Multilingual Content Marketing: 12 Actionable Tips to Follow

The success of your business hinges massively on how you communicate with your target audience. If you have a global audience, language becomes salient in clear communication.

As per Statista, In 2023, there were around 1.5 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language.

Although English is spoken and understood in scores of countries across the globe, not all of them prefer dealing in English. So, you must stress your audiences’ native languages to connect with them. Just for the language issue, you wouldn’t want a large portion of your audience to slip through the fingers.

This is where multilingual content comes in as it enables the people and locals of different countries to grasp your marketing content & collaterals. Once your content becomes digestible, the audience will think about whether to stay in touch with you.

Understanding Multilingual Content Marketing

Simply put, multilingual content is the availability of content in more than one language. By making content available in multiple languages, you can engage audiences & prospects in their native language, expand your business into new markets, and enhance search engine rankings globally.

The term may imply simply creating content in your primary marketing language or translating from your primary marketing language to other languages. But in reality, it’s way more than simple translations.

Content marketing primarily deals with building trust & rapport with your audience. And to do that, you have to communicate your content & resources with them in their languages. In other words, you have to perform multilingual content marketing to reap benefits from your target audiences.

Not just the language, understanding cultural practices is also paramount to crafting content that suits their values & customs. This is where content localization comes into play.

Content Localization Explained

Content localization is creating content related to a specific culture or region by comprehending your target audience’s customs, values, and beliefs. Some of the elements you need to adjust for localization content include text, designs, imagery, formats, cultural references, and so on.

For example, there is an expression in Bengali “Khabar ta shei chilo” which means the food was extraordinary. If it’s translated into English literally, it would sound like “The food was like that”. This expression makes no sense in English but in Bengali, it expresses a satisfactory feeling.

So, if you target Bangladeshi audiences, consider including such types of localized expressions in your content to resonate with their feelings & emotions. If required, get in touch with local experts who can help you understand local terms.

Remember, if you want to develop a global content marketing strategy, localization must be a part of your strategy to bring out effective outcomes.

Why is Multilingual Content Marketing Salient for Businesses?

You want your message to be digestible to every person curious about what you offer. That’s where multilingual content marketing counts as it expands your reach and appeal. 

According to a survey of 8,709 global consumers in 29 countries in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, CSA Research found that 76% of online buyers prefer to purchase products with information in their native language.

According to a recent DeepL study, a whopping 96% of respondents reported a positive ROI from their localization efforts.

So, when data is speaking for multilingual and localized content to catch customers’ attention and convert them, hands down, you are likely to reap benefits from the efforts if you operate properly.

Top 12 Multilingual Content Marketing Strategies

If you are convinced about the importance of multilingual content marketing, you would be urged to adapt your content to multiple languages. If you are thinking of just contacting a few translators, shake off your thought as it won’t suffice.

I have come up with 12 multilingual content marketing strategies to help you start. Here’s how you should approach a multilingual content marketing strategy — 

Analyze & Research Your Target Audiences

HubSpot’s recent survey shows that out of 1,200+ marketers, only 42% have the basic demographic information about their target audience. 

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

Market research can be performed in umpteen 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.

For example, you can leverage an advanced audience research tool like SparkToro that will help you understand audience behaviors, characteristics, and demographics.

• Behaviors: what they visit, read, watch, listen-to, and follow
• Characteristics: keywords they search for, how they describe themselves in their bios, language in their content
• Demographics: gender, age, interests, job titles, education, and more

Equip Your Core Message

Right after identifying the target audience, establish a solid foundation for your brand. For that, you have to create a strong message (Tagline, mission, vision, etc.) for your brand.

You should already be publishing quality content on your blog, social media channels, and other digital marketing materials, as well as following SEO best practices. All of this will bring great value to your other language versions. 

Your content and campaigns must adapt to the foreign markets you’re targeting. But never change your core message, regardless of the language version as it’s instrumental to establishing your brand.  

Create Top-notch Multi-lingual & Localized Content

When it comes to global content marketing, simple translations won’t cut it. You’ll need to customize and localize your content so it truly speaks to your audience.

When creating content, make sure it reflects your brand’s values, standards, and image across all your channels and in all the languages you’re marketing in.

Localized content entails adapting content to suit cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions, and even humor, unlike translated content that only converts content from one language to another. 

For quick & flawless content marketing in multiple languages, you can leverage GetGenie’s core features like one-click blog generator, content creation templates, etc. It will enable you to create content in 33+ languages.

Craft Original Content for Each Language 

When you adapt your content for a certain region, it’s important to convey your message precisely. The cultural references need to resonate with the local audience. 

If you create technical content like manuals, guides, etc., accuracy is the key. So, you might need to work with local experts to make sure every detail is correct. The attention to detail in crafting original content for each language can enhance your campaign’s effectiveness. 

GetGenie comes with 37+ templates that you can use to generate content in multiple languages. Product description, Explain Why, Pros & Cons, and Content Rewriters are some of the examples of GetGenie’s useful templates.

Don’t Forget to Optimize Content for Multilingual SEO

In today’s digital world, if you want to maximize your multilingual content’s visibility, only writing content on your website in different languages isn’t sufficient. You have to also optimize the content with relevant keywords, formatting, and answering users’ questions.

