The Internet provides virtually unlimited possibility to reach clients from all over the world. But to achieve international success, your brand needs multilingual marketing.
Let’s take a look the top six reasons for introducing an international communication strategy.
1. Can’t read, won’t buy
A 2014 survey titled “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” found that 75% percent of respondents from ten non-Anglophone countries preferred shopping in their native language. Moreover, the same study showed that 60% of consumers rarely or never buy from English websites.
This is critical data—especially for the e-commerce industry which growth is driven by shopping without borders.
What conclusions should we make from this? If you want to be competitive on the global market, you need to communicate with clients in their native language. An investment in reaching the target group from abroad without a proper translation strategy is a waste of great potential and your marketing budget.
2. Global marketing is more than just communication in English
Regardless of whether you have an international purchasing platform or operate in a services industry, you need to translate into more languages than English.
Around the world, people use between 6,000 and 7,000 different languages. Of course, translating content into all of them would be arduous and expensive. But by limiting only to English, can only reach a potential of 1.5 billion customers, out of an entire global population of 7.4 billion people.
You can quickly scale up your target audience by focusing on other popular languages like Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, and Portuguese.
3. Adapt content to the multilingual market
When preparing a multilingual marketing strategy, get your inspiration from the biggest brands.
For example, Amazon was available in Polish in 2016, even though the platform itself still hasn’t even been introduced in Poland in 2020.
Nevertheless, customers could read product descriptions in their own language, use the search engine and contact forms, and read content provided by the e-commerce platform. They’ve also created a Polish version of their mobile shopping app.
4. Localization must go hand in hand with e-commerce translation
The Amazon example shows that the mere translation of product descriptions is not enough to satisfy demanding customers. Content translation must go hand in hand with localization, making it fully understandable and accessible in various cultural circles.
It’s also important to change the currency and units of measurement into those used in a given country as well, to simplify the path to purchase. During the process of localization, elements like graphics, videos, and even source code should also be altered.
5. Hire a bot to improve customer service
Global marketing also involves the need for fast and multilingual customer service.
It’s not enough to have translated instructions, regulations, and technical support content. Customers also need the opportunity to send a question and receive a prompt reply in their native language.
Chatbots created through machine translation and artificial intelligence can support this multilingual help desk support. And the trend is already visible: as many of 80 percent of companies confirm that they have already hired a bot or plan to do so by 2020.
6. Let them find you: bet on multilingual SEO
At the same time, an international SEO strategy is also important. A well-thought-out multilingual SEO strategy should include both content marketing and website optimization so that your site can be found on search engines in every one of your target markets.
And as SERPs evolve to integrate multimedia content like videos and podcasts, you also have to make sure you’ve included multimedia translation as part of your SEO strategy.
Your multilingual marketing partner
Summa Linguae Technologies can help you with every facet of your multilingual marketing. Check out our localization & translation services for more details.
