14 December 2022
What is long tail language marketing?
As multinational companies continue to grow and expand their international footprints into new territories, it is becoming increasingly difficult for new businesses to compete for the audience’s attention span. Traditionally important markets operating in popular languages such as English, Spanish or Japanese, which have long been the focus of localization efforts, are quickly becoming saturate, meaning newcomers face significant challenges when trying to break in and find a consumer base. This is pushing some start-ups and smaller enterprises to look towards other, less obvious markets, where there is greater potential for growth.
They aren’t alone however. Large corporations with long-established user bases in major markets are feeling the pressure to continue their expansion amidst global economic decline. One way many companies are looking to do this is through the provision of more finely localized experiences to customers in markets outside of their traditional user bases. This means that, for both large and small enterprises, long tail language marketing is becoming increasingly important. But what is long tail language marketing? In order to understand that, it’s important to know what a long tail language is.
Alpha CRC has provided a more detailed look at long tail languages and the differences between them and minority languages here, but let’s have a look at a quick summary.
The term ‘long tail’ is used in business to refer to products that sell in small quantities. In the localization industry, ‘long tail’ is used to refer to languages that aren’t localized as often. There’s a key point to note here – labelling something a ‘long tail language’ doesn’t mean that only a few people speak it. It just means that fewer companies request localization for it. This means that a language counting hundreds of millions of native speakers could still be considered a long tail language.
For businesses looking for new markets, long tail languages present an exciting opportunity for growth. By definition, long tail languages aren’t as heavily requested, meaning that it’s easier for one company to stand out by offering consumers in those regions new, native experiences to interact with. Leveraging these languages in marketing materials will help enterprises rise above their competition and see greater revenues in new and emerging markets.
Alpha CRC offers clients consultation to help them identify potential new markets and create new localization strategies as part of its Enterprise Localization offerings. With teams of dedicated linguists around the world, it specializes in providing end-to-end localization services, providing a consistent port of call for clients looking to maintain consistency among all markets and over all media channels.
