Multilingual Marketing Strategy: Key Steps

Once your product is localized, your customers might expect other interactions with your brand to be in their native language. That’s the point where you should consider localizing your marketing assets, including your website, emails, blog, store listings, in-app notifications, ad banners, and other user-facing content. Also, the most crucial part of a multilingual marketing approach is figuring out what the client wants and adapting your offer to the needs of each market.

This article will cover how your company can adopt multilingual marketing and why you need it. We’ll also show you how to localize your marketing content without copy-pasting or help from the engineering team and which apps from Crowdin Store can help you most with the localization of your marketing content.

Table of Contents

What Is Multilingual Marketing, and Why Do You Need It?

The phrase “multilingual marketing” may seem self-explanatory. But since it entails employing more than one language in your marketing strategy, it may be more challenging than it sounds. A multilingual marketing approach entails maintaining the goal of the original message while conveying it in a way acceptable to the local audience. It’s not only about translating texts but considering cultural differences as well.

The main objectives of marketing materials are to draw interest, foster trust, and provide leads. It might include blog entries that aim to rank well on Google’s international search engine, email marketing, advertisements, social media postings, whitepapers, and product-focused materials. Most of these are housed on CMS systems and are the property of marketing teams ( WordPress, Contentful, Storyblok).

Localizing marketing materials mainly applies to long-form digital content. Realistically, a single article may have more words than the whole product UI.

Working with a local subject matter expert or an adaptation marketing professional may be necessary if you’re localizing material for a market with a vastly different culture from the original market. This individual can assist with identifying the material that needs to be translated and what new assets need to be created specifically for the chosen market.

Localization Is Key to a Successful Global Marketing Strategy

We want to stress that language has great power. It facilitates communication and lets us connect with everyone and everything in our immediate environment, including other people, locations, and organizations. Because of this relationship’s importance, up to 60% of consumers will only purchase goods in their native tongue.

Further, we’d like to dwell more on different types of marketing content that can be localized. It’s better to focus on something specific instead of translating everything at once, as more considerable scope would delay your project in time. Utilizing a digital project management tool can help prioritize tasks and streamline the translation process efficiently.

1. Localization of your website

Businesses increase sales when their online shops are translated into the readers’ mother tongues because it eliminates many barriers to purchase. That is why you should start with the localization of your website.

Focus your website materials on things that are relevant to the regions you’re targeting. There might be some cultural differences and market specifics that people in each location would expect from you. When you make this adaptation, both your website and the performance of your multilingual marketing plan will be hampered.

Avoid losing potential customers because of poor translations or lack of info in their language. With Crowdin, you can easily translate your website. No manual translation copy-pasting or export of the source content.

Crowdin integrates with over 200 tools for developers, marketers, designers, and support teams. Integrations with marketing tools automate the sync of source content and translations. It means that your texts can instantly become available to translators in Crowdin, and translated texts can be sent to a tool of your choice in a few clicks.

To translate your website, use one of the Crowdin apps:

2. Global SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to reach a multilingual audience

The technique of optimizing your multilingual website for search queries in different languages is known as multilingual SEO. The aim is to make your website appear higher in search results for each target language.

Finding the best keywords people use to search for goods and services in other languages would be an essential step, as simply translating your keywords might not do the job. The objective is to identify keywords with a sufficient monthly search volume to warrant pursuing them but not enough competition to make it challenging or costly to rank for them.

Additionally, you should be aware that not all countries use Google as their primary search engine. For example, in China, the most significant market share belongs to Baidu, not Google. See these important ways to launch it confidently.

You must include multilingual SEO components to reach a global audience after you have a multilingual website. That entails including components like

• Producing and maintaining content in your target audience’s native language.

• Identifying the target country or area using an international-friendly URL structure.

• Determining which language your pages are targeting with language tags and more.

For instance, if you optimize the British version of your website using words like “catalog” and “cellular phone,” your website and marketing collaterals will most likely get low visibility — not because there isn’t a need for your products or that they aren’t of high quality, but instead because people will be searching using different spelling and different terms.

Remember the importance of entering each market with the appropriate keywords and on-page and off-page SEO strategies. Although they differ in language and area to region, keywords are essential. The significance of multilingual SEO shouldn’t be understated at a time when the internet and search engines are kings. The last thing you want is to flawlessly plan and carry out a multilingual content marketing strategy only to have it never appear in a search and go unnoticed.

3. Run Multilingual Ads on Google and Facebook

Once you have localized your landing pages, you might want to localize ads that lead to those pages. By creating multilingual ad campaigns, you can expect conversion rates to increase since people are more likely to click on the ad in their language.

Here’s a guide on how to adapt your Google and Facebook ads localization.

What are the main benefits of Google ads localization?

• Reduce Ad Costs
• Reach a Wider Audience
• Gain a Competitive Advantage
• Increase Conversion Rates

4. Make your blog and help articles multilingual

Using a multilingual content strategy, you may use a blog as a free platform to sell your website. There are several benefits to starting a blog for your company’s website promotion:

• Increasing brand recognition

• Involving your clients

• Enhancing your social media marketing efforts and brand loyalty increase your conversion rates.

It will also enable you to advance to the position of an industry leader. According to statistics on blogging, 70–80% of internet users read blogs. Therefore, understand how to effectively construct a blog and use it for your content marketing plan.

