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Multilingual Marketing

Guest post by: Christian Arno

Article Overview: About 75% of the world’s population speak no English at all. At present count, that’s some five billion people you’re not able to reach if your online presence is English-language only. Add to that findings by the Chartered Institute of Marketing that ‘export sales of companies that make an effort to understand each nation’s way of life, consumer tastes, culture and language are growing by, on average, £290K per company per year,’ and you have a powerful incentive to go multilingual with your online marketing. Here’s how...

Multilingual Marketing

Speak and Sell Consider this: about 75% of the world's population speak no English at all. At present count, that's some five billion people you're not able to reach if your online presence is English-language only. Add to that findings by the Chartered Institute of Marketing that ‘export sales of companies that make an effort to understand each nation's way of life, consumer tastes, culture and language are growing by, on average, £290K per company per year,' and you have a powerful incentive to go multilingual with your online marketing. Here's how...

Go Local

To effectively market your company to non-English speaking countries, you need to consider the specificities of each target market. Dialect and culture can vary greatly within a language depending on which country you're targeting. Take Arabic, for example. The style of Arabic you would use for a website in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates isn't the same as the language you would use for a website in Lebanon, where the locals use a mélange of Classical Arabic, slang, French and English. The same applies to the different French, German, Portuguese and English dialects of the world. Go global, think local.

SEO Research

SEO is king when it comes to online marketing, and with a little simple research you can optimize your SEO terms to ensure the best possible page results. When working across languages, it's important to remember that the direct translation of the English phrase may not be the most commonly used search term in your target market. Maybe they use the English term itself, or a variation of it, or perhaps a phrase you would never have considered. Fortunately, with keyword searches, it's easy to figure out exactly what your audience is thinking when they search online. By using the keyword search function for a search engine like Google, you can look up the frequency of use of a term and its alternatives in that region. Say you want to sell portable computers in France, a quick search on the Google France Keyword Search will reveal that while the term laptop was searched for 368,000 times in France in February, the term notebook popped up in 450,000 searches - that's 82,000 web searchers who may have missed your site if you didn't know to include the term ‘notebook' in your list of SEO terms.

The Right Engine

While we're on the subject of search engines, another vital strategy for effective multilingual online marketing is making sure you use the right search engine for your target market. Different language groups tend to use different search engines - indeed the entire architecture of how a search engine works will change depending on the grammatical rules of the language. So, if you're planning to market your site to a Chinese audience, you'll want to learn how to climb the rankings at Baidu, the number one Chinese search engine, while if it's Russia you're planning to tackle then Yandex will be your engine of choice, or NHN for South Korea and Yahoo in Japan. With a bit of research and some professional translation assistance you'll be using the right language and the right search terms in combination with the right search engine - then you'll be unstoppable.

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Article Tags: localization, multilingual marketing, online marketing



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