The competition for getting social media responses is getting stiffer all the time. Businesses are in a constant battle to try to take attention away from each other and gain larger audiences. One of the important ways to gain a truly global audience is to create multilingual content. But what exactly is multilingual content?
And is it something that the average person can produce? This term refers to the idea of creating content across multilingual social media outlets in multiple languages to try to appeal to a wider audience. This can include multilingual social media posts of different sorts – text, video, etc. – and infographics, newsletters, blogs, etc.
While this might all sound straightforward, getting it right is actually a fair task. Speaking to people’s various cultural interests adequately is about much more than simply completing a translation. Let’s take a closer look at what it involves.
Steps to Building a Multilingual Content Strategy
There are specific steps you should take to build a multilingual content strategy.
Before you get started, you should examine these steps in order to plan how you will create your strategy.
Decide What Your Primary Purpose is
Truly successful global brands are ones that appeal to people all over the world regardless of their nationality, language, religion, etc. They are brands that offer people something they really want or need.
Branding
If you want to be successful with people in different parts of the world, you should hone in on the crux of your product and determine what its universal features are.
Dairy Queen’s International Success
If you look at Dairy Queen’s global marketing strategy, for example, you will see that it offers interesting twists on its ice cream specials in different countries.
It might offer exotic fruit toppings in tropical countries, for example, where certain kinds of fruits are cheaper and more plentiful than in others.
However, what Dairy Queen is really known for is its blizzards. This is what made it famous originally, and without it, Dairy Queen would no longer be Dairy Queen.
For this reason, the chain’s franchises might offer regional specialties in certain countries, as well as its core trademark items, in order to keep the spirit of the brand alive.
Create Your Trademarks
When you create your multilingual/multinational marketing strategy, you need to decide what your trademark item(s) will be and keep them prominent in all your global marketing efforts.
Perhaps most importantly, you shouldn’t change your motto from country to country, as this is what makes your business a distinct entity.
Figure Out Who Your Target Audience(s) Are and What Type of Approach They Require
As you create your global marketing strategy, you should figure out the characteristics of your target audience in different places, as well as the language barriers and other types of potential obstacles there might be.
International Website Traffic
Part of this can include looking at your website traffic in different countries, but this will only give you a limited amount of information if you haven’t yet translated your site into multiple languages.
Wider Demographic Information
Doing research on your target audience involves looking at your competitors in different countries and examining the priorities of their customers.
In addition to language itself, you should take note of other aspects of your competitors’ demographic groups – age range, income level, gender, etc.
Examine these companies’ social media accounts, review sites, etc, and note which types of products or services have been growing in recent periods and which have been declining in popularity.
Look through comments to see people’s various levels of satisfaction with what the companies offer.
Competitor Analysis
In addition, you should look at the amount of traffic that your competitors/counterparts in your industry get in different countries.
Creating a global strategy that you want to be successful in every country of the world is a nice idea, but you need to take cultural appropriateness into consideration.
If you’re selling alcohol or pork products, marketing in Muslim countries is probably a bad idea.
Work Out a Content Strategy
Once you’ve determined what your core message will be and where your priority demographic groups lie, it will be time to craft a content strategy. The most important thing to keep in mind is that your core message is the biggest indicator of your integrity as a brand.
Remember Your Values
Consciously or not, this is what customers really respect in highly-valued brands. Don’t compromise your primary values because you want to appeal to people in a different part of the world. People will sense this and not take you seriously as a company.
When it comes time to translate your content into multiple languages, be sure you go beyond literal translations. One particularly useful tool is Free Rask AI Video Translator. With it, you will be on your way to spreading your brand around the world.
Remember, even within native-speaking populations, people are sensitive to the use of words.
Language is Multi-faceted
If people look at a marketing message that they don’t think addresses them in the right way, they will immediately lose interest in the company that made it.
Native language is about the use of idioms and jargon and plays on words, and marketing requires a particularly keen awareness of not only the use of language itself but also how it speaks to the cultures of those who use the languages in question.
Monitor Constantly
As you do this, keep close track of how your use of language resonates with your various audiences. If you see your popularity rating going down in certain places, you might need to refine your message and do more research on your target audience in those regions.
There is a fine art to reaching people successfully, and it requires constant monitoring.
Optimize Locally
Optimizing your content for each of your audiences is critical, and this might be the trickiest part. Again, keep in mind that popular keywords, etc, in one place might be totally different in other countries. Their optimal usage goes far beyond simply translating.
To really be effective, you should find a company that is versed in SEO in the countries that you advertise in and have them do the work for you. Figuring out not only what keywords and phrases to use but also what popular search terms are in different places is critical.
One thing that might be helpful is using Google Trends, as Google is, of course, global, and it keeps track of what is popular in different parts of the world.
Formalize Your Efforts
Once you’ve figured out how to reach different kinds of audiences, you should create formal protocols for your methodologies.
After all, you will have spent a long time and a great deal of effort figuring these things out, and you want your efforts to be sustained in the future.
Create Guides
Therefore, creating proper guides for different language groups would be much to your advantage.
Whatever specialists you choose to work within your chosen regions, you should sit down with them and create proper glossaries of terms and lists of which keywords suit which product or service lines.
Check Your Results Frequently
And again, this should be fluid – trends are constantly in flux everywhere in the world. So you should be prepared to make your translation process an ongoing one.
Beyond Multiple Languages: What to Keep in Mind?
Again, your efforts to reach different audiences will be all-encompassing. They won’t just involve language. So there are many other things to keep in mind when you create multinational content for different audiences.
Sensitive Multilingual Video Marketing for Social Media is Critical
Multilingual video content requires a lot of careful consideration. Everything visual does, actually, but videos on different social media platforms specifically can be viewed quite differently from place to place. This is another area in which working closely with local advisors in different countries is advisable.
Conservatism Can Make or Break You on Social Media Platforms
If your multilingual video marketing efforts for products are in conservative countries and your videos show people walking around in short skirts or other revealing clothing, the message could be taken very badly.
Choose Your Media Carefully
Also, things like the choice of media are critical in your decision-making. Some of these things are obvious, like the fact that certain media are actually banned in some countries. Others are more difficult to predict.
There are many of these kinds of considerations that could cause your efforts to backfire if you don’t address them correctly. You will never be able to understand all of the cultural nuances of your target audiences because you are not from these places. So getting regular advice from local experts is key.
Conclusion
Creating multilingual content is essential for reaching valuable markets in other countries.
After all, unless you have a brand that is universally known, people will be unlikely to invest in your company if they can’t read what you are all about. You should keep in mind that reaching international audiences is about much more than just words, though.
To really be effective at this, you need to gain a better grasp of the cultures with which you want to work. And this requires a communal effort on your part, as well as that of local experts who know your target cultures from the inside. If you succeed at doing this, you will be on your way to great international success.
