In today's business landscape, corporate sustainability is a top priority for customers, investors, and regulators. The ability to track and report data related to sustainability, safety, and productivity has never been more crucial for companies to uphold transparency.

Sphera, a leader in the environmental health and safety industry, helps its customers keep their employees safe, remain compliant with regulations, manage their environmental impact, and mitigate risk with ESG performance and risk management software, data, and consulting services.

Sphera has been supporting customers globally for more than 30 years and offers a suite of products with a user interface available in 46 different languages. Despite offering a multilingual product enabled for a global audience, the marketing team at Sphera realized that the prospect and customer experience were largely monolingual with content only offered in English.

To drive geographic expansion and deliver a personalized, seamless, and comprehensive customer experience, the team decided to invest in a global strategy. For Senior Field Marketing Manager Michele Lavoie, this meant adding native speakers to their sales and business development teams and translating content throughout their customer experience into five key languages.

To support this large-scale project, the most important thing for Sphera was finding a true thought partner as they built out their localization program. 

Michele shared the chief considerations for her team’s evaluation process: “The key word for us was ‘partner’. It was really important for us to find a partner that would collaborate with us. Someone who would not just help with a one-time translation project but a collaborative partner who would be in step with us as we build this multiyear strategy.”

Michele and her team found that ideal partner in LILT. Together, the teams have developed a comprehensive localization strategy, continuously iterating and improving based on valuable insights gained during the process. With LILT’s AI-powered approach, the Sphera team set off to localize a range of marketing assets, including the Sphera website, eBooks, and digital paid ads.

While it will take a few years to fully realize the impact of this initiative, there have already been promising signs of success in Sphera's engagement metrics for multilingual content.

Since localizing key pages into multiple languages, the marketing team has experienced a significant surge in organic and paid web traffic. Translated pages have generated nearly a quarter million net new page views and translated paid ads on LinkedIn and Google have generated more than 30,000 clicks. 

Translated SEO keywords and sentences have outperformed click-through rates of English equivalents, by as much as 38% for Japanese, the top-performing language, further reinforcing the value of engaging international audiences with localized content.

As part of their preferred workflow, Sphera's team includes internal content reviewers who are native speakers of the target languages. These reviewers play a crucial role in reviewing the translated content and providing feedback. LILT streamlines this process, making it intuitive and straightforward for the team while also resulting in continuous quality improvements over time.

When the Sphera reviewers have a suggestion or make a change to the translation, they can make those changes and leave comments directly in the LILT Platform. Those edits are captured in LILT, shared with linguists, and saved in the translation memory automatically. Over time, this feedback helps fine-tune LILT’s Contextual AI Engine based on Sphera’s brand voice and linguistic preferences. 

For Michele’s reviewers, the impact of this intuitive review interface has not gone unnoticed, “Being able to share context as to why changes are made with translators has led to noticeable improvements in quality over time. This functionality was not something we saw from other companies in the market."

Now in the second year of their localization and geographic expansion project, the Sphera team is becoming more sophisticated in their global content strategy, tailoring content in each market to the needs of each regional audience.

As they continue to expand their program, Michele and her team plan to explore innovative ways to track the usage of their multilingual content and develop a comprehensive win/loss analysis to inform their strategy. Using signals from customers to adjust their content approach in each market and establishing best practices, the Sphera team is excited to continue to amplify their business impact with the support of LILT, their trusted translation and thought partner.