Multilingual digital marketing is not new. Many large, middle, and small-scale businesses are already using multilingual strategies to improve their digital marketing campaigns.
Let’s review the business benefits of employing multilingual strategies within your digital marketing efforts.
New Business Markets
Of course, multilingual digital marketing provides one huge benefit right out of the gate: it can help you establish a presence in foreign markets and reach new audiences.
At some point in time, most businesses find themselves looking for new ways to grow and develop their business. One of the best ways is to expand their market / improve reach. This is a natural progression in business growth.
Multilingual digital marketing immediately opens your company to new audiences, specifically, those that speak languages other than English.
You will have to tailor your content marketing and search engine optimization activities in a way that will fit the new locales that you are targeting. Otherwise, your efforts might prove to be ineffective.
Content is a major concern when shifting to multilingual marketing. Start with extensive research into the market, including variables such as their geographical location, economic characteristics, and even their culture. This may very well indicate that you should only target some regions or countries, and not others.
Once you have a list of territories you want to expand to, start researching the keywords you will have to use, the type of content that is most widespread in those territories, the topics in your niche that those audiences would be most interested in, and so on.
Effectiveness for Social Media Marketing
This might come as a bit of a surprise: multilingual digital marketing can actually make your social media marketing more effective.
Why and how you ask? This works almost identically to how you analyze what content to place in front of a target market. Once you tailor the content to that new locale, more people will see your brand content in the various languages.
Multilingual social media marketing has a significant potential of attracting your target audience and growing your online following.
While it’s true that most of the World Wide Web uses English, there are many other widely-used languages, especially on social media platforms.
This is why multilingual digital marketing can help you get in front of many more potential customers.
You will already have a list of countries or regions you would want to target from your content analysis. All you have left to do here is researching their social media habits and preferences.
More often than not, your findings will be similar to what you found during your general research. That said, social media marketing is still a bit more specific, so you might find differences (e.g. keywords vs hashtags to use in multilingual content).
Closer Connection to Your Audience
By using languages other than English, you show your audience that you respect their culture and want to provide them with the best customer experience.
Prospects and customers can better understand your messaging in their local language, as opposed to having to interpret English, which may not be their first (or even second) language. This can help you improve how you connect with the audience across the board, which will be good for your brand reputation worldwide.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to win the heart of your audience. If they feel like you are just another company trying to get their money, they will be quick to leave you and find someone more mindful.
When in doubt about creating high-quality multilingual content, don’t be afraid to hire a professional writer. There are ample services available where you can compare writers and choose the one you like the most.
Professional writers don’t only know more languages than you do, but they can also craft high quality articles that will correspond to your brand image.
More Opportunities
Once adopted, multilingual digital marketing can bring you many new opportunities both in the short term and in the long run.
Here are just some examples of possible benefits you can expect:
- New Audiences: As discussed earlier, multilingual digital marketing will help you reach new audiences. Well, to put it differently, these are all a part of your initial target audience – it’s just that you couldn’t reach them before, because you only created content in English while they were looking for the same content in other languages.
- More Visibility: You won’t reach new audiences in a vacuum. When your brand gains more exposure and visibility, you’ll enjoy more brand awareness and an improved reputation as well.
- Possible Partnerships: Multilingual digital marketing can do more than just get you in front of new target audiences. You’ll also have access to more people / companies that you can partner with or collaborate with. Collaborations, especially on social media, are usually very effective, because they attract the attention of even wider audiences.
- Better Reputation: As mentioned earlier, your reputation is bound to improve at least a little once you switch to multilingual digital marketing. When new members of your target audience visit your website or read your social media content, they’ll see you as more considerate towards their cultures and unique needs.
- Natural Growth: Lastly, your business should grow naturally. Once you have reached the national level, the only logical thing to do is expanding to international markets. This is the reason we are advocating for multilingual digital marketing in the first place.
Cost-Effectiveness
Last but not least, multilingual digital marketing is cost-effective, even when taking into account the fact that it requires more effort and investment from your side.
Most writers and translators are relatively inexpensive. If you can’t afford to dive in head first, you can move over toward multilingual marketing at a pace that works for your business and budget. Any size of company can benefit from making this shift.
For example, you could start by translating your business website to several other languages, and afterward you can start creating blog articles or social media content in other languages.
The transition should not be abrupt and will take some time for you to really get used to. If you do your research well and create a comprehensive plan with achievable goals, you will not experience many problems.
Conclusion
All in all, multilingual digital marketing practices can significantly improve the performance of your online marketing campaigns, help you get onto international markets, and become a generally more recognized brand.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Feature image sourced from Pexels.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Ana Mayer
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