By Sarah-Claire Jordan
Inbound marketing is quickly becoming the chosen marketing strategy of many businesses. Compared to outdated outbound marketing practices, inbound marketing makes the consumer feel like they have chosen to view content related to a product or service, because they have. This gives the consumer a sense of control and power when it comes to choosing who to buy from, as they aren’t barraged with emails or advertisements pressuring them to choose one brand over another.
Luckily, enough companies have made the switch to inbound marketing that it has become a common topic of conversation for most business owners. One thing that gets left out of the conversation, however, is translation. Once you decide to take your marketing global, the one thing that allows inbound marketing to still work is translation. Sure, there are many people all over the world who are proficient in English, but if it isn’t their first language, they won’t connect as much with content in it. Creating content in different languages is essential to a successful global inbound marketing campaign.
We are in the day and age of Internet, and social media specifically. Now that so many consumers have access to the opinions of billions of others regarding different products and services, it seems almost old-fashioned to still be swayed by a TV commercial or advertisement in a magazine. People are more likely to trust other consumers rather than the companies themselves. If you take the time and effort to take your original inbound marketing content and translate it into different target languages, people who form your target market will have the chance to share this content, allowing it to become part of the bigger social media conversation.
Inbound marketing is not confined to the U.S., either; countries all over the world have jumped on the idea and begun creating their own campaigns. There is already stiff competition out there, wherever it is you plan to market, so translation and localization of this content is critical. Consumers in your target markets are already used to inbound marketing by now, and have come to expect it from any company, no matter where they may be from. Offering up poorly translated or localized content means your marketing strategy won’t even be equal to that of local brands. How can you expect to compete with them if your content isn’t even on their level?
Translation and global inbound marketing have to go hand-in-hand. If you think about it, content is what drives inbound marketing in general. Blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and social media marketing, among other things, are driven exclusively by their content. When you take that same strategy and try to apply it on a global scale, it doesn’t quite work without translation and localization. Every country is different, and has its own expectations in terms of content. To completely ignore the importance of translation here is to not truly understand how global marketing of any kind works.