On advertising, marketing and freelancers

 

[Store marketing flow*]

Most freelancers find advertising and marketing a bit mysterious, confusing and/or disturbing in some way. For this reason, among others, they try to avoid investing in them on a regular basis. In practice, advertising and marketing are two different activities in terms of goal, method and measurement with marketing being a much more practical, effective and affordable for most entrepreneurs.

To explain, advertising is promoting short term sales. It involves exposing a product or service to a specific audience and encouraging immediate action. The customer motivation to buy may be limited time or supply or a notably low price. The promotion, whether in audio or visual form, emphasizes the product and the reason it is advisable to purchase now. Advertising generally involves a short-term, often high, cost. The business owner measures the results by comparing the estimated profit without advertising to the estimated profit attained through promotion, deducting the advertising expense. For example, if a new business advertises a grand opening, a successful advertising campaign would lead to a much larger showup to the event and an increased volume of sales on and around the opening. Likewise, if an established business advertises a product whose inventory it wishes to reduce or eliminate, it is possible to compare volume and profit before and during the campaign. Once the promotion is over, the seller returns to business as usual.

By contrast, marketing emphasizes brand over item. Specifically, it aims to create an identification between a service or product and the provider. As extreme examples, Google, McDonalds and Pampers each invest great effort in creating link between their name and their product, search engine, fast food and diapers, respectively. Marketing campaigns generally lack short term incentives to purchase, including low prices, but instead focus on a positive attribute of the product or company. A name-recognition effort can take on a variety of forms, including media adverts, sponsorship, signing, conferences and talking to your neighbors. The sky is the limit but many forms of marketing only involve investing time, not money. However, successful marketing does involve consistent effort as the fruits of marketing are invisible and slow and require multiple exposure. Simply put, it may take makes months or even years to financially profit from the effort even though the name recognition campaign is actually effective. Large companies can afford to conduct measuring surveys to ascertain the actual effectiveness. Most freelancers must have faith, a necessary attribute in all respects for a freelancer. Successful marketing requires long-term, directed action.

Advertising may be appropriate for some freelancers. For example, an accountant or translator specializing in tax form preparation and translation may try to reach companies and individuals in the first quarter of the year as the tax filing deadline creates a time incentive to purchase their service. Likewise, a recently established site designer or immigration document specialist may be willing to sacrifice short-term profit in order to build a portfolio and reputation. Service providers can reasonably provide large discounts if they are especially efficient in their work. Of course, those entrepreneurs finding themselves with no customers can choose to offer especially low prices choosing to prefer low profit to no income. The issue is trying to raise the prices to normal levels later but that is a long-term problem, a luxury for some people. Thus, for entrepreneurs with short-term goals, an advertising campaign may be worthwhile.

However, for most freelancers, including translators, marketing is the better option in terms of effectiveness and cost. Since most independent business people offer a product or service that is generally only occasionally required, the best method for incoming business is the create a connection between that service or product and the potential provider. To give an example, a customer contacted me this week for a French to English translation after her Masters advisor read a previous post of mine and labeled me as a potential provider of translation should occasion arise. Even more, marketing does not necessarily involve significant financial outlays. For example, business group zoom meetups and telling your hairdresser what your profession are free of charge as are posts in Facebook and other social media. One graphologist posted a simple business sign in her garden and regularly profited from opportunity clients. Marketing does require time to think, create and act. For better or worse, many freelancers had and have far too much free time in the last two years. Marketing is a way of converting that surplus into a future financial profit.

As a trigger to thinking about marketing, I would suggest considering the following questions:

1.       Do people in my local community know what I do?

2.      When I enter my name in Google search, do my profession and contact details appear?

3.      Have other people in my profession in my country and abroad, if relevant, heard of me?

4.      Have my potential customers ever heard of me?

If the answer to any of the questions is negative, it is time to actively think about marketing and then begin an ongoing effort to change the answer to positive. The results probably will not occur immediately. However, in an especially volatile market, all entrepreneurs must consider the question of where they want to be two years from now, keeping in mind that the failure to act is an action in itself. Despite their connotations and the lack of comfort they create for independents, advertising and, even more so, marketing are important options for all freelancers building a long-term future in their business.

* Picture captions open up the Internet to the blind.

Picture credit: Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/megan_rexazin-6742250/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=4156934">Megan Rexazin</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=4156934">Pixabay</a>

LA signing and the art of the translation

 

[Ventura Blvd, Encino with light traffic*]

I took a two-week break from posting blogs due to a family visit to Los Angeles. On my twice-daily trips to my mother’s house from the hotel in the San Fernando Valley, I had plenty of time to notice interesting billboards along the way and even consider how they would be translated. On the flight back, I realized how these signposts illustrate the craft of translation.

Mental Health Matters – This simple three-word text is subject to interpretation depending whether the word matters is a noun, verb or part of a name. In the first case, it would mean issues of emotional stability, which would refer to some counseling service, quite necessary in these Corona times. In the second case, it states that emotional health is important, which is obvious, without saying what should be done about it. In actuality, the text plays on the well-known group Black Lives Matters, and states the name of a charity. “Mental Health Matters” demonstrates why context and cultural knowledge matter.

Corky’s We Control Pets – The advertising message is completely clear in the American context but poses issues in translation. Since the company deals with rats and other nuisances, it is obvious that people pay Corky to get rid of their pests. Yet, the word “control” is translated in most languages as to limit, master or expertly use, none of which applicable in this case. The translator that sticks closely to the dictionary translation, at least in many languages, loses the main point of the message. Professional translation goes beyond word-to-word replacement and requires complete control of the vocabulary nuances.

Serious injury lawyers – The nature of the English language renders this sentence ambiguous, allowing a double meaning. In contrast with most languages, the only English nouns that have gender are natural, e.g., boys, girls, men and women. Thus, adjectives have only one form and do not reflect the gender or number of the noun they describe. In most other language, an adjective in a plural, feminine form must be used with plural, feminine noun, as in les grandes villes in French. In this sentence, we start with the adjective, serious, which is followed by a singular noun, injury, and a plural noun, attorneys, with no grammatical clue to which noun the adjective refers. So, it is possible that the attorneys handle matters of a serious injury, the attorneys are serious or both.  While the first is probably the primary meaning, as a marketing text, the additional implication of legal competence is vital to the message. Thus, the translator must be aware of the purpose of the text so as not to injure its message.

Thus, even a routine drive down Ventura Boulevard can provide food for professional thought. For purchasers of translation, it is vital that the chosen translator is aware of the cultural context, lexical complexity and intended purpose of any text. As for translators, they ignore any of those at their peril. By the way, it is good to be back home in Israel.

* Caption pictures to allow the blind full access to the Internet.