Agile Marketing Localization Interview with Julia Cames
Vistatec’s Esther Curiel interviewed Julia Cames from GetYourGuide.
Vistatec’s Esther Curiel interviewed Julia Cames from GetYourGuide. They will both be present at LocWorld34 as part of a panel entitled “Marketing Content at the Speed of Agile”.
Julia Cames is the Marketing Content Team Lead at GetYourGuide, a Berlin-based booking platform for travel, tours and activities. She will be speaking at LocWorld34, to be held in Barcelona on June 14–16, as part of a panel entitled “Marketing Content at the Speed of Agile — Game Changing Times for Global Brands”.
Vistatec’s Esther Curiel, who will moderate the panel, interviewed Julia for her thoughts on agile marketing, localization, user experience and global analytics.
Julia, you bring an interesting perspective to the panel as you don’t come, like many of us, from a localization background, instead you come from the content marketing world. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do at GetYourGuide?
My background is in communications (media, sociology, and content marketing).
I’ve always been passionate about the power of the word, I think you can apply it in all kinds of industries. I have been working on branding over the last 7 years. I did content marketing in my previous job, where I was country manager for France, and I was in charge of defining the strategy — but focused on one language only. I wanted to get more skills and knowledge internationally, to focus on more languages. Understand what is the difference between a French and a Spanish customer, in terms of e-commerce; what can we learn from global branding, and what can become best practices to roll out in all applicable languages. That is why I joined GetYourGuide as their Team Lead for Content Marketing.
GetYourGuide is a good example of a company born global (and digital). How important is content agility to GYG, and what does it mean for you?
Agile gives people autonomy, which increases motivation and ownership, and quality of the end result. There are different ways in which it benefits us:
● Fast iteration (which means we can produce content faster)
● Small scale tests and metrics analysis to roll out best practices at scale
● Strategy shift to ensure performance
● Agile increases value: customer experience and increased engagement
● And it allows to keep up pace with the marketplace
Being in a data driven company, we look at the numbers, we test, but we might not have the capacity to test everything in every single language. So we also involve our language specialists: we ask them if the messaging makes sense in their market. Will the customer understand the message?
It’s a matter of balance. Testing is important, but we also need to keep production going, and avoid creating backlogs.
How have things changed since you started? What did you set out to do 7 months ago, and what are your goals for the next year?
We are a fast-growing company, you have to be able to deal with the day-to-day but you also need to have a strategic vision. You need to define the scope of work, make sure you have the resources to go where you want to go, and make sure it’s aligned with what the company needs to drive the business.
My top priorities have been:
● Growing the team and giving them ownership. I’ve been very busy hiring and on boarding over the past few months, and ensuring we all work on the same direction.
● Shifting the perception of content from execution to business strategy. This involves lots of different touch points and departments, but we’ve managed to move from working FOR other departments to working WITH them. It’s getting more stable within the team, we are getting the capacity we need, and the knowledge and expertise.
● Defining and organizing the workflow between Marketing and Content.
● Ensuring excellency of copywriting in 14 Languages and in all touch points of the customer journey.
It helps that we have clarity from the top to the bottom of the organization, all departments have the same goals even if we work differently, and top management is in it with us — that’s half the battle.
Ensuring excellency of copywriting in 14 languages sounds like some task. How do you handle it?
It is one of the most challenging and interesting aspects of my role, to be honest. Excellency in copywriting is different from translation. It’s not just about having the right words, the content needs to convey the branding as well, and the ultimate goal is that an English customer has the same experience as an Italian or Spanish or a French one. What the customers are saying is the ultimate proof. We make sure we have coordination with customer service, they’re the ones who hear from our clients. And we look at the numbers, and take time weekly to analyze all this data and cross-check so we can understand where the problems are — is it a target group problem, for example, Spanish customers not being interested in a given tour compared to the English? Or is the product description lacking some important info for Spanish customers? You need to understand what works well locally.
We also need to make sure that there’s clear documentation so external partners understand our requirements. For instance, we want to inspire, but at the end of the day we want the info to be clear to our customers, too much creativity might actually clutter and create noise. You also need to keep in mind the channel we are using for our content, it might have the same message but we need to convey it differently. All this needs to be very clear. When you have a large resource pool this is critical. Minding the gap between copywriters and language specialists is also important.
Collaboration and the breaking down of internal silos are central to agile methodologies. From your comment before it is clear that this is a feature at GYG. How does the communication flow between Marketing and Localization?
The content team works with all departments and many different stakeholders, each one with their own goals and priorities. It can be difficult when they all want everything at the same time. We prioritize according the business value and have weekly sync ups and alignment with operations and project innovation teams.
The positive thing is that you have much more unity between the different languages. We aim at handling all similar content types in the same way, for all languages. A content department makes more sense than having a decentralized model.
You mentioned testing before and this is a key area in agile methodologies. Can you give us some examples of the type of tests you carry out at GYG, or share any interesting findings?
We believe in high velocity A/B testing, to back up everything with numbers. We are testing wherever we have enough traffic to do so and gather data quickly. We iterate fast. We are more inclined to do small scale tests to help grow further and find out what the customer wants exactly.
We are also opening some testing locally for some markets where we feel we can get stronger. We might test different levels of detail in the copy for product pages, for instance, or different features. We tend to easily transfer positive tests from English to all applicable languages. And it is not always right. Hence the importance of localization in content marketing.
And what type of metrics are you tracking? (And why?)
We track typical marketing metrics like how many people click on your page and then convert, or abandon immediately. We analyze the metrics, see if something is working for one language but not another, analyze why this might be … could it be related to the product copy? Things like high bounce rates obviously raise alarm bells, they can show that perhaps the messaging is not consistent from the landing page to the specific page. And increases in traffic tell you that you are doing something right, you took the right decision to target that language, and the product is already converting.
If you want to iterate fast, this is the only way. If you’re not paying attention, you might miss opportunities. Understanding the numbers helps you prioritize, grow, and perform better.
About Vistatec
Vistatec has been supporting some of the world’s most iconic brands to optimize their global commercial potential since 1997. Vistatec is one of the world’s leading localization solutions providers headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in Mountain View, California, USA.
by Esther Curiel, Project Management Team Lead , Vistatec.
