How to Create a Multilingual Marketing Campaign

The pandemic has had a definitive impact on business planning going global. In fact, since the coronavirus hit, the number of new additions to the companies going global has dropped significantly:

Credit: Statista

Luckily, now the world is slowly getting back to normal, and more brands are expected to start expanding to foreign markets.

Going global requires thorough preparation, not just product-wise. You also need to optimize your marketing campaign and make it multilingual to make sure your target audience understands what you’re offering.

What does it take to launch a multilingual marketing campaign?

We’ve got all the answers here in this guide.

1. Study the Target Market

Whether you’re launching a multilingual campaign to expand your business abroad or simply to grow your audience, you need to study target markets where your prospective customers are coming from.

Market research is a process of gathering information about the target customer persona with the goal of identifying their needs and preferences.

Proper market analysis gives you the following benefits:

• Minimized investment risks
• Knowledge of potential threats and opportunities
• Profound understanding of your competitors and their approach to marketing campaigns
• Strategic planning
• Knowledge of the latest trends in your industry on a specific market

Interestingly enough, less than 40% of marketers do consumer and market research before making any decisions. Such a careless approach results in failed marketing campaigns, lost investments and opportunities to drive more revenue.

So, which methods does market research involve?

We’ve prepared a handy checklist for you to follow with all the necessary points you should pay close attention to:

Remember: Market analysis also involves a bit of self-reflection. You should know very well what your product is and how it can serve the target customer. This way, it will be easier for you to match customer needs with the ways your product can solve them.

2. Get Help Localizing Your Content

Localization is the translation process that involves adapting content to the local market. It is different from general translation because localization puts the culture of the target audience first to make the text more understandable for the target reader.

The reason to prioritize localization is simple – it helps you speak the same language with a target buyer from a foreign market.

What does localization involve?

• Making content more focused on the needs of the local buyer
• Converting to local units of measurement, currencies, date formats, addresses, phone numbers
• Taking into account local laws and regulations

As you can see, localization involves extensive research. Of course, you can do it by yourself, but the risk of making a mistake remains very high because you are not familiar with the local culture.

That’s why it’s better to hire a native speaker to help you adapt content to the target language. For example, if you’re planning to attract more buyers from China, you could work with a Chinese tutor who would help translate all your marketing campaign materials and make sure there are no violations in terms of local regulations.

Apart from that, you can also involve a native speaker in market research. They could help you create a proper ICP (ideal customer profile) and pinpoint consumer needs in the target market. You may also use professional translation services like ALM translations which provide perfectly localized content to secure brand loyalty in markets.

3. Adjust Your Keyword Research

Keyword research is an inalienable part of any marketing campaign. It helps you spot the queries that can help your blog content and ads get listed on the first page of Google and outrank your competitors.

But what if you want to build a multilingual marketing strategy for your campaign?

In this case, you need to adjust your keyword research for each language you want to target.

For example, let’s say your business does interior design, and you would like to attract more clients from Germany. So, you take interior design as your keyword, localize it in German (Innenarchitektur) and search for related queries that have enough search volume but are not very competitive:

In the example above, we’re using SEMrush to illustrate our point. Make sure you choose Germany as a database when searching for relevant queries if it’s your goal to attract more buyers from this country.

Apart from that, watch the intent you want to target. For instance, informational intent implies general information that educates the reader. However, if you want to reach out to a consumer looking for a product to cater to their needs, keywords with commercial intent should be your primary focus.

4.  Set the Right KPIs

Your multilingual campaign will involve content marketing in all its diversity, so you will need the right metrics to measure your goals.

What goals are the most common in multilingual marketing campaigns?

The first one is definitely lead generation. Since you want to attract potential buyers from foreign markets, a portion of your content will definitely focus on converting them to customers. That’s why you will need the following metrics to know that your content serves its purpose:

• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Cost per Click
• Time on page
• Time to conversion
• Cost per lead
• Customer lifetime value

Another important performance indicator showing that your multilingual marketing campaign is doing well is traffic. The priority, as always, goes to organic traffic, but you can also track other traffic sources, such as referral and social if you’re using multiple strategies to drive more website visitors.

The easiest way to track traffic is via Google Analytics –  it shows you each channel delivering new visitors to website pages:

Some multilingual campaigns only aim to raise brand awareness before a business can be safe to enter a foreign market. Such campaigns help you better understand whether there is a real demand for your product.

If this is your case, then, apart from measuring the traffic, you also need to pay attention to the following metrics:

• Mentions
• Branded search volume
• Social shares
• Backlinks
• Total followers

Naturally, before you set the KPIs, you need to define the goals of your campaign. At this point, it’s important to be as specific as possible about your expectations and how they align with the available resources.

5. Select the Marketing Channels for Your Campaign

One more crucial step you need to think through is how you want to reach out to prospects.

If you want to target potential buyers from different markets, the best solution is to invest in multichannel marketing. This way, you will have more opportunities to reach out to prospective customers and increase brand exposure.

There are three types of content distribution channels you can choose from:

• Owned – platforms that belong to your business (website, email, blog, newsletter)
• Shared – channels where you are in control of creating content but have to comply with the platform’s rules and regulations (social media websites)
• Paid – third-party content distribution channels (online ads, content syndication, etc.)

If you are unsure about which channels to pick for your multilingual campaign, take a look at your competitors and how they tackle this issue. However, don’t copy their approach but align it with your goals and objectives. After all, you want your content to stand out, not get overshadowed by your rivals.

Apart from that, consider your budget. Can you afford paid channels to raise brand awareness and attract more buyers? If not, stick to organic strategies in your marketing campaign.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, in many ways, launching a multilingual marketing campaign is not that different from what you’re used to. It still involves all the usual steps of building a campaign. Let’s quickly recap them:

• Do target market research and define your ICP.
• Localize your content to cater to the target buyer’s needs.
• Do keyword research but adjust it to the target market.
• Set the right goals and choose metrics to measure them.
• Choose the right channels to promote your content.

Hopefully, our insights will guide you in the right direction and lead your multilingual marketing campaign to success.