Case Study
Confidential · Building Materials Manufacturer
A complete Arabic market entry — RTL website, InDesign brochures, and Gulf SEO — with the first distributor inquiries arriving six weeks after launch.
Challenge
The Problem
Due to a non-disclosure agreement, we are unable to identify this client by name. The client is a manufacturer of architectural building materials that decided to enter Saudi Arabia and the UAE after years of selling through European intermediaries. Their first attempt — machine-translated Arabic pages bolted onto the English site — had damaged credibility with the exact audience they needed to impress: procurement managers at regional distributors and construction groups. Layout broke in right-to-left reading, mixed-direction punctuation and numbers rendered incorrectly, product names were transliterated inconsistently, and the copy read like a translation rather than a native sales pitch. Their printed product brochures needed the same treatment, but the InDesign source files had been built for Latin text with no support for Arabic shaping or right-to-left flow.
Solution
What We Did
MediaLocalize rebuilt the Arabic presence from the copy up. Native Arabic copywriters with construction-sector experience rewrote the key pages as original Arabic sales copy rather than translations, standardizing product-name transliteration in a client-approved glossary. The website was fully mirrored for right-to-left reading — navigation, layout grids, icons, forms, and numeral handling — and hreflang was configured so Gulf visitors land on Arabic by default. The brochures were typeset in Arabic-enabled InDesign with properly licensed Arabic typefaces matched to the brand's Latin typography, with every table, diagram label, and specification sheet rebuilt for RTL flow. In parallel, we ran Arabic keyword research for Saudi and Emirati search behavior — which differs from written Modern Standard Arabic — and mapped the terms to dedicated landing pages.
Results
The Outcome
The Arabic website launched five weeks after kickoff, and the first direct distributor inquiries from Saudi Arabia and the UAE arrived within six weeks — the client's first inbound leads from the region that did not come through an intermediary. The Arabic brochures debuted at the Big 5 construction exhibition in Dubai, where regional staff reported visitors photographing specification pages — the same reaction the original English brochures got at European shows. Arabic landing pages began ranking for Gulf-market product terms within the first quarter, and the client has since added Arabic to every new product launch checklist.
Arabic market entry fails quietly when it is treated as translation plus a CSS direction flip. Gulf buyers read machine-translated Arabic the way you read a badly translated manual — it signals that their market is an afterthought. Native copy, properly engineered RTL layout, and typesetting that respects the Arabic script tell the opposite story: that you built something for this market on purpose. Distributors notice the difference before the first meeting.