Confession time: I have a love-hate relationship with RFPs and RFIs for language services. And I may not be the only one.

A lot of marketing thinking has recently shifted from talking about marketing funnels to marketing flywheels. This offers opportunities for how and when companies enter international markets with global content or products. In fact, some organizations may already use this concept — a global marketing flywheel — to drive their localization decisions without even being aware of it.

Everyone at least slightly involved in the language industry is acutely aware of the fact that local language is critical for products to sell and for ideas to spread. But one final frontier seems to be uncharted: corporate content.

The rise of marketing automation platforms (MAPs) like HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce (Pardot) seems unstoppable. Globally, this market has been growing by double digits, and Forrester estimated the penetration of MAPs in the B2B space to be 58% in 2018. HubSpot alone grew their customer base by 36% in 2018, adding some 15,000 new customers during the year.

When you think of a medical device, user experience (UX) might not come to mind as one of its key features. But UX is quickly rising in importance for medical device manufacturers, and global UX considerations are becoming an indispensable part of the typical medical device design process.

The international nature of travel and hospitality just might make it the “ultimate” localization industry. Either way, it’s one of the most fiercely competitive spaces in the world of e-commerce because a staggering number and variety of parties sell the same products for similar — or even identical — prices.