Effectively engaging bilingual audiences is a challenge for many businesses. Reaching those who will benefit from your product or service without being perceived as pandering is always a delicate line to walk. Fortun
ately, there are marketing translation services that can make your job easier.
If you aren’t considering creating bilingual marketing content, you are simply leaving money on the table. In the US alone, the number of people who speak a language besides English has more than doubled since 1980. Next to English, Spanish is the most common non-English language spoken in the US. In fact, according to the most recent census, 37.5 million Spanish-speakers live in the US, representing an increase of 210% since 1980.
But developing a marketing strategy to build a bilingual audience is complicated and requires serious planning. Gather your marketing team; find a strategy that will help you meet your marketing goals; and then find the marketing translation services that will support your strategy. Continue reading for some recommendations and ideas to help get the process started.
How to Engage Bilingual Audiences
Before you develop your specific marketing strategy, it’s important to reassess your company’s marketing goals. Creating bilingual marketing is not as easy as dubbing your videos or even adding subtitles. Bilingualism generally comes with biculturalism, which means you will need a separate marketing strategy to grow your audience.
Whether you want to increase awareness about a product offering, increase social media engagement, or educate your audience about new technology, each goal requires a clear strategy. It’s important to analyze data that are relevant to your industry, market, and services you offer.
Consider the following as you build an effective bilingual marketing strategy. Keep in mind that while many of the following recommendations and examples are based on Spanish speaking bilingual audiences, they can easily be adapted for other non-English speaking communities:
1. Identify Your Audience
It should be obvious, but not all non-English speaking populations in the United States are homogenous. For instance, US Hispanic and Latino audiences represent many different countries of origin, include both US natives and immigrant residents, and include communities with different degrees of assimilation, socio-economic status, and educational backgrounds.
To engage the bilingual audience you have your eye on, you’ll need to know more than simply what languages they speak.
- Develop an understanding of the composition of the non-native speaking populations within your bilingual audience.
- Create personas or customer profiles around these demographics.
- Be very focused and specific about who you are hoping to engage.
- Use A/B testing and prototypes to figure out what works (get feedback from real clients!).
2. Do Your Homework
Rather than insisting on reinventing the wheel, take a look at what other companies and institutions are doing to communicate with their bilingual audiences. What marketing translation services do your competitors use? Could you be a leader in your industry if you went beyond translations and added localization to your marketing toolbox?
If it makes sense for your company, establish an institutional culture around reaching out to local community members to create programming or events around your target demographic.
- Start by building relationships, establishing trust, and seeking out community partnerships.
- Encourage word-of-mouth marketing. Potential customers are more likely to be engaged when individuals from their own communities endorse your brand.
- Make all advertising and promotional materials available both in Spanish and in English.
- Utilize marketing translation services not only to translate the text, but also to offer suggestions for visual, cultural, and other localization changes that will engage your target market.
- Partner with Spanish-language radio, TV, and other traditional media outlets.
Now that you know your audience well and have done some homework, let’s talk strategy:
Bilingual Strategies for Digital Advertising
According to Google, over 30% of digital marketing and advertising in the US is consumed by users who are bilingual. In addition, bilingual users tend to be technology leaders. They are more likely than monolingual users to be early adopters of new devices and more likely to upgrade their mobile phones. So if your company relies on digital advertising and does any amount of online sales, especially if you’re in the tech industry, it probably makes sense to develop a bilingual strategy.
However, if your website content doesn’t translate seamlessly or your products or services aren’t yet offered in the target language, you may not want to risk resources creating entire marketing campaigns around your bilingual audience. You will want to address these issues before finding reliable experts to help with marketing translation services.
On the other hand, if you’re ready to build that audience and you use Google AdWords, one easy change you can make (within the next 10 minutes!) is to adjust your language targeting to include Spanish for any of your English-only campaigns. Yes, this sounds like taking the easy route and it is certainly not a replacement for creating a marketing strategy around engaging a bilingual audience. But in some cases, the easy route is the best route.
Bilingual Strategies for Social Media Marketing
If your company is considering developing bilingual social media marketing campaigns, the good news is that you’re ahead of the curve. The challenge is social media trends move much more quickly than more traditional marketing channels. So it makes sense to have a team dedicated to researching and building your bilingual social media presence.
Your marketing campaigns should mimic the mood of your target demographic without losing the brand’s voice altogether and that balance takes an expert in both market research and in the culture you want to engage. Remember that we all engage in social media in order to feel connected with individuals and brands.
Although many things will have to change about your social media strategy, hashtags are a mixed bag. It’s okay to mix and match languages with a bilingual audience. Keep a close eye on Twitter and you’ll see Spanish Tweets with English hashtags and vice versa. Because social media is such a dynamic and fast-paced environment, there is often not enough time for trendy hashtags to transmute into Spanish and still remain trendy.
The bottomline?
Keeping up with the rapidly changing marketing world is a huge challenge for any company. If you’re feeling overwhelmed just thinking about adding in a whole new marketing strategy around growing your bilingual audience, it may be comforting to know that even making a few tweaks to your current marketing strategy can make a big difference.
Whatever strategy you choose, there’s one big point to bear in mind: translating marketing materials is different from translating any other type of technical, legal, medical, or scientific documents. When choosing marketing translation services, make sure that your experts have the right skills.
Alpha Omega Translations understands that quality marketing translation services require a very particular set of skills. Our translators are experienced in expressing thoughts, emotions, and values that fit your target bilingual audience.
Do you have further questions about creating a bilingual marketing strategy? Are you looking for other translations services? Take a look at AOT’s services page for more information.