Marketing a service As a professional, how can you explain the value of what you do to a potential client? Holly Behl investigates H Holly Behl is a Spanish>English translator and interpreter based in Dallas, Texas. Comments welcome: contact@hollybehl. com. ow do you tell a prospective client about the intangible benefit you will provide as a translator? Marketing a service presents specific challenges that are quite different from those associated with marketing a product, but here are a few keys for success. If we accept our role as service providers and concentrate our business strategies accordingly, as freelancers, translation companies or cooperatives, we will be better equipped to improve our client base. We are engaged in the part of the economy known as the tertiary sector (the primary sector being related to extraction of prime materials from the earth, the secondary sector being manufacture of finished goods). In the US approximately 80% of the population is employed in service industries; in the UK it is about 76%. At a restaurant, for example, you don’t pay the cost of the food but rather the cost of contracting other people to source ingredients, prepare the food, and clean up after you. Likewise, your clients are paying you, the expert, to use the methods you’ve developed in research, reading and writing, to find a personalised solution that will allow them to meet their goals for the text concerned. Yet language service providers can feel unsure of their position in the equation, and this puts us at a disadvantage. While we understand that translation is not a commodity, we sometimes manage our business as if we were providing a product. It doesn’t help that the industry standard is to price estimates and invoices according to a count of physical words, lines, or pages, and that we turn over a ‘final product’ at 24 ITI BULLETIN May-June 2010 P24 MarketingF.indd 24 the end of the process. It’s easy to make the mistake of marketing translation as if it were a product, since people understand products more easily. You can discuss the features of a product and show how it’s worked for others. The buyer can try out the product before they buy it, examine its quality, and feel confident in the decision to purchase knowing they can return it if they don’t like it. But this tendency also contributes to the culture of handing translation projects to the lowest bidder. For the same reason, clients sometimes ask for a document to be ‘converted’ to another language, as if it were simply a matter of knowing the equivalent of each word in the second language. A translation is much more than an end-product, and it is essential to communicate this to our potential clients so they feel assured of the value we provide. Combating uncertainty The first key to marketing a service is to know that your prospective client feels very uncertain. If she’s done her homework, she’s read three or four websites of freelancers and agencies, all claiming to be the leader in translations, to provide services by native speakers, possess a variety of unintelligible acronyms representing qualifications, and emphasise on-time ‘It’s easy to make the mistake of marketing translation as if it were a product, since people understand products more easily’ delivery and accuracy. Marcela Jenney writes in her blog that ‘translation is seen by many as a commodity for the simple reason that everybody is focusing on the same “attributes”.’1 If your potential client doesn’t know to ask for some other specific information, her only comparison point will be price. If she hasn’t done her homework, she has selected you at random and dialled you for an estimate, and her only comparison point will be price. Faced with buying a mystery service from a stranger for the first time, your client wants to minimise her risk. She doesn’t know you, she doesn’t know if you will do a good job for her, she doesn’t know if you will do anything at all. You might even make her look bad by returning an inadequate or late translation. So, all else being equal, she looks at prices and minimises her risk. The only way to pull your way out of the price pit is to concentrate on easing your client’s apprehension. The most important aspect of the sale is the relationship she feels with you. In Korean business culture, the word for this is kibun (KEE-boon), loosely translated as a general positive feeling (along the lines of other-facedness). Koreans emphasise the importance of attending to the kibun of clients or business partners before attempting to make any deals. More than knowing that you accumulate hundreds of continuing education credits a year or that you’ve presented at industry conferences, your client needs to trust you. The same rules apply to client-provider trust as to any other relationship, so listen actively to identify and address specific needs. Speak in a way that makes you seem open and accessible. Be honest when you see something that would keep you from meeting expectations. Be helpful in providing the information she needs in order to make the best decision. Make her laugh and feel relaxed. Even if it turns out you are not a good fit for this particular www.iti.org.uk 30/4/10 5:48:31 pm marketing project, your potential client is sure to remember the positive emotions associated with your conversation when another project comes along or when her colleague asks for a referral. Make her feel at ease, and you’ve done 90% of the work. Managing your online image The apprehension is especially acute when a prospective client hears about you online instead of in person. The websites of translators and agencies are frighteningly similar, so anything that arouses suspicion will have him clicking back to peruse the search results