When planning localization marketing, it is important to take into account that 75% of non-English speakers prefer to shop for products in their native language, and 60% of non-English speakers will rarely visit a website that is written only in English. The benefits of translating a website and creating a multilingual digital marketing strategy are numerous, and not just for conversions, but also for overall international exposure. Translating marketing content is as essential as providing translated product manuals or translating your website, and optimizing traffic across multiple languages is a challenge that many international companies face.
These are the steps to take to improve your localization marketing
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Prepare your content for international audiences
The first step in crafting content that’s ready for digital marketing purposes across multiple languages is ensuring that it’s adaptable from the get-go. Always create digital marketing content with a global audience in mind. This means writing blogs, emails, posts and website content with a simple sentence structure and avoiding idiomatic language and culture-specific words. This will help reduce the number of edits and changes translators will have to make when localizing the content.
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Take advantage of innovation
In today’s digital market, various types of technology exist that can enhance the quality of your translations. From state-of-the-art translation memory technology, machine translation, publication APIs and translation management software, there are a multitude of ways to ensure your marketing content is translated into outstanding content in any language and country. Investing in a company that provides these high-quality language services and access to these technologies will pay off in the amount of multilingual traffic and conversions you will observe in the long-run.
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Multiple languages in multiple countries
If your website is designed to serve multiple languages in multiple countries, you will have to be smart about how you design your website from the very beginning. Use a generic domain, such as .com, so that you can target various countries and create language-specific subdirectories within the site. Ensure that each version of your website is optimized with the SEO keywords specific to the area and use hyperlocal strategies, such as Google Maps, for businesses in each country or city that you are targeting.
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Use specialized translators
By now, you hopefully know that Google Translate is not the way to go when you want to translate your website and marketing material. You must also take care when choosing a translation agency. Ensure that the company you are going to work with employs the best translators in a wide variety of languages and industries. You should look for a company that takes into account not only the translation of your marketing content, but also looks at your product, service, and target audience to make edits according to social and cultural nuances.
These four steps will make a difference when planning your marketing localization, and will help you target your audience in any language you plan on using.