Content marketing is a strategic approach to supporting the entire customer journey, from creating awareness to generating sales. However, only 1.5 billion worldwide speak English natively or as a second language, around 19% of the global population. If you’re a multinational brand or a local business planning to venture into a new locale, you should consider multilingual content marketing.

According to CSA Research, 65% of consumers want to read content in their language. As a result, sticking to English-only marketing content leaves large portions of your markets virtually untapped. That’s why you need a content localization strategy.

What Is Content Localization?

Content localization is adapting content to meet a particular country or region’s linguistic, cultural, and other requirements. It goes beyond translating text. It includes ensuring relevant cultural references, using appropriate numerical formats, and modifying images and graphics. 

Localization is what creates multilingual content marketing. This strategy involves creating, translating, and distributing marketing content in multiple languages to reach a wider global audience. 

The goal is communicating effectively with potential customers and building brand awareness in different markets. Multilingual content marketing can help your brand expand its reach and connect with customers in other regions who may have different language preferences and cultural backgrounds.

What Marketing Content Should You Localize?

Importantly, marketing content isn’t limited to your websites. Indeed, many types of marketing content can – and should – be localized for target audiences, including:

Websites

Website content, including product descriptions, blog posts, landing pages, photos, graphics, and user interface.

Social Media

Social media posts include text, images, and user-generated content.

Email

Email marketing campaigns and transactional emails, such as automated welcome messages or order confirmations.

Downloadable Materials

E-books, case studies, guides, checklists, and whitepapers.

Interactive Content

Quizzes, calculators, surveys, contests, and games.

Videos

Product demos, promotional videos, explainer and how-to videos, customer testimonials, and expert interviews.

Podcasts and Webinars

Marketing podcasts and webinars, including transcriptions and subtitles.

Print Marketing

Brochures, posters, flyers, catalogs, direct mail, and billboards.

Advertising Materials

TV and radio commercials and banner ads.

How Can a Multilingual Content Strategy Help Your Business Grow?

There are plenty of benefits of content localization. Localized content marketing can help your brand expand in several ways, including:

Reach New Markets

Localizing content allows you to overcome language barriers, reach new markets, and expand your business into different regions. By creating content in the local language and adapting it to local cultural norms, your brand can better connect with customers who prefer to read content in their language.

Improve Customer Experience

Localized marketing content helps engage customers in different markets more effectively by showing that your company understands and respects their culture, language, and preferences. The goal is to make them feel that the content was written specifically for them.

Build Brand Credibility and Loyalty

When customers in new markets read your content in their language, it builds credibility and trust by demonstrating a commitment to the local market and understanding its unique needs. Once you gain their confidence and deliver on your brand promise, it helps foster customer loyalty. 

Improve Search Engine Visibility

By translating website content and optimizing it for different languages and markets, you can improve your search engine visibility, rank higher for your target keywords, and attract more qualified traffic to your site.

Increase Conversion Rate

Here’s a fact: 4 out of 10 consumers said they would not buy from websites in other languages. And more than three-fourths prefer products with information in their local language. That’s why localized content can help increase conversions by providing a more personalized experience for customers and improving the relevance of the marketing message.

What Are the Challenges of Creating a Multilingual Content Strategy?

Content marketing localization is more complex than using machine translation, such as Google Translate, to generate multilingual marketing content. Several challenges come with creating localized content, such as:

Translation Accuracy

Localized content requires linguistic accuracy and should consider local context and cultural nuances. You must ensure that translated content accurately conveys the intended meaning and that cultural references are appropriate. Achieving accuracy can be difficult, especially for complex or technical content.

Maintaining Consistency

Maintaining consistency across different markets can be challenging. For instance, it isn’t easy to keep your brand personality, tone, and voice when adapting content for other languages and cultural norms.

Word Length Discrepancies

Content expands when translated from English to another language. For example, Italian, French, and Spanish use more words to express meaning. On the other hand, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese text contracts. And this affects the design and layout of your content.

Keeping Up With Changes

For highly regulated industries, such as the financial, legal, and life sciences sectors, you need to keep up with changes in local markets, including updates to laws and regulations. It can be complicated and may require regular updates to localized content.

Keeping Pace With Cultural Trends

Staying current with cultural trends and preferences in different markets can be difficult and requires ongoing research and analysis.

Managing a Multilingual Content Team

Managing a team of translators, editors, and reviewers can be difficult, especially when working with multiple languages and markets. Also, the more technical and specialized the content, the more challenging it can be to find highly trained native speakers and in-country specialists.

Balancing Cost and Quality

Balancing the cost of creating and translating content that is high-quality and that meets the needs of different markets can be complex. It might require prioritizing certain marketing content or specific languages.

5-Step Process for Successful Content Localization

You can address these challenges with a proper localization strategy and plan. Here is a 5-step process for successful content localization:

1. Conduct Market Research

Research the target market, including languages, norms, and preferences, to gain a better understanding of the linguistic nuances and cultural references that will resonate with the target audience.

2. Translate Your Content

Translate your marketing content into the target language. Use a translation management system, computer-assisted translation software, glossaries, and memory for fast and consistent translation. Combine machine translation and human linguists to balance scale with accuracy.

3. Localize Your Content

Refine your translations by adapting to the target market’s cultural, colloquial, and contextual nuances. Change photos, images, and other visual content to suit the local audience better. And adjust the design and layout to fit the translated content.

4. Review Your Localized Content

Review and revise translated content to ensure that it’s high-quality and relevant to the target market. This can involve working with native speakers or cultural experts to ensure accuracy and relevance.

5. Test, Measure, and Improve

Test and measure your localized content’s performance regarding page views, user engagement, and other metrics. Get feedback from local users about their experience consuming your content. Then implement changes as necessary.

Reach Your Global Audience

Content localization requires a significant investment in time, money, and talent. The process becomes even more complex for multilingual content marketing as you add languages.