Multilingual Marketing

Multilingual Marketing: Why You Should Advertise in Multiple Languages

There are over seven billion people on the blue and green planet that we call Earth. These people live across the globe in a variety of cultures speaking many languages – only one of which is English. English isn’t even the most spoken language on Earth; it’s the third after Mandarin and Spanish. Even though it’s high up on the list of commonly spoken languages, it is nowhere close to being spoken by the majority of Earth’s people. In fact, only 5.52% of the population actually speaks it. Why, then, should you only advertise in it?

Big Names

If you keep up with the affairs of major companies, you might be aware that many of them market their services and products in many languages. Big name companies that do this include McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. If they are doing it, it might tip you off that it is something you should look in to.

Advertising on the Internet

Many people use the internet in this day and age, and so there are many companies that advertise through it. Of the millions that surfed the web in 2010, about 550 million of them spoke English. This is great because it means that, if you advertise in English, you can reach many people. Unfortunately, you’re missing out because 1.5 billion people used the Internet that year and spoke other languages. Of these people, about 450 million of them spoke Chinese.

Expand Your Clientele

Seeing those numbers might be a shock to you. You could be growing your clientele significantly by simply advertising in multiple languages. If people see your ad and notice that it is in their language, they’ll pay more attention to it because they can read it. If you offer quality translations of your website, then they’ll be interested in using your products or services. However, most people are likely to ignore content that they can’t read and they’ll simply find a way to meet their needs somewhere else.

Be Professional

Not only will appealing to international markets gain customers that speak foreign languages, it will help you attract English speakers as well. When you’re a customer, if you see that a company offers content in another language, what does that make you think? It will likely make it seem that the company is professional and worth your time. If you think that, won’t other people think that about your business if they see that you advertise in multiple languages?

Multilingual Advertising

Advertising in multiple languages will boost your business and help you gain a reputation of being professional. You’ll be able to fully utilize the internet’s gift of bringing people around the world together. Consider trying multilingual advertising and get started on your journey into the many diverse markets of the world.

References

CMO.com: http://www.cmo.com/content/cmo-com/home/articles/2011/10/31/multilingual-marketing-is-migliore.html
ClickZ: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2282173/how-to-develop-a-multilingual-content-marketing-strategy
Lionbridge: http://blog.lionbridge.com/marketing/2013/04/04/expand-your-website-content-to-multilingual-markets/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
Internet World Stats: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm