B
y Viktor Andrukhiv (pictured) – Ukrainian entrepreneur, manufacturer, co-founder of Fibermix and Savex Minerals
In 2022, Ukrainian businesses underwent a hard trial by war and were forced to adapt to its military realities right away. It was plasticity that helped our entrepreneurs survive and keep their businesses running. Everyone chose their own strategy and efficiency tools.
One of such tools, digitization, was the key step Fibermix took when entering the European market.
A Website as a Tool
Our first website was a simple landing page that only gave our clients a general understanding of what our company does. As there was little use for such a web resource, we decided later to develop a full-fledged website for Ukrainian users. We also created and localized a dedicated platform for our European clients to improve cooperation with the EU and give high-quality information to our potential partners.
European business relations are traditionally formal. EU partners are attentive to details, prefer email to live communication, and carefully study proposals and documents. So, the process of interacting with our clients had to be simplified. This was how we designed our user-friendly website. It had to meet visitors’ requests as much as possible and serve as a one-stop entry point to all the necessary information about us.
Localization: A Lifehack
When creating a company website, the vast majority choose English to interact with foreign clients. After all, as an EU official language, English should be understood by everyone in the European community. But the reality is different. An average Pole or Frenchman or Czech is very unlikely to understand a list of specifications of construction fiber or other products in English. Natively, people are more willing to trust the information written in their local language.
Our company website was originally in English, too. However, that did not give us the result we expected. This was where localization stepped in. We used six local languages of EU countries and adapted our materials focusing on the local user. These two actions alone increased our website retention and interaction rates. Organic traffic growth followed.
Multilingualism has worked as an effective marketing tool. Our EU clients were now able to receive information in their local language. This significantly simplified our communication about product specifications and increased order placement. Thanks to such localization, in particular, our company opened two more EU countries for export in 2022. Today, we deliver to 14 countries.
During the full-scale invasion, we counted on our website as a marketing tool. We can now say that this decision was correct even despite its considerable creation and maintenance costs.Our website has become the face of Fibermix in European countries as the only way for us to interact with our foreign clients today. In its turn, localization has both increased the number of our clients and allowed us to work and pay taxes during this challenging period for our country.
