Less than a year ago, I interviewed for a marketing manager position at Skyscanner. After a long and labour-intensive 6-round interview process, I was offered the job. And, while I turned down the job to become a freelance translator and international SEO specialist, I learned a lot about Skyscanner and how to successfully navigate their recruitment process.
If you’re reading these lines, chances are you are looking to apply for a job at Skyscanner or better yet, you’re getting ready for the interview. Well done you! Skyscanner is a great company; you’re going to learn loads. Pand the working environment is amazing — especially their Edinburgh office.
So what does the Skyscanner interview process look like?
The first stage of the interview process plays out just as you’d expect: someone in HR gets in touch to let you know that you have been shortlisted, and you chose a slot for your first interview with a senior marketing manager from the country you will be operating for — Skyscanner France, in my case.
Your interviewer works at Skyscanner, so they probably have valuable insights about digital marketing that have been shared online. In my case, the interviewer had given a super-interesting talk about AI and voice recognition in marketing just a few months ago on French Web. Bingo! Now I know what my interviewer looks like and I have a few topics to engage with him about.
List all the examples of situations where you have added value to a project.
Did you manage to grow an email list by 300%? Tell them about it. Have you increased the time on site of your website, or decrease the bounce rate, or have you written a piece of content that made it to the first page of Google? TELL THEM! And, by all means, please use data to back up any case studies you give them. Skyscanner’s business model is heavily reliant on data; they love it, so use it to support your points as much as you can.
Read as much as you can on the AARRR framework, also known as the Pirate Metrics.
If you have been evolving in the digital marketing universe for a while, you’re probably applying the concepts of the AARRR framework without realising it.
AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention and Referral. These are the 5 critical steps to grow online businesses, and the system works for both websites and apps. The AARRR framework has been developed by David McClure and it’s used by many startups and non-startups alike, Skyscanner included.
If your first interview goes well, you will be invited for a full day at Skyscanner. From 9am to 4pm, you will have five different interviews: three technical interviews and two interviews focusing on behaviour . I know it sounds daunting but all of this is also a way to assess your reaction to pressure, so try not to give in to stress.
Before the big day, you will be sent a dataset showing a year’s worth of data and you will be asked to conduct an analysis on how to increase Skyscanner activation by a certain percentage — 5%, in my case.
Now, read the data again, with AARRR metrics in mind, and use pivot tables. Which channel works best? Which does not? In your rich and diverse experience as a digital marketer, what is the channel you need to focus on? What strategy could you put in place to improve this channel?
You probably landed on this blog because you are trying to sell a product or a service abroad and you are asking yourself if translating your website is really necessary?
These days, most Europeans who are under 40 speak at least some English — both for employment and for academic reasons. However, despite this interest and aptitude for English, all of the marketing data clearly indicates that Europeans would rather speak their own language during leisure time — and this includes shopping.
42 % of Europeans said they’d never buy a product or a service if the information is not available in their native language.
The truth is that people will not try to understand your website content if they can find another website selling the same product or services as you are, but with information translated in their own language.
Another well-known fact in digital marketing is that spending money on the internet requires a high level of trust.
According to a Cybersource survey, 73% of the respondents feel that shopping online is riskier than shopping offline.
Online shoppers will not enter any card details into your payment gateway if they are not 100% sure you are a reliable company. Paying in another currency and having to read complicated T & C’s in another language creates anxieties and uncertainty that put people off.
If you want to have a successful business in another country, you have to adapt to the culture and speak the language of your target market.
Google Translate may seem like a cheap and quick solution for translating your website from one language to another, but it does not work with creative or otherwise complex translations — also known as transcreation. If you rely on Google to translate all your engaging and original website copy, the results will make no sense; your content will be written so poorly that your brand will lose credibility and your bounce rate will drastically increase as visitors press the back button as soon as they read the first line of dodgy copy.
To illustrate the limits of Google Translate, I’ve pasted a great piece of French content from the website France.fr that advertises Paris to potential tourists.
Please tell me, Google Translate: what is a ‘first tube mouth’?
Translating your website into one or two more languages means that more pages will be indexed by Google and that you will start ranking for search queries in other languages.
The famous SEO consultant, Neil Patel did just this: he translated his website into several languages in 2015 and increased his traffic by 47%!
The well-known digital marketing company, Digital Turbine, conducted a study showing that translated campaigns have shown a significantly higher click-through-rate than the untranslated originals.
The top five performing campaigns from Digital Turbine ad network were identified and leveraged for localisation testing within 3 key markets: Spain, France and Germany. The English creative content had an average CTR of 2.35% and a conversion rate of 7.47%. The translated versions reported a click-through rate of 3.34% and a conversion rate of 9.08%.
Net Media Planet, a digital advertising company operating worldwide, reported that their clients witnessed a 20% increase in conversions when landing pages and Adwords campaigns were translated into the local language.
This figure staggers to 70% when the entire website is fully localised — with all website content translated in the local language and products offered in the local currency.
These good results show that any time or money spent on translating your website and your campaigns is extremely likely to achieve a strong return on investment.
There you have it: three reasons why you should invest in good translation for your website.
If I’ve convinced you — and even if I haven’t — please feel free to get in touch. I’m always happy to work with new brands and to discuss translation with anyone who’s interested!