How to improve selling texts for your translation business

In this post, I’m going to share some tips on how to improve selling texts, strengthen your translation offer, make it more attractive to your potential customers, win new projects, and make more money from your translation business.

Selling complex services such as translation is not an easy task. That’s why I constantly try to improve my marketing strategies and processes.

I’ve tested many approaches from called calling and emailing at the beginning of my career back in 2007 to PPC and content marketing in the later years.

It gradually dawned on me that efficient sales won’t come without understanding the pain points of my clients and developing a proper value proposition based on those points.

Having identified the problem, I have to convert vague anticipations of my clients into clear problem-solving offers with obvious value. I decided to go further and explore the underlying reasons that make someone set out to search for a translator.

How to improve selling texts

Putting myself in the shoes of potential customers, I identified two main reasons why someone may need to translate something, and eventually two universal values translators can bring to the client’s table. Here they are: 

1. A client wants to avoid potential problems and a translator helps with that.
2. A client wants to benefit or make a profit out of certain activities and translators help with that too.

Now let’s try to apply these two points to different situations when a potential customer needs translation. Then, let’s convert the characteristics of your services into benefits your client would get from translation. Finally, we will use all that to improve your selling texts.

Preventing problems

Translation of a contract

Let’s imagine you need to conclude a contract with a foreign company. There are several problems you may want to avoid in this process:

• Conflict of laws between states or countries.
• Misunderstanding of contract conditions, rights, and obligations by the parties.
• Erroneous interpretation of contract clauses in favor of one party and to the detriment of the other party, to name a few.

You can think of more problems that may occur in this situation. Now you can strengthen your offer by converting your service characteristic into a translation solution that can prevent these problems.

Making profit

Translation of a marketing copy

What’s the purpose of a marketing text? Depending on the sales funnel stage, a marketing text may have different goals:

• Discovery: grab the attention of a wide audience who is not aware of the solution you offer.
• Interest: warm up the interest in a product or service.
• Consideration: overcome objections, and present benefits and confirmations.
• Purchase: covert potential (knowledgeable) customers into client
• Loyalty and retention: improve customer relations and offer a great experience.

So, depending on the sales funnel stage, you can prepare a solid offer focusing on real benefits your clients will get from the translation.

A more interesting situation is when you can combine two points into one — help someone prevent the problem and even benefit from it!

Do you have any examples of such a combination? Post your ideas in the comments section below.

Task to complete

Finally, here is a quick guide and homework for you to strengthen your translation offer.

If you want to improve your selling texts, try this process:

• Take your latest translation projects (or come up with a potential project). Here are to test options for you:
  • translation of a technical manual,
  • translation of a company presentation,
  • translation of a CV, and
  • translation of the medical survey results.
• Try to identify why the client needs the translation: is it a desire to prevent a problem or to make a benefit?
• Write several problems or benefits depending on the nature of the project.
• Incorporate what you got so far into your client-specific offer.
• Test it in the next commercial proposal or sales text on your website or social media.

I hope these quick tips will help you improve your selling text. If you like this post, share it with your colleagues!