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How to advertise your business to a multilingual audience

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Are you always looking for ways to get your business in front of more potential customers? If so, a translation services company can help. By expanding your business’ promotional offerings into a new market, you can gain a whole new group of potential customers who can help your business succeed.

To do so, you’ll need the best marketing materials. Many translation companies specialize in working with marketing content. You simply need to find marketing translators to help capture foreign audiences’ attention in a way that speaks to the local demographics and culture in a cost-effective way. Below we’ll explore some marketing ideas to help you expand your business in a new region.

Using a translation services company for a multilingual website

The most direct way to get your business into a new market is to design a website in that new language, using a translation company that offers a range of services, including specialist marketing and website expertise. Websites offer a direct way to reach potential customers around the world without having to go through the hassle of setting up physical locations overseas. Even if you decide to expand your premises overseas, a website will still often be a customer’s first experience with your company.

Many customers often look at a company’s website to do basic research or compare it to other brands. In fact, 92% of consumers who visit a retailer’s website for the first time are not there to buy. 45% are searching for a product or service, 25% are in a comparison stage and 10% are just looking for store details. What all this means is that a website is often where consumers turn for their initial research, so your website has to connect with consumers to make sure you capture them at this stage of the funnel.

A translation services company that focuses on marketing can help you turn curious searchers into sales in a new market. The best marketing translation company not only translates the text so that it captures the original tone and message, while feeling native, but it also can update all parts of the website so that it looks appealing to the local market.

The best translation company will know how certain regions prefer their websites laid out, as well. For instance, in Asian markets, consumers tend to like websites that highlight products upfront, while Western markets tend to favor sleeker layouts with the background of the company featured.

A good translation company can also take care of the little details, like updating currency symbols, phone numbers and addresses. It could also make sure your website fits with local regulations, like privacy or cookie notifications. It can also fit the website layout around the translated text, and make sure nothing is culturally offensive.

Translation companies and traditional advertising

If you’re wondering how to advertise your business, it can be common to bypass more traditional forms of advertising. However, 82% of people still trust print ads. This can vary by region, but it still pays to see what traditional advertising like print ads, TV ads, radio spots and direct mail can do for you.

Translation companies often give the same treatment to print ads that they do websites. They will update all graphics to fit the local market. They will translate the text in a way that keeps the core of the message intact, while appealing to local audiences in terms of the tone of the communication. They might make sure the ad fits local regulations, like certain disclosure requirements. Further, they will make sure all those small, easy-to-miss details are updated, like currency symbols.

How a translation services company can help with multilingual marketing channels

While looking at how to expand overseas, you should also look at creating a multilingual marketing strategy. This can help you translate marketing content into the new language, while keeping the core messaging and brand image intact. It also provides a multilevel approach that helps you tackle all parts of your marketing channels, like your website, social media sites, advertising, blog or any other marketing channels you use. It can also help define which marketing channels make sense in each region. For instance, in China, people use the social media site Renren instead of Facebook.

The best translation company can even help you with your multilingual marketing strategy. It can provide you with insights into which types of advertising perform in which market, how to interact with local demographics based on consumer habits, help you keep your message consistent across all advertising channels and make sure your message is not offending local cultures, no matter the outlet or platform.

Another key part of a multilingual marketing strategy is looking at which target groups or regions your unique business ideas might sell best through. You might look at POS data, study data from business budgeting software, conduct consumer surveys, analyze trending topics on social media and look at other sales data from the region. An international translation company can help you make sense of these foreign data sources and help your product land well in the most appropriate markets.

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