You’ll understand the value of thorough preparation if you manage a blog available in many languages. Keeping a blog in two languages may become challenging without the proper procedures and tools.

In addition to creative translation, you must also pay attention to the technical aspect. The collection of blog management and multilingual tools above may assist you with managing your blog’s content, translating it into other languages, and making sure Google can locate the many language versions of your blog.

Also, the days of sending files back and forth to your teams, translators, and proofreaders are long gone. With Crowdin, fresh material that requires translation or modification is immediately sent to translators and proofreaders. Additionally, you may upload the translated version to the cloud storage provider you use with Crowdin’s connection. And you can send the appropriate team members a link to the relevant folder or file. The process of content marketing localization has become more accessible.

Crowdin apps to synchronize marketing content:

5. Running Email Marketing Campaigns for Customers Around the Globe

Email localization is essential because organizations worldwide affect subscriber lists and target consumers.

Making your email content more relevant to your target audience is the primary goal of email localization, but it involves much more than merely translating the text. Over 280 million emails are sent every day on a worldwide scale in the era of technology. And many of them bring new clients. That is why email localization is essential for businesses.

For instance, if you have a promotion for US consumers, you won’t send the same email to your Latin American clients. The finest email marketing for e-commerce will include connections to relevant website pages. And the material that is tailored for the target location.

You are already familiar with the advantages of this marketing channel if you have employed email marketing to advertise your company to English-speaking consumers. According to HubSpot, email marketing is now one of the most profitable solutions for marketers since it can earn up to $38 for every dollar invested. Language and cultural obstacles are removed from email marketing via email localization. You may significantly boost your sales by observing a comparable ROI in foreign marketplaces.

Marketing teams use various technologies to create relevant content. And also to run campaigns and do business objectives. These tools range from marketing automation platforms to content management systems. Every time a new localization project is launched, different stages are introduced to the marketing localization process.

In addition to the tools’ compatibility, everyone engaged must have access to the most recent source and translated material.

You can now leverage Crowdin connectors with HubSpot, Google Drive, Mailchimp, Dropbox, and other platforms to cut the tediousness of emailing files back and forth.

Now, look at Crowdin Store’s app selection for marketing localization. Using these programs, you may more efficiently manage the translated versions of your blogs, email campaigns, and other material while focusing on your marketing localization strategy.

Send welcome emails and transactional emails like password reset and purchase confirmations. More with the help of these applications:

Don’t create a fractured experience. Each email element and the user’s next journey should be localized. Instead of returning them to the English (or native language) website, lead them to multilingual material that speaks their language.

6. Invest in adaptable design before translating your content

A user experience design that is adaptable enough to handle different languages in the future is required for any digital product intended to be used globally. Expanding text is crucial since specific languages demand as much as 40% extra area.

Your web or app structure should be adaptable enough to allow for any movement since the contrary might also happen—where you have less content after translation.

Connect the designs you create with the tools you already have. With only one click, extract material from your designs. Prepare translations for Crowdin projects from inside your favorite design program.

Utilize quick machine translations to examine linguistic changes in design. As your team adds more language groups, test your designs. The most widely used machine translation engines may be used to convert files beforehand.

7. Translate Static Visuals

Strong visuals may have a powerful emotional effect. When implemented effectively, they may boost user interaction, length of time spent on your app or website, and your download rate and revenue.

The brain receives 90% of its information visually. You need excellent visuals to market and sell your goods, regardless of the nations you choose to localize for. You may more efficiently capture your audience’s attention by enhancing the images.

Be careful to localize all of your product’s visuals for maximum effect. Visuals you’ve employed in a European marketing campaign may not be received the same way by Asian buyers. People can’t relate to something they don’t understand, so choose images and videos that you can easily include in your local message.

Make sure your clients see your product’s translated version from the beginning if you are selling it. You risk alienating prospective users without translations, useless maps, and irrelevant graphics.

Use the Appropriate Translation and Localization Tools

Coordination of many teams operating across time zones is necessary when creating a multilingual marketing plan. Technology for translation and localization may help in this situation. With localization management software like Crowdin, you can link your favorite tools immediately. There is an opportunity to interact with your team on a single platform. You can save all assets in one place. And receive a quick overview of the progress of any translated marketing campaign.

You can automate repetitive operations with the localization software, which gives you all the tools you need to manage the localization of your marketing. The value for your end consumers will also rise since you’ll have more time to concentrate on the creative aspect. You receive a single source of truth for everything localization-related that enables you to collaborate on, organize, and evaluate translations effectively rather than managing all your translation efforts in a spreadsheet.

Plan Your Multilingual Digital Strategy

You need to communicate with your target audience in their languages. Especially in an age when customers can find everything they’re searching for with a few mouse clicks or screen taps.

Utilizing a multilingual marketing strategy will increase traffic and help you connect with your audience better. And result in considerable growth. You should consider implementing multilingual marketing into your plan to boost your company’s success. As you continue to expand into new markets worldwide, you’ll begin to notice returns almost quickly.

You may establish continuous localization processes for any piece of material you localize by connecting all the systems you need with Crowdin Apps. Websites, blogs, onboarding materials, how-to articles, social media campaigns, and more. Although multilingual content marketing may seem complicated, you may get long-lasting benefits based on a plan that includes the appropriate resources and applications. To discover more applications, go to Crowdin Store.