How to market your company in a foreign language
Marketing professionals and website owners usually concentrate on marketing to people who speak only English, since this is the only language they understand. They don’t even consider the benefits of using a foreign language in order to expand their reach. When they go along with this strategy, they assume that the people they are marketing their products to can speak the English language.
Why market your products in a foreign language?
There are marketing executives who sometimes state that the products of their company are well known all over the world, when in fact only people who speak English had the opportunity to find out about their products. This is because only English is used by all their marketers and on every marketing material they use, including their website.
Benefits of using a foreign language to market your products online
Almost 30 percent of Internet users understand the language, which of course, is the most significant language on the Internet. Marketers however forget that with the use of a foreign language, they will have the opportunity to reach more people including potential customers.
- Your business will get exposed to new set of people who speak that foreign language, leading to more sales.
- You will be at an advantage, compared to your competitors that market with only one language.
- You can reuse your former content for SEO. All you have to do is translate to other languages and you won’t have to create new content.
- Fewer competitions as regards unpaid and paid keywords.
- The possibility of increased foreign-language CTR keywords, resulting to some words having a higher quality score.
- Better buzz creating chance for your products: it is possible for several brands and products to become popular amongst a particular group of people with unique cultural features. Google’s social network, Orkut, for instance, is widely used in Brazil, just because a particular local version was developed.
- Increased business cooperation potential and use of affiliate networks to find new partners.
Knowing a Foreign Language
Today, we live in a globalized business environment, and knowing a foreign language is an ability that will differentiate you from the crowd. The ability to interact in a foreign language is becoming more and more critical in the increasingly integrated global business society. Communicating directly with new clients and businesses in their native language is one of the first moves to founding a constant, stable global business relationship. Being able to do this automatically sets any multilingual person miles ahead of his or her companions in the competition for businesses and high-prestige positions.
Efficient and effective communication among a foreign language is an indispensable tool for relationship building, and furthermore, financial success. A person with a foreign language against a person without the understanding of a foreign language the difference results in confidence, and ease of communication. One can explore the city, shop, and other products for one’s business advantages without crutches or dependencies.
Engage in content localization
When you decide to engage in content localization, you need to put in quite some effort. You will also have to consider the language, geography, and demography of the people you are targeting. For instance:
- If you are targeting the Chinese language, will it be the Shanghaies, Cantonese or Mandarin? Will you be using a traditional or simplified script?
- If your target is Portuguese, is it the Brazilian or Portugal demography?
- For Spanish, are you targeting Spain or South America (and which of the dialects).
Some website owners often opt for machine translation to avoid paying for professional translation services. There are translations plug-ins that can be installed on the website and then the website is automatically translated to a different language.
This is however disadvantageous since machine translation is not perfect and therefore does not give quality translations. Some disadvantages in using machines to translate into a foreign language include:
- Visitors to the website will notice a website with wrong grammars, with a good percentage not being aware that the cause of the error was machine translation as opposed to manual translation.
- They immediately think the website is a scam or the company is unprofessional.
- The quality of the website could be linked with the product quality, with the poor translation rubbing off the interest of the customer in the product.
- Can easily lead to increased bounce rate and negative website impression if the pages shows on searches from other languages, but when the page is opened, it is not automatically translated to the language.
The implication of this is that if you are serious about your website and your business, there is not shortcut to getting professional translation.
What if I don’t have much to cater for translation?
- Translate only the first page of the website.
- Create a sub-domain having the homepage alone. When you have more, you can expand the translated content.
As a conclusion, translating your online assets to a foreign language has its advantages, but it needs to be done the proper way. Asking for professional help won’t cost you a fortune and it will give you the satisfaction of a job well done.
