How To Do Multilingual Content Marketing: A Complete Guide
With 64.6 percent (about 5.1 billion) of the global population being active internet users, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table if your business only serves one language market. Multilingual content marketing effectively expands your product and service delivery to people of different languages and gives your business global recognition.
This article discusses multilingual content marketing, why you need to do it for your business, how to do it successfully, and the tools to achieve significant success in no time.
What is multilingual content marketing?
Multilingual content marketing is creating and sharing valuable marketing content in different languages to attract, engage, and convert prospects who speak those languages. It’s slightly different from traditional content marketing, but the principles and objectives remain the same.
However, unlike one-language content marketing, multilingual content marketing incorporates multiple languages and has slight changes in strategy.
Multilingual content marketing aims to use blogs, videos, social media posts, eBooks, infographics, podcasts, etc., to effectively communicate with, educate, and ultimately sell to your target audience who speak different languages.
When you provide content in your target audience’s language, it’s easy for you to build strong relationships with them, establish trust, and drive engagement and conversion.
Multilingual content marketing is a valuable tool you can leverage to achieve global recognition and dominance in no time. This is because it makes it easy for you to penetrate new markets and compete favorably with the existing players in your industry.
Do you need a multilingual digital strategy for your business?
Implementing a multilingual digital strategy for your business sounds great. However, you must be sure it’s necessary and not something you wish to do because other businesses are doing so.
To ensure you need a multilingual digital strategy for your business, you must consider the following factors:
- Your business goals and objectives.
- Your target audience.
- Industry requirements and regulations.
- The strength of your competition.
- Your access to resources, etc.
How to set up a multilingual content strategy
Here are steps to set up a multilingual content marketing strategy capable of pushing your business to global success:
1. Establish your core message
Creating an effective multilingual content strategy begins with understanding the core values clearly stated in your brand message. You can’t achieve global recognition if there’s nothing of worth your brand is recognized for in your base market.
Before attempting to attract different audiences from new language markets, you must have a solid core message that is evident in all your marketing content. That means your blog posts, social media channels, and other digital marketing materials must effectively communicate and align with your brand’s core message.
By establishing a solid foundation for your brand in its first language, it becomes easy for you to break into new language markets using a solid multilingual content creation strategy.
2. Research your audience
Choose the new language markets you want to break into with your multilingual content marketing strategy and identify the market section that fits your buyer persona and needs your product offering most.
This goes beyond their language, as you must consider their interests, needs, preferences, and pain points. You must also examine their values and cultural nuances and compare them with your core values.
Your target audience in the new markets might be similar to your current customers. Still, there would also be slight differences resulting from cultural values, language, and location.
Understanding this will help your marketing team develop a powerful multilingual content creation and distribution strategy to help you build relationships and connect with them easily.
3. Research your competitors
While it’s essential to understand your target audience, researching your competitors will provide valuable insights and lessons to successfully implement your content marketing strategy. This will be difficult if you’re the first in your industry to try that feat. However, you can also learn from other global brands in other industries successfully implementing effective multilingual strategies.
Research your competitors and how they’re implementing their multilingual content marketing strategies, identify market gaps, and implement accordingly.
4. Establish your goals and objectives
A vital question you should ask before embarking on this journey is, “Why am I implementing a multilingual content marketing strategy?” Answers to this question will guide you in establishing your goals and objectives for expanding into the global market.
Your goal might be to expand your customer base, increase brand visibility, drive conversions in specific markets, and ultimately increase your revenue. Determining the actual driver of this movement will help you establish a digital multilingual content marketing strategy that brings results.
5. Develop a localization plan
Once you’ve understood your target audience and competitors and established your goals and objectives, developing a localization plan is next. This involves adapting your content to suit your target audience’s cultural and linguistic context.
An effective localized content marketing strategy will include guidelines for language style, tone, imagery, and design elements that resonate with your target audience without drifting from your brand values and identity.
This localization plan will guide you into building a workflow that ensures the seamless translation of your existing content into the multiple languages you’re incorporating without losing the core message they’re passing.
