Multilingual content marketing: Everything you need to know

With brands competing for global audiences, organizations should create content that truly resonates with users. This is crucial for tapping into new markets and gaining a competitive advantage.

Multilingual content marketing is the process of creating content in multiple languages to reach a range of linguistic groups. It is a highly effective strategy for connecting with users and enhancing the customer experience. Brands that do this gain a competitive advantage and can more easily conquer new markets.

If you’d like to learn more about multilingual content marketing then keep reading. In this article, we’ll be running you through how it works so you can create content that truly speaks to your target users.

Multilingual content marketing can enable businesses to expand their global reach and build connections between their brand and audiences. It can also help them drive long-lasting growth internationally.

Let’s dive into the benefits to see what you can expect from a strong multilingual content marketing strategy.

Multilingual content helps to break down barriers that might normally hinder global audiences from engaging with a brand. This statement applies to blog posts, social media captions, landing page copy, and other forms of content.

Translation and localization allow content marketing teams to connect more meaningfully with local audiences worldwide. It helps users feel seen by the brand and boosts content engagement and interaction.

Brands are increasingly valuing user experience as a market differentiator. Publishing multilingual content enhances user experience by providing personalized, accessible information.

Optimizing multilingual content with language-specific keywords boosts a brand's search engine rankings in different regions. This increases visibility and traffic, and links from various language sites enhance the website's domain authority.

An obvious benefit of investing in multilingual content marketing is that users are much more likely to engage with content in their language. This is even more true of content that includes relevant cultural nuances and resonates with the linguistic nuances of their region.

Brands that spend time crafting high-quality, public-facing content in multiple languages quickly see an increase in likes, shares, and comments on blog articles and social media posts. These pieces of content are viewed by users as more credible resources than generic alternatives, further increasing trust in the brand.

A simple yet effective way to differentiate from the competition is to offer your content in multiple languages. This is because users will flock to the brand that is the most accessible to them. In addition, by establishing a presence in different regions, a brand can position itself as a global leader and market innovator.

These best practices will ensure you get your multilingual content marketing strategy right every time.

The number one rule of getting multilingual marketing right is research, research, research. You’ll need to conduct in-depth target market research into your users’ behavior, culture, language preferences, and beliefs.

Market research can be performed in numerous ways, but popular methods include interviews, surveys, focus groups, and social listening. With the data you collect, you’re well-placed to segment your audience. From here you can create buyer personas for each linguistic group that reflects its collective needs and behaviors.

This will help your content marketing team create content that really resonates with target users.

While AI translation is highly effective at creating accurate multilingual content from your current materials and assets, it’s important to always have a language professional proofread and edit any translated content. A linguist is trained in capturing the nuances and context of the original content that AI sometimes overlooks.

We’d recommend putting in place an AI-human workflow to manage your marketing translations. You may also wish to work closely with local experts in particular regions as they will have sound knowledge of important cultural subtleties.

Irrespective of the language, successful companies ensure that brand voice and tone remain consistent across all channels. This best practice ensures you present a unified image of the brand while also fostering familiarity.

To achieve this, develop a brand style guide that touches on tone, style, and messaging for each language.

The American website for Toyota’s 4Runner.

Japanese multinational car manufacturer, Toyota, uses a comprehensive multilingual content marketing approach to engage its international audiences. The company does this by tailoring and localizing its multilingual websites, using local languages to ensure familiarity and accessibility.

The brand’s advertising and social media messaging are translated and localized to reflect local cultural values. For example, in Japan, the car maker’s ads focus heavily on the company’s advanced craftsmanship and technology. In the US, however, the advertising emphasizes durability and a sense of adventure.

These different approaches reflect the differing preferences of Japanese and American car owners.

Vick’s “Touch of Care” campaign.

Boasting a large portfolio of brands such as Tide, Pampers, and Gillette, Procter and Gamble markets its products in a range of languages. The corporation’s branding and messaging are localized to reflect the cultures, values, and behaviors of its customers across all its channels.

An example is the emotional storytelling used to promote its over-the-counter medicine brand Vicks. In India, Procter and Gamble designed a campaign for Vicks called “ Touch of Care ”, featuring stories that focused on strong familial bonds and caregiving. This campaign mirrored the cultural values held in high regard by traditional Indian families.

The German version of Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” content marketing campaign saw the drinks brand replace its logo on its bottles with the text “Share a Coke with..” and then a popular local name. This localization strategy was a highly effective way for the brand to build connections with its customers in a range of markets. It also saw sales for the company increase by 2% in the US alone.

