This article is in partnership with Day Translations.

Day Translations staff attended the AdWeek Commerce Week conference in New York City, as covered in the second issue of The Linguist Magazine.

“From Storytelling to Selling”

The headline message from the AdWeek conference was “from storytelling to selling” and the aim of the event was to highlight how brands can build a customer journey that is intuitive and seamless in order to build loyalty and return business, while trying to grab customer’s attention, which is being diverted in many directions.

How do you hold people’s attention if you are trying to sell something? A good story is the medium but behind the scenes there’s a lot of number crunching of data to identify what people want and need, then there’s the creativity needed to create the right messaging backed by teams with the right skills and expertise.

With speakers from major corporations such as TikTok, Microsoft, Unilever, L’Oreal, Mattel and many more, Commerce Week, the key messages from the event were how to delight the customers and get them to come back for more with the correct use of technology and the right channels (from social media to in-store and from in-game to TV).

In fact, AdWeek cleverly used the term “phygital” in their messaging to describe the hybrid physical+digital model of delivering services to customers via virtual and augmented reality.

Basically, selling is about meeting customers where they are, getting their attention as they are browsing from their chosen device and offering convenience to minimise churn and abandoned carts. When the timing and the messaging are right, and the customer is in the right head space to make a purchase, that’s when all the hard work preparing for the sale pays off.

Day Translations at Commerce Week

Attending this conference gave delegates the opportunity to share insights and talk about the current state of online services.

For Day Translations, this was also a learning opportunity to hear about innovation and how to successfully market services to customers using digital marketing.

Day Translations has a strong social media presence:

• about 130k followers on Facebook;
• about 72k followers on X (formerly Twitter);
• almost 10k followers on Instagram;
• about 37k followers on LinkedIn.

All these digital channels represent a great springboard to broadcast the latest company news but also entice existing and potential customers to book translation and interpretation services.

Through networking with other professionals the team at Day Translations gathered precious intelligence about how to understand data from customer behaviours and tailor the offering to meet customers’ needs and preferences.

Companies that want to go truly global need to have all their content (text, audio, video) available in multiple languages and that’s where intepretation and translation services are at the core of a company’s expansion strategy. Another important piece of a global expansion strategy is localisation to adapt all the messaging to suit international audiences and have the appropriate cultural context. This is so important particularly for the long term, as, after building an international reputation, a company with global ambitions must do everything in its power to prevent misunderstandings and making wrong choices based on untested assumptions.