doesn’t appear in the mainsteam media for days, sometimes weeks.

3. Become a participant in this new world. Read blogs in your industry and post comments. Find industry chat boards and participate. Follow people on Twitter and post your own updates. When you find relevant information about your industry, send links to your clients so that they can be informed. (And, you’ll build your relationship with them, too.)

Becoming social media savvy isn’t that difficult, nor does it require a whole lot of time or money. But, it sure can save you one huge headache — as Johnson & Johnson learned the hard way.

Thanks to the power of the Internet, a small business or consultant can drive hundreds (if not thousands) of inquiries that turn into leads by becoming “famous” online. Today I give you three of the dozens of strategies you can use to build your online fame — without spending a lot of money.

Every Monday I’ll be posting tips small businesses and consultants can use to help get more from their B2B marketing communications (marcom) campaigns and tactics.

Today’s tip is, “Use existing assets in new ways.”