Have you ever used Google Translate to convert website content from one language to another? I have and while Google does an amazing job of attempting translation, I just didn't know enough about the language and cultural differences to know if the translation accurate or unintentionally offensive. Now imagine doing that on a much larger scale in multiple languages across multiple cultures. Things would go bad very quickly.

Well, today's guest is Heidi Lorenzen, Chief Marketing Officer for Cloudwords, a Marketing Globalization Cloud. It takes all of a business’s marketing material and automatically prepares it for use in any other locality – regardless of language and local customs – and with complete attention to brand guidelines.

During our conversation, Heidi explains how to expand your global reach, avoid costly communication mistakes, and increase the productivity of your marketing team using Cloudword's streamlined team communication dashboard.

Here's the full transcript:

Welcome back to Open Source Marketer. I’m your host, Charles McKeever.

Today’s topic is global communications. We’re going to talk about avoiding miscommunication in marketing and how to properly communicate in other geographic regions.

Joining me today to talk about this is Heidi Lorenzen, Chief Marketing Officer of CloudWords – the marketing globalization company that takes all of your marketing materials and automatically prepares them for use in other localities.

So, Heidi, thank you for joining me today.

HEIDI LORENZEN: Thank so much for having me, Charles.

CHARLES: You know, this is a really interesting topic to me because I’ve had personal experience with these types of situations where you’re trying to hit a market that’s not necessarily within your sphere of comfort and you’re trying to get all the materials translated and message things correctly and stuff like that. But my two experiences with it have been working with an outside resource – someone who translated something for me and then gave it to me and I didn’t really know what it said but I knew where it was supposed to go – and then, the other one was, you know, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, taking and putting something into Google Translate and then hoping that it was correct and then putting it out there and sharing it with the world.

So, let’s talk about CloudWords. What do you guys do and how is that experience different than what I’ve experienced?

HEIDI: Yeah. So, CloudWords was created to focus on the needs of folks like yourself – those who are actually in a position of needing to get their content into other markets and wanting to maintain global brand integrity, wanting to do it faster, wanting to do it more efficiently, et cetera.

Up until CloudWords was introduced on the scene, the translation industry was dominated by the translation service providers. They were creating efficiencies for the translators. It’s still a very important piece of the process. But nobody was really thinking about the needs of the marketer and, you know, globalization is just a must-do now. You know, it’s not a nice-to-have. You know, the world is flat ten years ago, and even then, if somebody spent a lot of time overseas, I thought that was already old news – that was really old news.

So, you know, if a marketer is not thinking consistently about “how am I optimizing growth for my company across the world?†they are leaving money on the table and they’re not really, you know, doing their company the full service that they can be. So, CloudWords aims to kind of address it from that perspective, building in the efficiencies that will allow marketers to do all of the marketing that they want much easier, much more simply, for less effort on their part as well as, you know, less financial resources.

CHARLES: Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying because it doesn’t really matter what space you’re in. I mean,