Multilingual Marketing and Design - Creative Word

As of June 2019, the internet penetration rate for the whole world was sitting at 57.3%. This means multilingual digital marketing and design are vital for every company wishing to make their mark on a global scale.

When marketing and selling your product, or service, to a global audience, you’ll need to understand their culture, language, preferred marketing methods, popular social media sites, and much more.

By choosing to work with a Language Service Provider (LSP), on your global marketing and design content, you’ll get the benefit of linguistic experts, who are also talented designers, who understand your audience’s cultural expectations.

They will understand what colours should be used for packaging, how a shopping catalogue should be set out, which advertising avenue to use for best results, and how to structure aesthetically pleasing websites.

They can localise and design your website, App, advertising campaign, brochures, packaging, or reports in order to give you the best chance for success in a global marketplace.

So, if you are considering the next steps for your company, and have decided to go global, the following tips will help you ensure your multilingual marketing and design is top notch!

Translating Content isn’t Enough

Translation will give you a good head-start on appealing to a global audience – they’ll understand your products or service, be able to read your marketing materials, and interact with some customer services.

However, they might find some images offensive, there may be glitches with App software, they won’t be able to order in their own currency, or the formatting of dates and times may be wrong.

This is because translation does not account for regional changes such as dialect, time and date formats, currencies, or preferred social media channels.

The only way to account for all these variances is by using localisation services.

Localisation will adapt, translate, or transcreate content, so that it fits with a specific audience, ensuring that all your content and marketing designs are tailored to the local audiences’ expectations and requirements., taking account of cultural variance and preferences.

Localisation can also help with developing a brand message and generating brand trust.

 

Develop Brand Image

Developing an effective global marketing and design strategy may also mean altering aspects of your brand image, message, logo or tag line.
This is because certain elements don’t always ‘translate’ well.

Features such as, idioms, humour, colour, tone of voice, and so on, may need altering, or localising, for new audiences and cultures.
Many big brand names have found this out after initial explorations into overseas markets, so we can learn from their endeavours!

For instance, MacDonalds, who have kept their famous ‘M’ logo around the world, have tweaked their products to suit local markets by introducing items such as, the McArabia Pita, in Middle Eastern MacDonalds, which comes with chicken or beef patties and has no pork due to a predominantly Muslim client base.

Knowing your target market is vital if you are going to get this right, so choosing a language service provider for your design, marketing and localisation needs makes sense – they’re experts in many different languages and cultures, so they’ll instinctively know what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t work!

 

Content Management

Managing multilingual websites, social media pages, email advertising, and other digital marketing, across multiple languages, cultures, and platforms, can feel a little like balancing spinning pates on long poles – lots of running in circles, with the need for a long reach.

However, outsourcing your content management, to a professional language service provider, can offer you peace of mind (you know the language, perspective, and cultural aspects will be accurate), save you time (lots of time would otherwise be spent researching and developing strategies), and can save you money (no need to hire local media managers or do things twice because it wasn’t right the first time).

If you would like to speak to a member of the Creative Word about how we can help with design and multilingual marketing, please contact us.