7 Essential Steps to Reach Global Audiences with Website Localization Services for Life Sciences Organizations
Website Localization for Life Sciences Organizations Means Greater Global Reach
Life sciences organizations are under increasing pressure to connect with global audiences. With 65% of internet users preferring websites in their native language and 40% refusing to buy from websites in other languages, we can safely assume websites that are not localized are missing significant opportunities for accessibility and reach.
Connectivity for life sciences organizations is about more than building brand trust—it's about health and safety compliance, information accessibility, and improving patient engagement. In a field as critical as healthcare, meeting the linguistic, cultural, and regulatory requirements of global markets is not only essential for advancing global health but also imperative for your bottom line: ROI.
There are seven key steps to building an effective website localization strategy for life sciences organizations. This approach helps bridge gaps, reach new markets, and stay ahead of increasing regulatory scrutiny in a rapidly globalizing industry.
1. Identify Key Markets and Audience Needs
When entering global markets, it’s critical to understand each target market’s patient and healthcare professional demographics, including common health issues, language preferences, and cultural considerations that may impact content tone and relevance. Do your market research and leverage resources and tools from a localization partner that has experience supporting life sciences organizations.
Assess current content and prioritize according to which website pages and sections require localization based on the specific needs of each market. Patients and healthcare professionals will need access to localized information on clinical trials, patient education, and product information at the bare minimum.
2. Define Regulatory Requirements in Target Markets
Healthcare professionals are challenged to maintain the highest level of regulatory compliance for patient safety. Understanding and adhering to local healthcare and advertising regulations is essential. This importance is underscored by a Grand View Research study, which valued the global regulatory affairs outsourcing market at close to $7 billion in 2022, with a projected 8.3% increase by 2030. Don’t let your organization fall behind by failing to meet regulatory requirements during your website localization.
Your organization cannot successfully engage global audiences without researching local guidelines for healthcare communication, including restrictions on medical claims, privacy laws, and advertising regulations, to ensure your localized content complies with regional standards.
Get legal and compliance teams involved early in the process to identify key compliance requirements for each region and avoid potential legal, ethical, and safety challenges down the line.
3. Choose the Right Website Localization Software
The importance of localizing healthcare websites is clear: organizations using translation management systems (TMS) achieve faster time to market and lower localization costs. To streamline localization and reach audiences faster, choose website localization software that integrate with your existing CMS and other technology systems. When it comes to regulatory compliance, your organization needs to be able to move swiftly and accurately. Leverage translation management tools that support multilingual content and enable smooth publishing and updating in multiple languages at scale.
Implement a TMS to streamline workflows, automate translations, and centralize content management, reducing manual tasks and improving consistency across languages.
For a deeper dive into choosing the right TMS for your localization goals, download our free Website Localization Buyer’s Guide.
4. Leverage AI-Driven Translation for Efficiency
Using AI-driven machine translation in your localization efforts presents key opportunities to optimize. Most global organizations have adopted AI-driven machine translation for content that requires frequent updates or lower levels of cultural sensitivity, allowing for faster time to market and cost savings.
AI-driven localization can trigger hesitation and fear that translations will be incorrect or lack cultural relevance. To ensure AI translations align with your brand’s tone and terminology, you can create and integrate custom glossaries, style guides, and tone of voice guidelines specific to life sciences and your brand. However, the best translation solutions enable you to leverage both the speed of AI and machine translations and human-in-the-loop support when and where you need it.
5. Integrate Human Review for High-Quality, Accurate Localization
AI translations are not perfect, nor will they ever be. You’re more likely to build trust if your website and content are: 1) accurately translated, 2) culturally relevant, and most critically, 3) factually correct. For sensitive content like clinical trial information and patient communication, human translators with subject matter expertise should review AI translations to capture nuances and ensure accuracy.
Human reviewers add a layer of quality control by maintaining consistent medical terminology, following regulatory guidelines, and adapting the tone to local audiences while staying true to brand.
6. Conduct Quality Assurance and Localization Testing
Errors in localization cause website visitors to question a company’s professionalism, underscoring the importance of quality assurance in the localization process. Test localized content to ensure it reads naturally in each language and functions correctly across devices. Check for errors, mistranslations, and technical issues that may impact user experience.
Create a high-quality user experience by ensuring that your website’s layout, navigation, and features such as screen reader compatibility and text size adjustments meet local user preferences and accessibility standards.
7. Establish a Process for Continuous Updates and Monitoring
Use your TMS to monitor content changes on the source website and automatically trigger translations to ensure that localized sites are up-to-date and consistent with the original content. This will significantly reduce translation costs and manual work.
Regularly monitor site performance, analyze user engagement metrics, and collect feedback from local audiences to identify improvement areas, measure impact, and refine localization strategies over time.
Go Beyond Website Translation to Reach Patients and Healthcare Professionals
Effectively localizing a website in the life sciences sector goes beyond translation; it involves understanding audience needs, regulatory requirements, and the importance of high-quality, culturally relevant content.
By following these seven steps, life sciences organizations can enhance their global reach, ensuring patients and healthcare professionals have accurate and accessible information in their native languages.
GlobalLink Web Partners with Life Sciences Organizations to Simplify Website Localization
For life sciences organizations, timely, accurate, and culturally adapted information is essential to reach providers and patients. GlobalLink Web offers a robust solution for managing multilingual websites with ease.
With its advanced TMS, seamless integration capabilities, and AI-driven solutions, GlobalLink Web helps life sciences organizations streamline the entire website localization process while ensuring compliance and consistency across markets. Sanofi, for example, uses GlobalLink to strengthen local engagement across regions. Learn more about Sanofi's experience and the impact of this solution on their global presence.
By choosing GlobalLink Web, you’re not only investing in a platform that saves time and reduces costs but also ensuring that your global audience receives the high-quality, localized content they need to make informed healthcare decisions.
Discover how GlobalLink can improve your localization strategy and support your mission to connect with patients and professionals worldwide.