7 steps to successful marketing content translation

Marketing content translation is crucial for multilingual brands looking to connect with markets around the world. To capture audiences and keep them engaged with your brand, you have to produce regular content that speaks out to them on a personal level – not only in their native language, but also with cultural and social relevance.

As a result, marketing content translation is more complex than simply producing content in one language and translating the same piece for multiple audiences. Instead, you have to be more strategic across the entire planning, production and translation process to engage every audience effectively.

The 7 steps of marketing content translation

Effective marketing content translation begins with planning and research to ensure your resources and budget are put to the best possible use. There is no point in creating multilingual content if it doesn’t contribute to revenue and profit.

Here are the seven steps you need to follow to create multilingual content that is a business asset:

1. Audience research: Each language audience has its own needs and interests that your content has to address.
2. Keyword research: You need to perform keyword research for every audience (in their language) – you cannot just translate keywords.
3. Content strategy localisation: Create a content strategy for each audience with universal content relevant to everyone and unique content to address the individual needs of each audience.
4. Content production: Create universal content for translation and unique content in the native language of each audience.
5. Content translation: Translate your universal content into every target language.
6. Promotion: Promote your content in each language on the most suitable platforms for each audience (these can vary across language and locations).
7. Expansion: Once your multilingual content strategy gains traction, expand into new media types, platforms and audiences – e.g. video content, TikTok marketing, expansion into Spanish-speaking nations etc.

As you can see, only one of those steps involves the act of translating content from one language into another. All of the other steps ensure that you are producing the right type of content in each language, promoting it in the right places and getting the best return on investment.

Make an impact in every target market

Any company can produce content in one language and hire professional translators to convert it into other languages, but what impact exactly is this going to have on your target audiences?

Imagine a Chinese company producing great content that hits all the right notes about current events in the country, regional interests of its customers in different areas and addressing the current socio-economic environment in the country. If this company, just simply translates all of this content for UK consumers, the relevance of these messages may be lost and parts of it may not even make any sense at all. Worse still, some of the messaging could even come across as culturally insensitive or offensive.

This is why it is important to do some initial research first on every target audience to find out what really matters to them, what kind of content they engage with and where they access it. In cases where audiences have shared interests, creating universal content and translating it into each language could be the way to go. However, creating unique content from scratch for each audience to address their individual interests would still be much needed.

If you need any help with building your multilingual content strategy or translating marketing content, feel free to fill out the form on our contact page with your project’s requirements and we’ll get back to you.