Multilingual content strategy. Alpha Creative’s empathy model.

1. Analyse the context of your multilingual content strategy

When it comes to creating a multilingual content marketing strategy for a brand, it’s important to look at the context in which the content will develop:

• How will the customer interact with the content?
• Which media channels will be included?
• What is the customer persona?
• What is the desired customer journey?
• Where is the audience located?

It’s all too easy to focus on language when thinking about multilingual content, but make sure to consider locale too. After all, there’s no such thing as Spanish.

Some languages are used in various regions around the world, with some key differences (like the regional variations of English, Spanish or Chinese). It is not just a matter of translating content: it needs to be localized. As part of this process, companies should also consider whether it would be better to create wholly original content for each market instead of localizing centrally-created content campaigns.

Once that has been decided, companies should be ready to put together a strategy that is ready to be made multilingual – whether this is through localization or through content creation.

The starting point will be to create a concept of the desired message, and how that message should be adapted to the different regions. By clarifying the message, multilingual copywriters, designers, and linguists can transform it into tangible pieces of content that will be spread throughout the customer journey, including the traditional awareness, consideration and purchase phases, both in the original language and in the international markets.

2. Strategic Content Marketing

What is the purpose of strategic content marketing? Essentially, the aim is to put a client into contact with the products or services they need by tapping into audio visual or written content produced by a business that can supply their needs. In order to make it relevant to other regions, this content should be localized.

So how can a company ensure it makes connections with the right audiences through its multilingual content? The best-proven way to do this is to use a customer centric approach , such as the one Alpha Creative uses to develop multilingual content strategy for global brands. By putting ourselves in the shoes of their customers, companies are able to understand their clients’ needs. The best way to do that, is through empathy, which means connection with the client.

3. Create an Empathy Map

Alpha Creative, a division of Enterprise Localization company Alpha CRC, believes that companies connect with their customer through emotion. In order to do that, they need to create the right emotion.

Following this reasoning, at Alpha Creative creates content strategy following an empathy model. By looking at how the customer feels and how the client wants their customers to feel, Alpha Creative originates or adapts the right content to create that connection in each region.

Successful content creation strategies don’t just follow the standard customer journey. Instead, they should be based on an “empathy map”, which relates to how a company connects with its customers throughout its content.

Companies should make sure that they have a deep understanding of the experiences they provide their audience:

• What are customers’ common pain points?
• Is the service offering something customers enjoy doing, or is it something they need to do?

By taking these things into consideration, companies are able to craft empathy maps that will enable all content to be target towards their specific customers.

Some of the other points to consider when creating a multilingual empathy map include:

• Thinking: What does the client think when they interact with the company?
• Seeing: What does the client see when they look at company branding?
• Feeling: How does the client feel when they approach the company? Is it a positive emotion? Negative? Neutral?
• Doing: What are the most common behaviours customer display in relation to the company?

4. Types of multilingual content strategies

There are different types of content strategy depending on the channels that we use (social media, email marketing, blog copy for the website, etc), depending on the classical customer journey stages and emotions.

Alpha’s Creative views content creation from an emotional perspective, and has identified several content types and the emotions they can potentially elicit:

• Attraction content: Content available on websites or social media. Ready to be indexed by Google and shared by humans. This is content made to gain attention from people, and should take SEO into consideration. Multilingual creation is usually more effective than localization for this type of content, although it can depend on the project.
• Affinity content: A little more subtle and very powerful. This is content that attracts the right audience. This content explains a company’s price and value proposition to attract leads that are ready to engage with its services. Affinity content campaigns are sometimes designed from scratch for each locale, and sometimes localized.
• Action content:  Content that’s designed to get the audience to take the next action. For this type of content, the call to action is usually the same, no matter the language or geographical location, so usually localization is enough.
• Authority content: Proof of a company’s status as the most relevant provider for their client. Authority-building content helps the client understand what a company’s strengths compared to its competitors. Authority building campaigns can get quite creative, so in many cases multilingual localization of the content is not enough. This means it should be created from scratch in the target languages.

5. Implementation of multilingual content

By following the four previous steps, companies will have been able to develop a clear multilingual content strategy goal, a definition of their ideal customer, an analysis of the emotional customer journey, and how different types of content resonate.

Now it is time to put all of that content into action.

Companies already following classical customer journey models, will have likely identified the different client stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

• Usually, audio content like podcasts is related to awareness, just like social media. Although, with the advent of search engines in Instagram and Tik Tok, these channels are also beginning to leave an impact in the consideration stage.
• Website copy in the form of blog posts is used in all three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.
• Website copy such as e-commerce descriptions is usually relevant in the decision stage, at the end of the funnel.
• Email marketing is also used throughout the three stages.

Whatever product or service companies offer, and whoever their customer persona is, they should make sure to create the best content possible that resonates with your audiences, both locally and abroad.

Those unsure about whether to localize content or to create multilingual content from scratch should think about how creative their campaigns are. Drier, more factual content (whether written or audio-visual) tends to be easier to localize, but it can depend. In some scenarios, multilingual creativity is the best way forward!

Never worry that there is too much content competing for attention, because good work always pays off and high-value content delivered consistently will always find the right audience.

Get in touch with the Alpha Creative team to discuss multilingual content strategy for your business. Its empathy-based approach has been proven to create effective communication campaigns as it connects with the fundamentals of the human mind: our emotions.