3 Reasons To Start Multilingual Content Marketing

Technology allows us to reach more people than ever before. With this opportunity also comes a challenge: not everyone will speak the same language! Reaching this diverse pool of potential customers will take a lot more than using Google translate. You’ll need to establish a multilingual content marketing strategy to take advantage of the benefits that it can offer.

What is multilingual content marketing?

Multilingual content marketing is the process of creating content that can appeal to different languages. You’re not just translating your existing content, but also intentionally creating content that effectively showcases your brand to different language audiences across the globe.

Content marketing supports your organization by introducing it to potential customers to generate more leads. By embracing multilingual content marketing, you can expand your audience by providing localized eCommerce storytelling tailored to their language.

3 reasons to start multilingual content marketing

Here are a few key reasons to start incorporating multiple languages into your content governance strategy (opens in a new window).

1. It increases your international appeal

Approximately 1.5 billion people speak English (opens in a new window). This may seem like a lot, but focusing only on these potential customers excludes roughly 6.5 billion others! Tapping into those other language markets can be essential.

One way to do so is to focus on other widely-spoken languages: Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish, for example. However, keep in mind that these popular options may not be your best bet for leads despite how many people speak them.

Be sure to conduct market research so you know where your money is best spent. If you have more appeal in French-speaking countries, for example, that will be a better investment even though it’s not in the top four most popular languages.

You may also have audience members who speak more than one language. For example, a native Spanish speaker could be able to browse your site in English. Nevertheless, offering content in their native tongue can provide a better user experience (opens in a new window) by forging a direct cultural connection. Thus, multilingual content marketing can reach new international audiences and improve the UX for current users.

2. Multilingual content marketing can boost your SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to getting your site seen. After all, most users don’t even bother to look past the first page of Google! Investing effort into maximizing the effectiveness of your keywords is simply necessary.

This is another area where multilingual content marketing can benefit you. When you add more languages, you’re also adding more relevant keywords to your site. Because Google distinguishes between different languages, you won’t get penalized for overusing keywords as long as they remain naturally integrated.

It can also grow your SEO (opens in a new window) by expanding your scope. Creating content in different languages usually means creating some unique pieces to specifically cater to topics these users might have a particular interest in. Thus, this can grow the number of keywords you’re ranking for. The result is that your website will be showing up in more searches. Combined with other SEO strategies like backlinking and frequent updates, this can lead to a boom in traffic.

3. It can support your overall content marketing strategy

Having a clear strategy from the start is a solid way to make sure that you’ll be able to skillfully appeal to potential leads that head your way. If you’re thinking about creating content in multiple languages, try to account for that during the ideation stages. That way, you’re executing your strategy with a mind toward accessing a large audience as the foundation.

Doing this initial research to determine your best multilingual content marketing also enables you to learn more about:

• The different cultures you’re trying to reach
• The most likely possible outcomes from your efforts
• How you can make your content more appealing to more people from the start

All this means you’ll be able to create English content with an eye toward its expansion capabilities (opens in a new window) while simultaneously making your translation work down the road easier.

It also comes down to the aspect of establishing a solid brand story. It’s safe to say that different languages will interpret your content in different ways. Exploring all the possible forms your brand can take can help you make sure you’re getting a very thorough understanding of your brand identity. This in turn can make your multilingual content marketing more effective for all different types of consumers.

Embracing multilingual content marketing with localization

Multilingual content marketing is an essential part of reaching more people, but it’s important to note that it’s still just one part of a larger effort: localization. Localization is a strategy where you adopt your brand and its offerings to a certain subset of your audience. This makes your efforts more effective.

To fully embrace multilingual content marketing, be sure to include localization in your plans. For example, Black Friday is a shopping event that not all countries celebrate. If you’re looking to reach a market where this isn’t present, you may not even want to spend the effort of translating existing Black Friday content. Going the other way can save effort and be more effective: if you’re trying to reach Japanese users, for example, you’d be far better off creating content that focuses on the gift-giving occurrence of White Day.

Localization also gets down to more technical aspects. If you’re looking to reach maximum markets, be sure to look for technology that can support your plans (opens in a new window) with features such as:

• No content limits so you can endlessly create material that converts
• Field-level translations that let you use one content tree to distribute to many languages
• An easily translatable backend interface so you can easily hire native speakers without worrying about how they’ll be able to navigate your system

Because of the impact a CMS's features can have on localization, try to consider the process when you’re weighing your options from the start. This can save you growing pains and migration issues later on.

Key takeaways

The wider audience you have, the more likely you are to provide relevant offers that convert to people who are truly interested. An essential step in this process is multilingual content marketing. By crafting a strategy that looks beyond a single language, you’re broadening your organization’s horizons and maximizing the value of what you have to offer.