Multilingual Digital Marketing: Tips for Implementing Other Languages into Your Digital Marketing Strategy 

When to Consider Using Other Languages in SEO and PPC 

Does your business serve customers in other countries, or is it growing in that direction? If so, it may make sense to translate content into those languages for optimized website content and PPC ads. Moving to a multilingual digital marketing strategy should come after the necessary actions to scale a business are in place such as international delivery, tariffs, regulations, and other logistics. Once ready, marketers can begin making the necessary transitions to a global marketing strategy that may require targeting multiple languages.  

Creating this content aligns with your everyday strategies for English-speaking customers but goes beyond the one-to-one translation of those efforts. Major brands are guilty of translating English to other languages verbatim without considering how their content strategy plays into the culture and needs of these new buyers. 

In this blog, we look at how to incorporate other languages in your digital imarketing strategy and what considerations you need to ensure you reach these new audiences appropriately. We focus on three tips: 

1. Research Your Audience 

2. Remember to B-SMART 

3. Translation, Localization, and Transcreation 

These tips can help you leverage other languages to differentiate your business online and expand your reach to potential buyers in other parts of the world. 

A Note on Resources

If you don’t have ongoing resources to help translate or review marketing content, leads, and ongoing sales discussions, these tips will be tough to accommodate. Our first recommendation is to stay the course with your existing programs if there isn’t a budget for translation services, a new hire, or an existing Teammate on hand who speaks the language. Until budget and resources are made available, be sure to continue tracking leads in other countries to validate that need in future resourcing discussions.

Research Your Audience 

While the Google Analytics 4 demographic report shows the traffic your website has received globally, it can’t share the intent of those users and includes sources of spam activity. Note that the need to expand globally will likely be due to other efforts and business objectives, and traction in GA4 won’t be seen until multilingual content and targeting are in place.  

Review demographic details in GA4 to get a broad sense of traffic, then narrow in on events and conversions. You can then confirm these conversions are something to act on by analyzing your lead data. When looking into your lead data on LOOP Analytics and the successes of your Sales Team, target countries and regions within them will become more apparent. Start collecting common denominators from these communications:  

• What keywords led them to your site?  
• Are they coming in via SEO, PPC (if running international campaigns), or directly?  
• What products and service pages are they visiting?  
• What industries do they serve?  
• Any trends in lead forms and calls? 

Many global operations will have English speakers in contact, but if not, take the opportunity to review lead data forms and calls with a native speaker or translator. Additionally, use this resource to review the landscape of those users with the language selected in your browser. This will allow you to conduct TopSpot’s Four Steps from the point of view of these buyers and their language.  

The tough part is understanding those users’ intent, the languages and dialects in play, and any cultural considerations you may need. A word-for-word translation could miss cultural nuances, norms, values, and taboos in each target market, which is why a human resource is worth the investment. 

Even if your SEO drives global traffic and you’re running ads internationally, these users may have different expectations and needs, so consider this when looking at each buyer’s journey. Consider things like the economy, regulations, and certifications that may differ in that country. This tip aligns with our recommendations for creating a content strategy that drives quality traffic and leads and then targets the international buyer you’re looking to attract. Like our English recommendations, this includes using the B-SMART Method®.   

Remember to B-SMART 

For our industrial and manufacturing buyers, in particular, their user intent could include:  

• Ordering parts with specific brands, shapes, sizes, SKUs, materials, and types  
• Areas of industry they are serving, which could impact the application 
• Adhering to requirements for regulation purposes 

Accuracy is crucial in industrial buying because not aligning to these specifics can result in expensive errors and loss of credibility. B-SMART is a way to choose keywords and content to power your digital marketing and drive the right traffic to your site by understanding user intent. This principle doesn’t transcend languages, however, upfront research and understanding of language nuances can help your marketing accommodate a new non-English market. Tap into industry experts on an ongoing basis from those areas or those who speak the language during this research.  

Translation, Localization, and Transcreation 

We begin this section with a few definitions:  

1. Translation: converting words from one language to another.   
2. Localization: goes a step further and adapts content linguistically and culturally, considering idioms, cultural references, sensitivities, and consumer perception.   
3. Transcreation: goes even further and allows for the original intent of a message to transcend translation and localization, adjusting the content to ensure the same results as the original for that language and culture.  

Successful multilingual marketing considers all three, and that is why one-to-one translation via Artificial Intelligence isn’t sufficient. Using a native speaker from your Team or a translator who can account for these areas appropriately is always best practice. At times, your needs may be less about tailoring content and more about creating content specifically for this audience. You can identify that need in your upfront research and then execute where needed, including in technical SEO areas like metadata.  

How a user arrives at this content is also an important consideration—one that may mean changes to a website’s navigation or changes to SEO and PPC results and their corresponding landing pages. Implementing high-quality content that is culturally appropriate, aligns with industry standards of the area, and is relevant for the needed products and services requires the same feedback loop as your other digital marketing efforts. Track the performance of your multilingual campaigns and leads to learning what’s working and what’s not, allowing for flexibility and forward momentum in your approach. 

For more on creating multilingual content for your digital marketing, contact us to learn more.