The company also translated the slogan itself into multiple languages and adopted local terminology. For example, during the Australian rollout of the campaign, the label text read: “Share a Coke with mates”. This reflected the language used by the young Australian consumers being targeted by the campaign.

We’ve outlined the precise steps you need to take to build a highly effective multilingual content marketing plan for your brand.

Your first step is to identify and flesh out your goals for the content. Do you want to improve your market reach? Drive traffic? Or simply boost customer engagement in areas you’ve not previously had success in?

Once you’ve got a list of achievable goals, set measurable objectives for each one to keep track of your progress and stay focused.

These objectives might be:

• To reach a specific number of new customers

• To increase the percentage of website traffic coming from particular regions

• To attract a certain number of new social media followers for foreign-language posts.

As we’ve seen, market research is fundamental to the success of your bilingual marketing strategy. If you don’t know the users you are trying to bring on board, how can you create content that will attract and engage them?

When conducting market research, identify and analyze areas where there is already a demand for your product as this is where multilingual content will have the greatest effect. For example:

• Would educational blog posts in the native language help inform users of the benefits of your product and persuade them to trust your brand?

• Would targeted ads in the native language attract users to your website who had previously not considered it?

You’ll also need to get to grips with local cultural, social, and language preferences. This will help you tailor your content to best meet your audiences’ needs.

However, simply translating your current content into the local language might not be enough. You may need to invest in the localization and transcreation of your content to win around and retain new users.

With your market research completed, you’ve got the data you need to develop personas for each of your desired language groups.

Your first step is to segment your audience into demographics, interests, pain points, and behavior patterns. Trends in your market research will help you here. Look out for commonalities in your research and group together audiences that share goals.

Using your personas as your starting point, optimize the content in your native language to ensure the messaging resonates with each target group. This means that when you’re ready to translate and localize the text, the content will already be tailored for its audience.

The languages you choose to translate your content into will depend on the results of your market research and your business goals. Therefore think carefully about where the highest demand is and where you want to see growth.

You’ll also want to take into account which languages will make the biggest impact on your business. For example, which language can be used in multiple countries and markets. Bear in mind that although a language like Spanish might be the main language in several countries, the content will still need to be localized based on the specific culture of the target region.

Now you’re ready to translate and localize your native language content into the language of your target region(s). While the translation process ensures the content is in the right language, localized content marketing efforts enhance engagement and increase conversion rates. This is because local audiences resonate more deeply with content when it is familiar to them.

You have a few options open to you when it comes to translation and localization. While some organizations choose to use in-house translators or agencies, an AI-human workflow is an increasingly popular choice. An AI-human workflow combines the latest AI translation technologies with the talents of language specialists to produce accurate translations at speed.

For website translation, the Smartcat Website Translator automatically translates website content into multiple languages using automatic translation engines. The benefits of this tool are:

• It enables you and your content team to reflect your brand’s tone of voice in every language

• It incorporates your on-brand terminology

• It enables you to align your content with specific linguistic preferences.

For content marketing teams looking for fast and accurate translation and localization support in one place, Smartcat AI translation is another great choice. The tool uses AI technology that leverages bilingual data and machine learning algorithms to fully support the entire localization process.

Additionally, custom prompts for variants such as length or tone of voice make it ideal for adapting content to meet different needs.

To ensure authenticity and accuracy, AI human workflows are the final step in the translation and localization journey. Smartcat’s AI-matching algorithm analyzes your content against individual linguist performance and subject matter expertise.

This enables the tool to match you to a language professional from the Smartcat Marketplace who can proofread, edit, and polish your translations to ensure they serve the target audiences’ needs.

A best practice for any content you publish is to perform keyword research.

For every language you publish your content in, be it a blog article or landing page copy, you’ll need to optimize it for local search engines using localized keywords, meta tags, and URLs.

You should also implement hreflang tags to indicate the language regional targeting to search engine crawlers. This will assist in ensuring the correct version of your site gets seen by its intended audience.

With all of these steps completed, your multilingual content is ready to be published!

As with any content strategy, you’ll need to continually assess the success of your content with your audiences over time. This involves identifying the content pieces that support you in reaching your objectives and the pieces that need improving.

Using this data as your foundation, you’re well-placed to improve your multilingual content marketing output. This will not only increase your market share but also ensure your content resonates with an ever-widening circle of customers and potential customers across the globe.