Moxa China
A Global Strategy
moxa.com.cn
Moxa is a world leader in connectivity and industrial automation. Moxa technology can be found everywhere from the International Space Station to Smart Ships in China and Air Traffic Control in Europe. They are a growing global organisation.
This project was created as the Moxa China Website was dated and didn’t match the company’s strength in the country or globally. Further, it was increasingly difficult and inefficient for the Global Marketing Team to manage sites on different platforms.
Challenges
This project had many challenges. The site needed to be located within the Chinese Firewall, but be the content needed to be sourced from the Global site located outside of China. Second, there were over 20,000 nodes of content that needed to be changed. Third, the site sourced much of its product content from an ERP System outside of China that was only in English. Fourth, the project required that ongoing translations would all be automated via an API to an external translation agency.
Strategy & Implementation
The website was built using Kentico EMS and is hosted on an Azure VM within China.
The Global Website (i.e. not the CN one) is where all the content originates. This site is located on a separate Azure set up outside of China.
The Global Marketing Team writes the copy in English on the Global Site where it goes through the normal workflow process before getting published. In addition, ERP product data/content is incorporated into the Global Site through an API setup.
Once the content is published in English on the Global Site, Content Staging is used to transfer that English Copy to the CN Website. The CN Website then automatically sends the English copy to a 3rd party translator where it gets translated into Chinese and enters back into Kentico for an approval workflow.
The codebase for both the Global site and CN site were kept in synch to keep things simpler. However, the functionality varies as well as, of course, the content and templates.
Results
The China Site went live with a large PR Campaign with Dealers across China praising the new site and expressing their happiness in having the improved marketing asset available.
Early Baidu traffic numbers already show a large increase in traffic. For example, the traffic over the last 2 months has been up over 50% on the previous year period.
Other Moxa markets have now approved similar project work on the back of the successful China launch, with Japan being the next market to come on board to the platform.
Perhaps most importantly, the new site has dramatically reduced the effort required for internal company processes involved in translations. The previous model was largely manual and hugely labour intensive whereas the new application is largely automated end to end.