further. Fortunately, there are several tactics that can help allay his doubts. First, consider how you come across on your site. Especially if you write your own content, your text will express your personality and any lack of enthusiasm towards the tasks involved in maintaining an online presence. If hiring a copywriter to write your content from scratch is not possible, consider hiring one to review your content and offer advice to make it sound more inviting. And hire a professional translator for any material you want to publish in your non-native source languages. Another tool that online buyers rely on when making decisions is reviews from other buyers, but the glowing testimonials on websites are suspected of rigging. To assuage the client’s fears, consider including testimonials that talk about how well you understand your limitations or how you resolved a problem. I have a hard time believing that none of a company’s clients have ever had a problem; I am much more likely to trust a company when the clients mention a problem that came up and how happy they were with the company’s speedy and gracious resolution. Add your business to review sites like Google Local Business, tipped.co.uk, or Yelp, and encourage your clients to leave reviews. You may even want to provide a loosely controlled online review page on your own website, where clients can rate you on different aspects of your service and leave feedback.2 Finding your USP The second key to successfully marketing a service is differentiating your business from competitors. How will a prospective client ever www.iti.org.uk P24 MarketingF.indd 25 differentiate between you and the competition if you don’t clearly express what makes you unique? Do you even know what makes you unique? It’s nearly impossible to be more highly specialised than all of your competitors, or more highly educated, or offer the very fastest turnaround times or the most competitive rates. So selling based on these attributes is a cheap solution with a low return on investment. As Seth Godin puts it, ‘there’s a lot of pressure for freelancers to fit in, conform and comply. It seems easier to generate new business that way. That’s not really true. It’s easier to become an easily-described commodity that way.’3 Instead, figure out why your current clients choose you. Are you ‘a London-based freelance translator’ or are you ‘a fourth-generation London translator’? ‘Don’t try to hide your size; it won’t take your prospective client long to notice that the “CEO” he met in a café is also answering phones and providing estimates’ Although these statements offer no real qualifications, at first glance the second statement causes a much more positive impact. The reader instantly feels the second statement refers to a translator who is deeply rooted both in the London area and in translation, while the first statement still leaves a fog in the mind’s eye. Translation companies offer one set of benefits to clients, while freelancers offer a different set. Maybe your translation company can offer the multiple target languages and management expertise for large projects, while maintaining a close relationship between each client and his or her contact in the company. Advertise that, and be that. Maybe as a freelancer you’ve partnered with a desktop publishing professional to offer a bundled service. Isolate the ways that you add value for your clients, and flaunt them. Interestingly, gender may also affect how you should slant your sales pitch. According to a recent study, men feel more loyalty to an establishment or company, while women feel more loyalty towards the relationship established with a contact at the company.4 Either way, few people will remember all your qualifications or the details of your scrupulous editing process, so offer something to hold onto that’s meaningful to them. Your prospective clients will notice and your current client base will remember. One important distinguishing factor among language service providers is size. According to polls published by ITI, most members are either freelancers or involved in small companies. Don’t try to hide your size; it won’t take your prospective client long to notice that the ‘CEO’ he met in a café is also answering phones and providing estimates. Be real, and de-emphasise your size by emphasising other things. I’ve seen so many websites for freelancers and small companies with large text proclaiming themselves as the ‘industry leader’ in their type of service that it’s actually illogical to believe that all of them are telling the truth. Unless you have some specific revenue figures to show your leadership position in the market or some evidence that all your clients are A-list companies that everyone knows about, few people will buy the inflated position you’re trying to sell. Besides, if you were really the premier translation company, shouldn’t your prospective client have already heard about you? Essentially, marketing your service is all about positioning yourself in a way that is convincing. Don’t make your client suspicious or insecure. Instead, make him feel that he quite brilliantly discovered a gem of a company. Then all that’s left is to provide your services in a way that convinces him he was correct. Jenney, Marcela. ‘Are you a professional translator? If so, do not lower your rates.’ Marcela Jenney’s Blog. 3/7/2010. Web. 15/3/2010. 2 Jeremiah Owyang. ‘How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website.’ 29/5/2007. Web Strategy. 20/3/2010. 3 Godin, Seth. ‘When a Freelancer Changes the Game.’ 20/3/2010. Seth’s Blog. 21/3/2010. 4 Bhargava, Rohit. ‘The Surprising Gender Difference in Customer Loyalty.’ 12/3/2010. Influential Marketing. 12/3/2010. 1 ITI BULLETIN May-June 2010 25 30/4/10 5:48:33 pm