Content is king – you’ve heard that many times already. To grow the online presence of your business you’ll need to invest time and effort in content marketing. Increased sales, cost savings and loyal customers are just a few benefits of a good content marketing strategy. But to fully exploit its potential and attract a huge audience you can go one step further and develop a multilingual content marketing strategy for your company’s growth.

Why do you need multilingual content?

You might think that content in one language is enough to market your services efficiently. And you might be right. But if you really want to expand your business and establish strong presence abroad, even if it‘s just two more countries, you’ll definitely need to address your customers in their native language. Multilingual content marketing isn’t reserved solely to the big international companies. In fact, any business aspiring to sell its products and services to anyone with a different cultural and linguistic background will need to take its content to the next, multilingual level.

Prepare your multilingual content marketing strategy

Before entering new markets, make sure you run a thorough market research to determine the countries and regions that might be interested in your products or services. Look at your current website traffic to check where your visitors come from, review the comments on your social media profiles or blogs to find out if there’s a need to offer your content in specific languages.

Once you select the markets for your new content marketing, make sure your core brand message is clear. In some countries you might need to adapt your content, use different metaphors, slogans or graphics, but the overall image and perception of your brand should be consistent. Only then you can go on and create new channels with translated and localised updates.

Select the right channels

Don’t forget to verify where your target customers in each market hang out. Is it only YouTube, Facebook and Twitter? Or maybe they prefer Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat? Are they likely to read blogs or prefer short videos? Again, you’ll need a good market research to determine the needs and expectations of your target audience. With the right channels you’ll be able to engage with your potential customers more efficiently and make sure that your multilingual message is well received.

Adapt your content

Multilingual content marketing will work to your advantage only if you use professional translation and localisation services. Machine translation won’t help you build a positive brand image and attract loyal customers. So, remember to work with qualified translators that will ensure your message resonates with the target audience. You can also adapt your content to the culture of your audience by adding culturally relevant images, symbols or referring to the local habits and traditions. This strategy will improve your marketing results and show that you know and care about your target audience.  

What are your experiences with multilingual content marketing? Is your website and social media available in several languages to attract more customers?

Photo by D. Pawlak

Dorota Pawlak

Dorota helps digital brands infuse their content with a local touch. She is a localization consultant, translator specialized in IT, prompt engineer, and a book author. Dorota teaches online courses on localization, writes for her blog and a Medium publication. She also runs a Small Biz AI, a Substack newsletter for freelancers and small business owners ready to discover handy AI tools.