Create a strategy that makes your multilingual content more discoverable and visible to searchers globally in the search engine.

Conduct thorough keyword research in each target language, optimize metadata, implement hreflang tags, and ensure your website’s structure and navigation are smooth across all languages.

By enforcing multilingual SEO best practices, businesses can boost their online visibility and drive organic traffic from diverse markets.

Tap into the Right CMS

Choose a content management system (CMS) that allows you to make different language versions and has a shared database. I would recommend going for WordPress as it’s versatile and provides support for multiple languages.

Integrating multilingual website SEO strategy into your website is also paramount. Plugins like RankMath can be a perfect choice for on-page optimization.

Once you’ve created or translated your content, you’ll be able to optimize each language version and page through meta descriptions, metatags, keywords, link building, etc.

Promote Your Content in All the Targeted Languages

If you want your content to reach the target demographic faster, don’t forget to promote it among your audiences. However, reaching potential customers in the modern global business landscape is more complicated than placing a few ads in targeted languages. 

With ads, you have to think about multiple factors, like ad spend, keyword competition, quality score, etc. Every time, you may not bid with a high amount for profitable keywords due to the competitive nature of target keywords. That’s why you have to leverage other promotional platforms and methods.

For instance, you can focus on link-building efforts in specific languages to generate backlinks in authoritative websites. It can be through guest post collaboration, product enlistment, link swap, etc. A successful backlink will result in referral traffic to your multilingual website, maximizing content visibility.

Maintain Brand Consistency 

Your branding should remain constant, regardless of the language and cultural diversity. For this to work, hire translators who deeply get hold of your brand’s personality. 

That will require a collaborative effort between marketers and translators to ensure that each translation communicates the intended message and aligns with the overall brand identity. 

Adapt to Local Social media 

Social media is a key element of global content marketing, but it’s important to be strategic about it. While your first reaction may be to create separate accounts for each region, it’s usually a better idea to start off small with one global account.

Once you’ve got that running successfully, you can gradually start adding more regions. But only as many as you realistically have the capacity for.

Different platforms are popular in different regions. Instagram and Twitter might be widely used in the West, Facebook in Asia, and in some European countries, they prefer Weibo or VKontakte.

Leverage the Right Management Tools

Coordinating all your project managers, translators, content creators, and community managers can become quite complex, especially if they’re located in different parts of the world and in different time zones.

That’s why you’ll need to use the right software to organize your global multilingual marketing strategy, campaigns, and accounts.

There are plenty of content management tools available that support multiple languages — one of the most well-known is HubSpot. In our company, we use Nifty to manage our content projects.

Without these tools, we wouldn’t be nearly as efficient in carrying out international content marketing projects. They make it easy for team members to assign projects, collaborate, provide status updates, and more. 

Use the Right Translation Software

Translation tools equipped with AI capabilities offer a comprehensive solution to manage your multilingual content efficiently. These advanced tools not only allow you to keep all translations organized in one place but also enable assignments to translators and editors directly within the software.

Additionally, they create a memory bank of repeated words and phrases across different languages, enhancing consistency and expediting future translation processes.

TranslatePress AI is a wonderful translation tool that lets you translate your WordPress website content into your preferred language. However, if you aren’t a WordPress user, try the DeepL AI translation tool to get an accurate translation from the original language to your target language.

Monitor & Check the Performance

Make sure to consistently measure metric parameters (traffic, engagement, leads, and conversion) in different languages and markets. It allows for spotting what is working and what is not. This way you can create targeted strategies to achieve the goals set for multilingual marketing.

Leverage Google Analytics and Google Search Console to get your multilingual website’s accurate content marketing data. Besides, take advantage of third-party SEO & keyword research tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, etc. to get further content & keyword data.

When figuring out ROI for your content efforts, you need to think about different aspects — the cost of translation, advertising, and hiring social media managers, and more.

Set up some KPIs that will help you make sense of the data related to your localization strategies, and you should be fine. 

A Classic Example of Multilingual Content Marketing

Toyota

Toyota, a Japanese multinational car manufacturer, taps into a comprehensive multilingual content marketing approach to engage its global audiences. By tailoring and localizing its multilingual websites, the company ensured familiarity and accessibility along with expanding reach.

The brand always translates & localizes its advertising and social media messaging to reflect local cultural values.

For instance, in Japan, the car maker’s ads focus hugely on the company’s advanced artistry & technology. In the US, however, the advertising stresses longevity & a sense of adventure.

Create Multilingual Content & Boost Your Conversion

Your primary aim of creating business content is to reach your target market, engage prospects, build relationships with them, and convert them into paying customers. And for that, communication language matters a lot which you know by now.

So, what are you waiting for? If you have helpful business content on your website, consider creating them in your targeted languages. If you have the resources to create marketing content from scratch, go for it. If not, go for translating & localizing the existing content with a top-of-the-line translator tool.

As I already mentioned above, GetGenie can create original content easily & swiftly with its AI prowess. Select the Genie Mode or your desired template, choose target languages one by one and create multiple language versions of your marketing content right off the bat.