While it’s a great start to translate and localize the content on your website to get started with a multilingual content marketing strategy, those are not the only aspects to keep in mind if you want to see a positive ROI on your marketing strategy.
You’ll need to adapt your multilingual content marketing strategy for every new market. And this includes everything from the images and wording on your site to the channels you use to promote your brand.
To ensure that your multilingual content marketing strategy is effective, you’ll need a deep understanding of the language your new audience speaks as well as how their cultural norms affect their buying preferences and preferred methods of consuming information. But first, let’s tackle an important topic:
What Exactly is a Multilingual Content Marketing Strategy?
Multilingual refers to many languages. Content marketing is a marketing strategy brands use to attract and engage audiences by promoting content like blog posts, videos, and podcasts.
So, multilingual content marketing is the process used to market content to consumers who speak different languages. These kinds of marketing content projects support multiple languages across various social media platforms and other marketing channels to engage with the audience in a new target country. The success of multilingual content marketing campaigns relies on your ability to adapt your content and brand image to the target audience and their language and culture.
Multilingual content marketing calls for more than translating your existing content and calls for localization.
Cutting corners with a foreign audience is one risk that brands can’t afford to take. If you want to see your multilingual content marketing strategy yield positive results, here’s how to set the stage for success…
Steps for Developing a Multilingual Content Marketing Strategy
1 – Stay Focused on Your Core Message
There are many different rules and requirements for localization in every country. And these differentiations can see you straying away from your core message. You don’t want to adapt to the new market’s tastes to the point where you jeopardize your brand’s reputation. You can, however, adapt brand behavior, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the core essence of your brand. Think of McDonald’s. They might adapt their menus to suit local tastes in different locations, but you’ll find their happy message (and meals) wherever you go. A multilingual content marketing strategy is not about changing your core message. It’s about deploying smart adaptations to highlight the strengths of your core brand identity.
2 – Aim for Easily Localizable Content
It’s much easier to keep localization costs low and stay on schedule when you create content that is easy to localize for the purpose of a multilingual content marketing project. Although it’s plausible for big global brands like Coca-Cola to pay for transcreation techniques in every new market, most brands need to keep tabs on their localization budgets. The aim of creating content that’s easy to localize is to remove overly-complicated language, cultural idioms, phrasal verbs, and local jokes. This makes it easier to repurpose existing content for countries that have similar consumer behavior patterns. With this approach, you can use similar content to target internet users with similar content marketing strategies.
3 – Localize Your Brand Message for the Target Audience
This is the part where you ensure that your brand message feels authentic to the target audience. And this is where you’ll need localization experts to research appropriate images, colors, date formats, and icons to ensure that your marketing strategy strikes a chord with the new audience. It’s important to gain a deep understanding of current affairs, places, and specific cultural references that need to be included in your message to give it more appeal. And localization professionals offer turn-key localization services that offer all of this and more.
4 – Make Sure You’re Using the Right Translation Management Software
Any multilingual content marketing strategy requires the input of various people and assets like marketing specialists, translators, project managers, and developers. And when you’ve got a widespread team of people working in different time zones and languages, it can be hard to keep track of everything. Your translation management software can help with this since it allows you to integrate with project management programs like Slack too, enabling effortless team communication on one platform. Translating your WordPress site using a centralized software that acts as a project manager and eases coordination between all stakeholders makes it easy to create an effective multilingual content marketing strategy.
5 – Don’t Forget About Keywords and SEO for Each Target Market
It’s critically important to use the right keywords and SEO tactics for each new market you enter. You also need to keep in mind that keywords change from one language to another, and they also differ on a regional level. In a day and age where search engines play a central role in brand visibility, you can’t afford to underestimate the importance of SEO in a multilingual content marketing strategy.
6 – Create a Style Guide
A company embarking on a content promotion strategy should make it as easy as possible to achieve a consistent message across every platform and for every publication. It is the same for design colors and logos and the same for text. Your readers can easily identify you and recognize the brand you are using at the moment. Style guides are crucial if a team of content marketers has several colleagues. This will provide clear guidance to help your brand remain consistent with its values. The idea may take a while but your efforts will be rewarded by an established brand identity.
Wrapping Up
We’ve given you an overview of the most important things to keep in mind when creating a multilingual content marketing strategy. It can take much longer than you think to identify demand in a new market and learn to understand the culture, tastes, and preferences of your new audience.
That’s why it’s important to stick to your brand’s core message and identity. You’ll want to make things as easy as possible for future localization projects by creating content that’s easy for native professionals to localize. The right translation management software can also make a world of difference. Although it’s not always the easiest task to coordinate a successful multilingual content marketing strategy, it definitely is achievable.
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