Every year, we check in with our active clients to understand how localisation is working for them and where we can do more. This year, we asked a simple but revealing question: what impact has localisation had on your company? The responses from clients across a range of industries painted a clear picture. Nine out of ten reported a tangible, positive impact on their business.
Here’s what they told us, and what it means in practice.
Localisation as a growth engine
When we combined the responses around reaching new markets (14%), increasing sales or revenue (14%) and reducing time-to-market for products and services (14%), 42% of respondents pointed to localisation as a direct driver of business expansion. That’s a significant proportion, and it reflects a shift in how many organisations are coming to think about multilingual content as a growth enabler.
The connection between localisation and market entry is well established. Consumers are significantly more likely to purchase from a website in their own language and more likely to return. But the link to revenue goes deeper than language preference alone. When your content is culturally adapted – when it reflects local norms, addresses local concerns and uses familiar frames of reference – it builds the kind of trust that converts browsers into buyers and first-time customers into loyal ones.
Time-to-market is a less obvious but equally important factor. For businesses launching products or services across multiple regions simultaneously, localisation bottlenecks can delay releases, create inconsistencies between markets and erode competitive advantage. Organisations that integrate localisation early into their development and content workflows consistently find that multilingual content supports rather than slows their launch timelines.
Customer experience and brand: the largest impact area
The biggest single response category was improved customer experience and satisfaction, cited by 27% of respondents. A further 18% said localisation had strengthened their brand globally, making this the combined area where clients felt the most impact overall, at 45%.
It’s worth unpacking why customer experience ranked so highly. Localisation affects every touchpoint a customer has with your brand: your website, your product interface, your support documentation, your marketing communications. When each of these speaks to someone in their own language and cultural context, the cumulative effect is a sense that your brand understands them. That feeling of being understood is one of the most powerful drivers of customer satisfaction and retention.
Brand strength operates on a similar principle, but over a longer horizon. A globally consistent brand that adapts intelligently to local contexts, rather than simply translating its English-language messaging word for word, earns credibility in each market it enters. Inconsistent framing and representation in localised materials and local presence, on the other hand, can quietly undermine the impression of professionalism that global companies work hard to build in their home market. For regulated industries in particular, where trust is foundational, this consistency has direct business value.
Our work with IG Group illustrates this well. By providing consistent, technically accurate multilingual content across regulated markets, localisation contributed directly to stronger confidence in investor-facing and customer-facing communications across eight countries. You can read more in .
The quieter wins: internal communication
One finding that often gets overlooked in conversations about localisation ROI is its internal impact. 5% of respondents highlighted improved internal communication or training as their primary benefit, showing that localisation isn’t exclusively a customer-facing discipline.
For global organisations, the ability to communicate clearly across languages internally is just as important as external messaging. Multilingual training materials ensure that employees in every market receive the same quality of onboarding and development. Internal policies, compliance documentation and operational procedures all carry risk when they’re misunderstood due to language barriers. Investing in the localisation of internal content is, in many cases, an investment in operational consistency and risk management.
What about the 9% who saw no impact?
It would be easy to skip past this, but we think it’s worth acknowledging. A small proportion of respondents said localisation had made no noticeable difference to their business. In our experience, this tends to come down to strategy rather than the work itself.
Localisation delivers the most when it’s planned proactively, aligned to clear business goals and treated as an ongoing programme rather than a reactive, project-by-project exercise. Organisations that localise without first identifying which content is most critical, which markets represent the greatest opportunity or how success will be measured are less likely to see the results they’re hoping for.
If you’re not seeing the impact you expected, it’s worth asking whether localisation is embedded in your wider content and market strategy, or whether it’s still being treated as a procurement task. Our article on centralised versus decentralised localisation strategy is a useful starting point for that conversation.
What this tells us
The results reinforce something we’ve long believed: localisation, done well, has a measurable effect across multiple parts of a business, from revenue and market reach to brand strength, customer loyalty and internal alignment. The range of impact areas also reflects the diversity of our client base, spanning industries with very different content needs and internationalisation goals.
We’re grateful to everyone who took the time to respond this year, and we’ll be drawing on these findings as we continue to develop how we work with you. If any of this resonates or prompts questions about your own localisation programme, we’d love to hear from you at info@stptrans.com.
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