Modern brands are required to produce a large amount of multimedia content just to get themselves seen. From social media content and video ads to blog posts and print media, today’s businesses need to be visible across more channels than ever.
Content production is challenging for any business, but multilingual brands have a particularly demanding workload in terms of delivering content to multiple audiences across each channel. To meet their content quota, multilingual brands depend on a number of multimedia language services to make production manageable.
5 essential multilingual services
Now, the phrase “essential” means something different from one business to the next. For example, a lot of eCommerce brands produce all of their content online, while others reinforce their digital footprint with more traditional channels like TV ads. Meanwhile, many companies in more established industries like medicine, law and financial services are still working to integrate digital content into their existing marketing strategies.
With this in mind, we’ve narrowed our list of essential multimedia services into a shortlist of five that covers the essential bases:
- Website translation & localisation: Multilingual websites need accurate translation and your site also needs to be structured in the right way to maintain and deliver content to each audience.
- Video translation: From TV ads to social media content, video is crucial for modern marketing strategies and, for multilingual brands, this requires specialist video translation.
- Social media translation: Managing multilingual social media accounts is tricky. Aside from social media translation, you need to make sure you’re active on the right platforms for each target audience and have a management strategy that means they only see content in their own language (e.g. a separate Facebook page for each target language).
- Multilingual SEO: Optimising a multilingual website for search is far more technical than a single-language site and you’re going to need specialist multilingual SEO services for this.
- Desktop publishing services (DTP): This is how you translate digital and print files (like posters, presentations, magazines, etc.) without breaking the visual design due to issues like text expansion.
Most businesses are going to need more than five types of multimedia services but those are the ones every modern business is going to need in the digital age. For example, a brand producing a lot of video content may also need specialist localisation and transcreation services, in addition to the usual subtitling and/or voice over translation solution. The list above will cover the multimedia essentials for brands targeting multilingual audiences and you can speak to a language service agency for advice on what else you’ll need.
Delivering content where it’s most effective
Translation is the first service that often comes to mind when people think of multilingual marketing. However, producing content is only one half of the process; you also need to make sure it’s delivered in the right place. This means establishing which platforms are most important to your target audiences – for example, which social media platforms they use – and which types of content are most suitable.
Likewise, some target audiences might need an entirely different type of content to react in the way you’re looking for. While the bulk of your marketing strategy might involve email marketing in some markets, you may need to focus more on social media, paid advertising or offline channels in other markets.
This is why the first stage of multilingual marketing should always be in-depth market/audience research, which will tell you precisely which multimedia services you need. In the meantime, if you need any help with this, please do not hesitate to contact us.