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Crafting an effective multilingual content strategy: Key considerations

By Acclaro

In today’s global marketplace, reaching diverse audiences across different linguistic and cultural backgrounds is essential. A multilingual content strategy allows businesses to connect with customers in their native languages, building trust and fostering loyalty.

According to a study by Nimdzi, 72.4% of consumers prefer to purchase products in their native language, and Common Sense Advisory found that 55% of consumers are more likely to buy a product with information in their language. These statistics highlight the importance of developing a multilingual content strategy to expand your customer base and increase revenue.

However, developing such a strategy is complex and requires careful planning. Here’s what you need to keep in mind when creating a multilingual content strategy.

Challenges and benefits of a multilingual content strategy

Creating multilingual content can present a number of challenges, including the need for accurate translation, cultural sensitivity, and the added complexity of managing multiple language versions. Additionally, creating and maintaining multilingual content can be time-consuming and costly.

Despite the challenges, a multilingual content strategy offers numerous benefits. It can significantly expand your business’s reach, making your message more targeted to international audiences. Moreover, it can help build trust and credibility with customers worldwide, showcasing your commitment to inclusivity and cultural understanding. Additionally, it can enhance your website’s visibility, as it caters to multilingual audiences searching in their native languages.

Developing and launching multilingual content can be a valuable way to expand a business or organization’s reach and impact. Still, it is important to carefully consider the challenges and resources required to do so effectively.

How to get started on a multilingual content strategy

Assess your audience and target market

It’s often difficult to know where to start. To secure the best ROI for your time and investment, it’s good practice to start with research to uncover which focus areas will help you achieve your business goals. One step to achieve this is understanding which audience and markets would best fit your service or product. Researching your audience and target market for a multilingual content strategy includes the following steps:

Identify target languages and regions

This involves reviewing your website analytics, customer surveys, and market research. Where are the highest demands for your product, and which could you easily serve with your existing infrastructure?

Understand cultural and linguistic differences

Understanding the cultural and linguistic nuances of your target regions is crucial. These factors can significantly influence how your message is perceived and received. This understanding can be gained through thorough research, such as studying the culture and customs of the target region or consulting with native speakers. Your language service provider can be a valuable resource in this regard, ensuring your product names resonate with the market.

Research your competition’s multilingual content strategies

Understand what they are doing well and what they are not so you can find gaps and set your benchmarks. You can research the languages in which they describe their services and the type of content they are producing, i.e., is it just product descriptions they are translating or the whole digital experience from SEA to customer support and after-sales? This information can help you identify opportunities and gaps in the market and develop a strategy tailored to your target audience.

Create solid audience personas

Creating audience personas can help identify the characteristics, behaviors, motivation to buy, and needs and requirements of your target audience. Personas can help create a more targeted and effective strategy, as you can identify all the relevant touchpoints that need to be multilingual. When creating content, refer to these persona types, e.g., “Would Sarah find this interesting?”

Measure performance

Measuring the performance of your multilingual content strategy is essential. It helps you identify what is working well and what needs improvement. By using website analytics, customer feedback, or surveys, you can track engagement and content strength across different languages, ensuring your strategy is effective and aligns with your business goals.

When starting your planning, you need to know where to invest your time and effort to get the optimum results. You need to decide which languages and content types are in or are out of scope, with valid supporting arguments. By understanding your audience’s content needs and your business goals, you can establish the metrics to check you’re on track, remain focused, and achieve your internally communicated vision of success.

Considerations for scope, budget, and quality

Identify which content will be translated (existing product range) and which will be created from scratch (new product range).

Use professional translation agencies with a good customer service track record, as you’ll need to work with them regularly for high-volume translation. Look for reviews and case studies to see if their work is up to scratch.

Determine if the content is confidential. If you’re working on pre-release content, you may want to keep your content securely in the translation cloud platform. This will limit translations being shared by email or downloaded by sub-contracted linguists, preventing accurate feedback and insight into progress and increasing the risk of product information being shared and released before the actual launch date. See the marketing agency case study for examples of highly confidential product launch details.

Choose the right translation partner for your multilingual content and desired outcomes. If you’re translating high volumes of content, machine translation (MT) might be the best approach. The quality levels of MT platforms are constantly improving and evolving, but some will work better for your content. Therefore, an MT-independent partner will select the best MT platform for your content type. Other content might need a more human-centric approach, depending on the visibility of your content.

When creating new content, consider the brand voice, unique terminology, and the cultural and linguistic nuances of the target language and audience. The agency will develop this information with you, the client, as part of the linguistic instructions for large translation engagements.

Select the right localization partner

Choosing a localization partner is important when creating and implementing a multilingual content strategy. Consider looking for a translation agency that will truly partner with you to achieve your global growth goals and where you can build a mutually beneficial relationship.

Plan for scale

As your business grows, your multilingual content strategy should be scalable. Plan for:

Content expansion: Ensure your strategy can accommodate adding new languages or regions.
Flexible workflows: Develop workflows that can adapt to changes in market focus or content requirements.

In conclusion, developing a multilingual content strategy is essential in reaching and engaging a global audience. It requires a thorough understanding of your target audience and their needs and a commitment to cultural sensitivity and accuracy.

Implementing a multilingual content strategy can help businesses and organizations expand their reach and build trust and credibility with a much wider audience.