Did you know there are over 7,000 languages on Earth? As a marketer, that statistic alone can be overwhelming enough to throw in the towel. But don’t call it quits quite yet. With almost 8 billion people in the world, catering your content to the various languages they speak can multiply your potential audience by the hundreds of thousands! That’s the power of multilingual content marketing, and it’s worth the effort.

Let’s look at some multilingual marketing strategies and how you can not only publish your content in multiple languages, but grow your audience in them as well.

What Do We Mean By Multilingual Content Marketing?

Multilingual content marketing is when you translate your content, videos, and other media assets into different languages, and optimize them in those languages as well. This can help you get your content in front of a larger audience throughout the world.

Think about the purpose of content marketing: you’re trying to grow your audience by establishing a relationship with your readers. Meeting your readers where they are by publishing in their native language can help establish that trust and grow your bond.

Optimizing content for other languages also means doing research to see how keywords have changed or adapted to other languages, what people in that language are searching for, and how to write differently for other languages. This optimization can help you score wins in languages other than your native one.

Multilingual Marketing Strategy Tips

Multilingual content marketing is a great idea for every brand — however, that doesn’t mean it’s by any means simple. Let’s look at some tips to make sure your content shines and that it overcomes any multilingual marketing challenges.

1. Nail Down Your Messaging

Before you can succeed in many languages, make sure your content is foolproof in your primary one. You should know exactly what your brand wants to say and how you want to say it, so when you start translating your message will still clearly come across. This will reduce the risk of your main points getting lost in translation, or not appealing to new markets.

A few ways to nail down your messaging:

• Write a simple mission statement that is short, sweet, and encapsulates your brand
• Research your audience to see what they’re searching for, what they like, and how they act, so you can change your messaging accordingly
• Run polls to see what advertisements or taglines work best with your audience

2. Do Keyword Research In Different Languages

When someone in the United States searches for the keyword “pants,” they’re looking for something pretty different than someone searching the same thing in the United Kingdom (hint: “pants” means underwear in the UK).

So unless you want to get caught targeting the wrong keyword, conduct your keyword research in all the languages you plan on creating content in. You might end up needing to make tweaks to help your content rank in other countries.

3. Write Content That Can Be Universal

If you’re wanting your content to be read by people around the world, you should write for a global audience. Don’t fill your content with slang, cultural references, or memes that will only be useful to those in your home country.

This will either make global audiences confused, or require extra editing on your end to add relevant references for each country during the translation process.

4. Start By Targeting a Few Main Languages, Then Expand

Remember when we said there are 7,000 languages throughout the globe? If you start your global marketing strategy trying to target too many languages at once, you’ll most likely find yourself in over your head and not delivering the best quality content possible.

Instead of jumping in head first, save yourself from drowning in localized content marketing by dipping your toe into some research to find out which countries have your highest potential interest and localizing for those. After all, it’s not worth the effort to translate your content into a language your potential customers don’t even speak.

5. Let Software Help You Localize

Software is available that can help you easily localize your content. Here at Rev, for example, we can help translate your captions into non-English languages with our AI transcription tool. We can also help add subtitles for global languages. Utilizing software and AI tools can help you make sure that your localized content is accurate.

6. Create DEI Benchmarks For Your Content

DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And while you should be focusing on this in all aspects of your content strategy, it’s especially important when going global. Examine your content to make sure you’re promoting and celebrating diversity, and not including any unintentionally exclusionary language.

Some things to look out for:

• Don’t assume major holidays from your home country are celebrated in every country you publish to
• Avoid mentioning religion if it isn’t the subject matter of the article
• Avoid using terms that are only popular in your primary language
• When mentioning a cultural practice or etiquette — even things like air conditioning, which is not commonplace in many countries — don’t assume that your home country is the standard

7. Make Your Videos Multilingual As Well

There have been many proven benefits of video marketing. So if you’re going global, focusing on your video content is a good idea. You don’t have to reshoot the video time and time again in different languages to translate it, using subtitles or video dubbing (when someone speaks over the original video in a new language) will do the trick.

Benefits of Multilingual Marketing

Employing a multilingual strategy comes with many benefits, most notably a wider reach for your content. Let’s look at some of the other benefits of going global:

• More potential business from global customers
• A better experience for readers and viewers worldwide
• Increased website traffic
• Enhanced visibility for your brand
• More competitiveness against competitors who aren’t putting effort into a global approach

Multilingual Marketing Challenges

We could talk about the benefits of multilingual marketing all day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll choose to make the leap and do it effortlessly. Most likely, there will be some roadblocks along the way.

Some common global marketing challenges include:

• Difficulty conveying your brand’s distinct voice to a global market
• Potential for miscommunication across languages
• Staying compliant with global regulations for marketing content in different countries

Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Nǐn hǎo, Guten Tag

Going global might seem intimidating, but there are many software companies out there (like Rev!) that can help you do so confidently. Let us help you translate your captions and videos into some of the most-used languages worldwide — your engagement will thank you for it.