By Sarah-Claire Jordan
Inbound marketing sounds more complicated than it is. It just means marketing that doesn’t require the marketer to go out and find customers. The idea is to entice new customers to visit your site or check out your product on their own. Since the internet has made it so much easier to reach people all over the world, more and more marketers are thinking about global inbound marketing, where they try to attract customers who probably don’t speak the same language as them, let alone live in the same kind of culture.
So, how can you take advantage of the huge global market out there? First, start by getting together a translation team or hiring a translation service. Why? Here are three reasons:
1. Inbound marketing on a global scale isn’t feasible without translation
This is probably quite obvious, but necessary to point out anyway. However, since English is becoming more and more of a global language, some companies think they don’t need to translate their pages or create any content in the native languages of their prospective clients. Even though they may understand English perfectly, someone who has a native language other than English will connect and respond more to content in their native language.
2. Social media conversations aren’t all in English
With the boom of social network sites from Twitter to Instagram, more and more people find out about companies from reading about them on a friend or celebrity’s page. If you buckle down and work on creating content to be shared this way in different languages, you can win over a lot more customers than if you stuck with your regular campaign in only English. People tend to trust what their friends and fans post on different sites rather than advertisements, so if you can get some people talking about your product or service, you are definitely going to drum up some more business.
3. Inbound marketing is already being used globally
That’s right, the U.S. is certainly not the first or only country to use this method of marketing. Everywhere from Europe to Asia, you will find companies that are using the same techniques that you are, but in their native languages. This means they already have an advantage over your company, and the best way to deal with this is to create inbound marketing content in different languages as soon as possible. Once you do this, you will see just how much of an impact translation can have on your business.
There is more to global inbound marketing than just translation, but it plays such a huge role in it that it is really where you should start in terms of creating a new global campaign. Other localization details like culturally-appropriate web page layout, color schemes, and humor are definitely things to keep in mind, but the most important thing is that your message is understood.
For an overview of our translation expertise, visit our website translation and localization page.