Stockholm is a bit out of the way, when you're travelling around Europe on business, and it takes a little more than usual to attract attention from businesspeople. The Adlon Hotel realized this when they created a Website to attract a business person who is keen to have PC and Internet connections in their room. To get the word out to people around Europe, they translated the main page of their Website and sent out press releases in German, French and Spanish. This work is equivalent in price to one month's run of a quarter-page color ad in a magazine. Yet what a difference in the results of their marketing -- a print advertisement would need to keep up this monthly budget, whereas the Internet ad (that is, their Website) continues on, and the traffic increases, thanks to being in local indexes and search engines.

When designing the online marketing plan, they had to decide who their target audience was: who comes to Stockholm. Obviously the Germans (Sweden's leading trading partner), but also some French, some Spanish/Portuguese (even from Latin America), and the Italians. Hence, Adlon Hotel's director chose to have their gateway page into the Website translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

One year later, this is what they have to say, when asked if the multilingual approach helped them build their hotel business:

"Yes! We are right now up to over 3000 visits per week! And it is from the whole world. Please bear in mind that Adlon Hotel is a small hotel in a small city in the northern Europe and it is not a tourist hotel. Only business people (although we keep getting a lot of tourists as well).

"From our simple E-mail booking facility we are getting more than 10% of our turnover! No discounts, no commissions etc. The one and only reason for getting this kind of result is the way you are linking your site on Internet.

"The winners are the hotels who have understood the importance of being seen on the web. The cost in money is small. The knowledge how to market your site on the Internet is the key to success."

Bengt G Lidforss,
Director of Adlon Hotel,
Stockholm, Sweden

What is important to keep in mind when one decides to internationalize a Website is that it takes time to build traffic. The Adlon Hotel's site was not fetching that much traffic internationally 6 months after their translation and promotions, but a year afterwards, it was clearly a success. This is partly because the indexes and search engines in each country attract more and more attention, as more people in other countries come online.

The Adlon Hotel made the efforts to translate a Home Page in 10 languages, and actively promote these gateways into their Website. During the month of August, 1998, the breakdown of people using these language gateways to find the site was as follows:

German: 10%
French: 9.6%
Italian: 9.3%
Spanish: 9.2%
Portuguese: 8.9%
Scandinavian languages and English: 53%

Of course, they could handle Scandinavian languages and English themselves, and contracted out the other European languages. It's most interesting that the other European languages are now pulling in 47% of the traffic to these language gateways to their site.

Another lesson to be drawn from this example is the separate targeting of the U.K. Instead of going through one of the large American Website registration services, Adlon Hotel decided to target specifically U.K. search engines and press. The American Web promotion services are excellent when broadcasting a message worldwide, to anyone who is conversant in English, but it does not make sense when one is wanting to target only one or two Anglophone countries, as in this case. Many English businesspeople come to Stockholm in comparison with Americans. Hence, the need to target the U.K. alone among Anglophone countries.

Of course, the next step would be to translate their banner ad into these languages and run it in travel sites related to Stockholm. By creating several identical Web pages in each language, each with its own URL -- for instance, in French this could be index-fr1.html, indexfr2.html, etc. -- the Webmaster could test various forms of Web promotion in different countries and see what promotion technique brings in the most people.

The conclusion is obvious: for very little outlay of advertising budget, there can be considerable yield from other countries, just by taking the pains of translating one single page of a Website, and promoting these language gateways into the site. Let's hope that this technique will grow in popularity as businesses become more aware and interested in getting exposure to those abroad.

Written by Bill Dunlap
Managing Director, Euro-Marketing Associates
ema@euromktg.com

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Last revised on 31 Aug., 1998
URL: http://www.euromktg.com/eng/ed/art/rep-eur10.html