6. Optimize your website for multilingual SEO
After you’ve developed a localization plan that includes building a translation workflow, optimize your business website for multilingual SEO. To effectively achieve this, begin by researching and optimizing your website with keywords specific to each target language. Create and implement Hreflang tags using the Hreflang Tags Generator tool to indicate the language and regional targeting to search engines.
A website optimized for multilingual SEO must include localized Meta tags, URLs, and other SEO components to enhance visibility in searches made in different languages.
7. Analyze and optimize
Implementing a multilingual content marketing strategy isn’t a one-time process. You must consistently work on your website to achieve your website goals. This you can do by monitoring and measuring key metrics such as your website’s traffic, engagement, conversions, and customer feedback.
Use the insights from the metrics to identify areas that need improvement in your multilingual content marketing strategy and consistently refine and optimize it to meet your desired goals.
Tools to help you do multilingual content marketing
Here are some tools that can make your multilingual content marketing efforts easy and successful:
1. Google Trends
Google Trends is a vital multilingual content marketing tool that helps you identify the terms your target audience is searching for. It gives you insights into trends, search behavior, and audience interests across different languages, enabling you to build keyword clusters and generate topic ideas for your multilingual marketing.
Google Trends helps you research the performance of keywords in specific locations and choose related keywords that drive more engagement in those locations.
2. Google Docs
Google Docs is another crucial tool for your multilingual content marketing needs. It enables your content marketers, writers, editors, and translators to collaborate effectively in delivering content that answers audience queries.
One of the most fascinating features of Google Docs is that changes made to a document are updated automatically and are visible to all parties who have access to the document. This makes it easy for your multilingual content marketing team to work together in real-time.
Furthermore, changes made to a document are not lost, as the tool tracks all changes made, making it possible for your team to go back and trace where context was lost and make appropriate corrections.
3. Trello
Trello is an easy-to-use project management and collaboration tool that enables your team to create workflows and track their progress easily. It uses a board and card-based system to manage tasks, projects, and workflows, allowing you to create a board for each project and assign tasks to the team involved.
With Trello, all your team members are in sync with a project timeline, as everyone knows the project’s current stage and when their expertise is needed. That means, for blog posts, once the writers finish their tasks and submit the content for editing, the editors are notified immediately, and once they’re done, proofreaders and translators key in and contribute their part to the content. Trello streamlines your multilingual content creation process and saves you lots of money.
Other project management tools can help you achieve this goal too. Some notable examples include Asana, Airtable, etc.
4. Slack
Slack is an instant messaging platform that makes team communication and collaboration seamless. It enables a team of any size, despite their locations, to be on the same page about project progress.
The collaboration tool is vital for your multilingual content marketing, as it provides a collaborative environment for your team to communicate, share ideas, and work together to make your multilingual content creation a success.
Apart from allowing team members to communicate in real-time, Slack allows you to create channels and threads dedicated to different stages of a content creation journey, enabling everyone involved to contribute their quota and monitor progress.
It also makes it easy for team members to share their content for review and get quality feedback in no time, making it easy to create multilingual content that delivers desired results.
5. Phrase
Delivering content in multiple languages is possible with powerful localization platforms like Phrase. You can manage your localization process completely on Phrase, as the platform has a system that lets all your translators collaborate to speed up your translation process.
Phrase has a feature that stores all translated documents in its system, making it easy to access them at any time. As a cloud-based system, Phrase allows your multilingual team to work from any device and location, making it easy for them to work on the go.
6. WPML WordPress Multilingual Plugin
The WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML) is a powerful WordPress plugin that lets you create and manage multilingual content. It enables you to translate your website’s pages, posts, taxonomy, menus, media, and more into different languages.
WPML lets you translate your content into 65 pre-configured languages, giving you various language options to add to your multilingual content marketing. It also allows you to add your custom languages and create language variants from different languages. The tool allows you to either translate your content directly from your WordPress dashboard or use the Translation Management tool to add your team of translators to your site.
You can do many other things with WPML on your site, including optimizing for multilingual SEO, adding a multicurrency feature to your E-commerce site, etc.
7. The Hreflang Tags Generator
This is arguably the most important tool you need for multilingual SEO. The Hreflang Tags Generator is a tool that enables you to generate Hreflang tags for your multilingual website.
Hreflang tags enable search engines to understand and serve a webpage’s appropriate language and regional version to searchers in different language markets.
