Why It Helps to Have a Multilingual Marketing Strategy for Your Content

Lionbridge Marketing reports:

"Think you can get by without a multilingual marketing strategy? After all, don’t most people in the world speak English? Yes, they do. But the answer to the first question is still probably '[N]o'...Checking the language distribution of site visitors is one way to determine which languages to target. Here are three reasons your brand needs a multilingual content marketing strategy...'Brands that engage with potential customers in their second language lose the chance to interact in a more effective manner,' explains Ian Humphreys, regional director for Caliber...'We work in the Arab world and while English is widely spoken, brands that don’t market in Arabic are missing out on a powerful segment of decision makers who are crying out for content in their native language. You are essentially making life slightly inconvenient for your customers, and as a marketer that’s the last thing you want to do.' He adds that multilingual marketing enables you to penetrate untouched market segments because engaging in the local language reveals insights that you might be ignorant of otherwise...'It’s easy to ignore other languages if one dominant language makes up the majority. When English accounts for 90%, it can be tempting to dismiss the other 10%—but what if that 10% holds a more qualified and likely-to-convert audience within it[?]' [Bhuiyan] Orun posits. 'Alienating part of your audience is the obvious downside. But it doesn’t end there…[Multilingual] websites with the correct markup can lead to increased performance on search and social. It’s a little like having two websites. As most marketers understand, some aspects of SEO and referral traffic are a numbers game–the more pages/content your site has, the more of a probability you have of ranking in search engines.' If you’re running an ecommerce site, you already offer prices in the visitor’s native currency, 'so it doesn’t take much to further customize the experience by addressing nuances in the language of the region.'...'Generally speaking, emerging markets are the regions where English fluency is weakest, yet those are the same markets that promise huge growth in the coming decade,' explains Denise Goluboff...'It would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to gain traction in high-growth regions of the world where your product could make a huge impact.' She says translated content is especially important in Asia and Latin America. For instance, [a] U.S. high[-]tech company can use English-only materials and demos at a trade show in Germany and do well since the majority of the attendees at a show like that speak and understand English quite well. 'But if you try to pull that off in China or Argentina,' she warns, 'you won’t just struggle to get your message out–you’ll be wasting your time. If your competitor, however, has localized content and local staff at the show, they will be light years ahead of you. If they are offering translated and localized content that is useful and compelling, then they will build brand equity with the global audience.' That’s why creating a multilingual marketing strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore...A Common Sense Advisory report found that we need 12 languages to communicate with 80% of the global online audience; and a whopping 21 languages if we want to achieve 90% of the potential audience. Don’t miss out on additional market share and brand equity in the international marketplace. Now’s the time to take a closer look at your global audience and the languages they speak so you can use translation tools to build an effective multilingual marketing strategy."