28 June 2022
Multilingual content strategy for global brands.
The internet’s accessibility powered an initial frenzy of brands aiming for global reach, creating marketing campaigns that spread internationally. But when everyone is going global, how can any one brand hope to differentiate themselves? What is the future for multilingual content strategy?
The answer, to go local, might seem surprising. However, in a world where international branding campaigns have become the norm, proximity and relevance are the next logical steps to take in addressing the customer experience.
Global operational scale has often meant sacrificing customer intimacy. That is why brands are now beginning to tailor their marketing to individual locations, capitalizing on popular “near-me” searches.
Brands might struggle to strike a balance between economies of scale and being able to connect with local communities. However, without taking into account the entire buyer persona (including age, language, goals) and the local zeitgeist, the brand and customer experience may never reach its full global potential.
As a layer of personalization, effective localization pays dividends. However, the creative processes many marketing and advertising agencies currently adopt rely heavily on the translation model. This means creating an idea first, executing in one country and then translating into five languages. Tactics such as originating completely new content for each market, through services such as copywriting in Japanese, Hindi or Mandarin are only just beginning to really take off.
The “writing your name on a coffee cup” type of CX initiative seems to be a global hit, but there will be some areas where it inevitably backfires – take an Indian woman in the US who received her coffee with “Hippo” written on it.
In order to differentiate and be truly successful, global brands will need to balance economies of scale with greater empathy and intimacy with the customer.
Over the next few years, this need to foster local intimacy will see marketing teams and agencies remodel themselves to engage consumers creatively at a granular local level. Some will embrace a multilingual content strategy and benefit from multicultural creative teams. Others will develop creative huddles that provide easy access to local creative expertise.
Either way, the strategies required to be a truly multilingual digital agency that can craft successful international customer experiences will have built-in creative localization at their core.
Multilingual content localization will be increasingly “built-in” at the start of the product lifecycle.
The days of localization as a “bolt-on” after a product has been developed or international marketing strategy has been created are likely to be numbered. Working on a truly global scale means localization needs to be integrated right from the start of the product lifecycle.
Some global companies – particularly in the IT and software sectors – are already doing this. But many multinationals are not there yet.
Localization models and technologies have evolved because of requirements to quickly localize into a greater number of languages across more diverse channels than ever before.
The big tech companies, for example, are often localizing into 100+ languages. For them, the old “bolt-on” process simply isn’t feasible if they want to achieve speed to market and engage local audiences.
This is where the idea of multilingual content localization during the development process comes into place.
For many large enterprises, localization is still a process that comes after a series of initial stages, such as product development or content creation. However, those that work to build localization into the product development process, fully realizing multilingual content creation, will soon see the benefits of it.
This could be greater product fit for specific markets, enhanced brand awareness and loyalty, brand differentiation in saturated markets, greater agility to respond to emerging trends or topical events, and faster speed to market.
By integrating the principles of good localization into the processes of R&D, product design, market research and marketing strategy, enterprises can better respond to the growing demand for products and content built on highly specific personal preferences. As such, localization will play an increasingly important role in the next phase of digital transformation.
Original marketing and brand content will increasingly be created in multiple languages, rather than adapted from a single source.
Placing localization at the core of the creative process will also see a shift away from the traditional hub-and-spoke model of brand content creation and dissemination. For global enterprises working across a huge variety of cultures and languages, it no longer makes sense to create marketing campaigns and content in a single language (usually English) to be translated for other local markets.
Rather than creating marketing and brand content in a source language, and then translating or transcreating that content, companies will create multilingual content strategies. These may adapt campaigns for different locales or they may instead create entirely new approaches.
This disrupts the traditional workflow, which involves an enterprise commissioning a digital marketing agency to create a global campaign that is then rolled out by marketing agencies and localization providers in different regions.
Instead, leading enterprise localization providers will move into the marketing and content creation space, offering multilingual content creation as a natural part of the overall service provision.
The approach to language and content is becoming much more market- and customer-specific. This is no longer a discussion of source and target languages, but of several source languages, each following specific brand guidelines.
Creativity that leverages emotion remains consistently unchallenged in its power to attract.
In response to these changes, Alpha CRC’s newly founded Alpha Creative has been set up to create effective localization communications. Localization objectives are included in campaign strategies from the very beginning, moving beyond international transcreation and into global content creation.
When it comes to expanding brands internationally, nine out of ten times the translated campaigns don’t perform as well as the ones that were created for the original market.
Creative media localization has been on the back burner for too long, and reliance on simple translations goes against the common-sense idea that relevant marketing content needs to be personalized right down to the exact place and context of a targeted audience.
Long gone are the days of multilingual guest post writing services, bilingual blog writing services and other tactical techniques. The Alpha Creative team believes that marketing teams and agencies will, in the immediate future, need to adjust their models at a higher, strategic level if they want to make impressions outside of their domestic markets, and has adopted these adjustments for itself. The team believes that in order to implement an effective multilingual content strategy, agencies will need to:
• Create tools to understand the local landscape and get the most out of international search engine marketing.
• Show local audiences that the branded content they’re marketing is relevant to the language, cultural identity and other various nuances that make that locale unique and special.
• Run split tests on an individual market to measure how much those extra costs and effort in effective creative localization are ultimately worth it, or whether, in some cases, international transcreation remains the way to go.
• Leverage their partner network, initiating creative hubs with foreign affiliates and sharing ideation methodologies to encourage more local creative input.
• Build teams of multilingual writers and adopt a multicultural perspective to hiring new talent in order to provide truly global copywriting and international branding services.
This is a process Alpha Creative has developed from its experience working with global brands, no matter the size, and one that has been proven to yield results for those looking to upgrade their existing multilingual content strategy.
The global future demands a local perspective. Only language service providers with enough creativity and experience will be able to deliver results in an increasingly demanding and competitive market.
It’s always interesting to get new insights, so we’d love your feedback or comments on what you think is the future for global branding and multilingual content strategies.
If you’d like to share any ideas with the team, please contact us here.