Tips for doing multilingual content marketing the right way
Here are some tips to help you do your multilingual marketing the right way:
1. Create content that can be localized
Quality content is gold. And this applies everywhere, whether you’re communicating in English, French, Italian, or Spanish. However, if you don’t implement an effective localized SEO and content marketing strategy, you might create content that loses its meaning in translation.
You must create content that can be translated into any of your chosen languages without losing meaning. This means creating content with limited idioms, cultural words, narratives, and puns, as they might mean different things to your new prospects.
2. Optimize with multilingual keywords and SEO
Your target audience in France won’t search for particular information on your website with the same keyword someone in China would. Keywords change from language to language, and you’ll lose prospects to confusion unless you optimize your website with multilingual keywords.
Furthermore, for SEO purposes, ensure you analyze your website to know the posts and pages bringing traffic from specific languages to your website. Create more valuable content around those posts and optimize it to capture other languages.
3. Create style and SEO guides for each language
To maintain your brand values and standards, each language you’re incorporating in your multilingual marketing must have style guides and SEO guides created for them. This means you must have a list of terms and keywords carefully picked from each language market to pass your marketing messages without deviating from your brand’s core message.
Creating a multilingual glossary is essential for your brand’s marketing content to remain consistent across all languages. It helps your multilingual content marketing teams understand acceptable or forbidden terms.
4. Use the right translation software
Adopt professional translation tools to streamline the translation process, maintain consistency in your marketing messages, and manage terminology. Most professional translation software have features that let you store terms and keywords for each language for efficient translation processes in the future.
5. Work with native speakers and cultural experts
While translation tools are vital for your multilingual content marketing, they often produce incorrect information or miss the context of a message. Therefore, you need native speakers and cultural experts to ensure accurate translation, localization, and cultural adaptation. This ensures you have experts who can work with your translation tools to give you excellent translations devoid of language and cultural misrepresentations.
6.Use the right management tools
Implementing a multilingual content marketing strategy means you’ll work with many experts, such as translators, project managers, designers, editors, and content marketers, who will collaborate to achieve the desired results. This raises the need to use management tools that support multiple languages to manage these team members for efficient communication and easy implementation of ideas.
Management tools like Trello, Asana, Podio, Slack, etc., will be efficient in helping you manage a team of multilingual experts.
7. Employ a strategic multilingual social media strategy
You can’t successfully implement a multilingual content marketing strategy without leveraging social media. Most of your target prospects are on social media, and implementing a multilingual social media strategy is ideal for maximizing your chances of reaching them.
This strategy involves identifying your target audience’s most preferred social media channels, creating accounts on those platforms, and communicating with them in their preferred language and terms.
Multilingual content marketing — FAQs
What is multilingual content?
Multilingual content refers to content available in multiple languages. It can be a blog post, video, infographic, podcast, etc. Businesses create or translate their content to multiple languages to capture new markets, reach a wider audience, and increase income.
Why is multilingual marketing important?
Multilingual marketing is an important marketing strategy for your business. It helps you reach diverse audiences, improve the customer experience, build trust and credibility, establish cultural relevance, and gain a competitive advantage in your industry.
If you’re looking to penetrate a new language market or gain global recognition as an expert in your industry, then multilingual marketing is a must.
What is multilingual SEO?
Multilingual SEO is the act of integrating localized keywords and terms into your website and online content to gain visibility and rank for organic searches in specific languages.
In multilingual SEO, you adapt SEO strategies and techniques to cater to diverse language markets. This includes researching for language-specific keywords, translating and localizing your content, structuring your website to capture multilingual interests, and building backlinks from local authorities in your chosen industries.
Implement a robust multilingual content marketing strategy and enjoy global success.
Multilingual marketing isn’t a walk in the park. It requires patience, consistency, and an adequate investment of resources to yield the needed results.
However, the benefits are worth the hassle once successfully implemented, as achieving global recognition and dominance is enough to take your business to great heights.
Understanding how to implement a multilingual content marketing strategy and the right tools needed for implementation are essential for success. Hopefully, this article provides the right guide to making your business a global authority.
Originally published at https://weignitegrowth.com on July 9, 2023.
