The only way your website can survive the crucial marketing race of the web is by SEO. Your website is the first point of contact with your business and what you’re providing to the people. Therefore, the representation of your business on your website should be top-notch.
If your business is doing well locally, expanding your business globally will be even more profitable and will render satisfactory results. By reaching out to your audience globally and speaking their language, you are attracting more customers to your website and simplifying the process of using your services to all nationalities.
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at how exactly bilingual content marketing will benefit your business today.
Improve Brand Image
There’s a certain degree of sophistication that is automatically integrated to your business when you have a multilingual website. To have your content translated to all languages will only give the demeanor of efficiency and professionalism to your business, and it proves to the customer that you have a high regard to their interest above all else.
Expanding Your Potential Audience
Using multilingual SEO can help you gain more audience from all over the world, when you optimize your SEO in a foreign language, it will make your content accessible globally as not everyone is able to understand and write in English. Writing in one’s native language shows that you value your customers.
Making Profit at Low-Cost Marketing
Digital marketing is known to be cost-efficient when compared to traditional marketing. When you put your money to optimize your content by making it multilingual, you are investing more into your business and simultaneously gaining more profit at low-cost marketing strategy.
Where to Begin?
Building a multilingual website that speaks directly to your target audience starts by translating and localizing your content. Here’s how to begin with each:
Translation:
When you want to expand your targeted audience by using multilingual skills, you either need to create content in another language or translate your existing content. For translation, you need someone with an extensive knowledge of the required language and a high/native level of executing it. It doesn’t stop there, the knowledge of the language comes to nothing if the person translating your content has no clue about the culture of your targeted audience, it is imperative to know how the audience will react to your content, a rigid word-to-word translation could sound insulting to your audience. For example, if your targeted audience is French, the way of addressing the audience will differ than how you usually address your audience in English by simply using “you”. In French, you have two pronouns to address people (tu, vous) both are used in completely different situations and depending on your level of acquaintance of the addressed person. Therefore, using “tu” is considered informal and sometimes rude, on the other hand, using “vous” is formal, respectable and gives an aura of professionality to your content.
Localization:
Localization is adapting your content to customers in a specific location. E.g., localizing a product in Levant will be different than localizing a product in the Gulf. The people are different, with different cultures and different dialects. For someone who manages SEO marketing in the Middle East, paying attention to dialects is a necessity, every country has its own dialect and they’re all derived from one language: Arabic. It is unlikely for marketing campaigns to address the audience in standard Arabic as it sounds too formal. Using the local dialect will help people relate to your content and make your services sound trustworthy. Therefore, when managing a campaign in the Middle East, you must choose a reliable marketing agency such as Chain Reaction that consists of a professional and multilingual team with a thorough knowledge of different cultures and dialects.
Why is Culture Important for Multilingual SEO?
Cultural differences are extremely important when managing a campaign, sometimes a word-to-word translation can have a misleading meaning. When little details are missed, they can ruin an entire campaign. The famous “Got Milk?” by the American Dairy Association was very successful in the States, however, in Spain they made a mistake by translating their slogan to mean “Are you breastfeeding?”. This is one of the examples why a thorough knowledge about the language and culture is imperative when it comes to multi-language marketing.
Investing your money to optimize your business by making it multilingual will be worthwhile. It is not an easy process and requires hard work, but this strategy will immensely boost your company’s success and you’ll be able to notice significant improvement in your business activity in the foreign market.
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