Five ways to build translation into your successful internet marketing strategy

This article is updated regularly. It was last updated in February 2022!

Five ways to build translation into your successful internet marketing strategy
Five ways to build translation into your successful internet marketing strategy. Image source: Pixabay

Internet marketing has opened up so many opportunities to businesses that use it wisely, whether in one language or several. In this article, we’ll take a look at five ways that you can build translation into your internet marketing strategy in order to achieve impressive results.

What is meant by internet marketing? It describes the promotion of a brand, business, product, or service over the internet. This can be done through a range of tools, which can do everything from enhancing engagement levels to improving sales.

Internet marketing in translation

When you add the translation into the mix, internet marketing becomes particularly interesting. What is a business translator? It is a catchall definition for those specialists who provide translation services for corporate materials – anything from contracts to social media messages. Within the business translation sector, language professionals can specialize in a range of areas, such as legal and secure translation for contracts or marketing translation for social media campaigns.

If your business is looking to use translation as part of a successful internet marketing strategy, our first tip is to map out your social media needs. Facebook is certainly the king of the world of social networks, but it is far from being the only such site. VKontakte is Russian social media users’ platform of choice, while those in China prefer QZone. Understanding these differing global platforms will help businesses to translate effectively for them.

And on this topic, be sure to opt for a human translation service when it comes to social media marketing. Machine translation hasn’t yet replaced human translation, as the quality isn’t high enough, so don’t entrust your business messaging to a machine!

Localizing your internet marketing activities

Social media translation also means shaping the posts that you write to suit the different audiences that you’re reaching out to. A joke in one language may well not be funny in another and could even be offensive. Translation errors such as this have caught out many a company before now.

This is where localization comes in. Why is localization important? Because it shapes the translated content with the target audience in mind. Businesses looking to develop a successful internet marketing strategy should not be afraid to alter and adapt their materials, from social media posts to their entire website.

The key to this process is using a localization expert – someone who can provide insights into the target audience from a cultural perspective, as well as from a language one. This localization professional will be able to steer your business through the translation process while ensuring that your messaging doesn’t get lost along the way. They may even recommend transcreation, which is where marketing materials are almost entirely recreated, although their purpose/intended effect will remain the same.

Design and translation – the perfect pairing

Does your business use infographics and images with text on? If so, translating these for international audiences is likely to be about more than simply changing the words. Do the statistics in your infographic relate to the country that you’re translating them for or the audience that you were targeting in the original language? Are the people in your images representative of individuals from the culture in question?

Paying attention to details such as these is essential if you want to optimize the success of your internet marketing activities. Localize every element of the process, including the design side of things, in order to present a slick and polished marketing campaign that should resonate well with the target audience.

Translate marketing into fun

If you’re translating materials in order to engage audiences around the world, be sure to make the process more than just presenting the information. Seek to engage individuals and recruit brand advocates through innovation and fun in your language translation activities.

Competitions and giveaways can work well in this respect, helping you to expand your reach through human-powered translations that thoughtfully promote interest in your brand. Be sure to use a proficient translator when it comes to competition small print and perhaps even certified translated documents to ensure that none of the contest rules get lost in translation. Consult with local experts on the terms of any competitions as well. Laws around competitions and wagering vary hugely from country to country, so be careful not to fall foul of any strict anti-gambling legislation!

Build market research translation into your model

Our final recommendation is to remember your marketing basics and build market research into your internet marketing strategy. Whether you’re releasing a new product or service or simply AB testing to discover how effective different approaches can be, it’s a fundamental marketing activity to test the water before you commit to a new direction in a major way.

This is an area of work to explore in partnership with your translation agency. Professional translation services can not only deliver content in another language but translate audience engagement back to your original language. This is, clearly, key to market research. After all, there’s no point in asking questions if you don’t understand the answers.

Using professional translators and localization experts when developing your internet marketing campaign can significantly alter its chances of success. Taking a consultative approach means that you can incorporate insights and advice relating to your target audience from the outset of your strategy. The alternative approach – writing your strategy and then bringing in professional translation services at the end of the process – means missing out on the potential to incorporate plenty of important advice into your translation project.

Internet marketing can be hugely cost-effective when compared to traditional marketing activities but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still important to achieving value for money. By considering your translation needs at an early stage of the process, and using suitably skilled human translators to deliver you’re messaging appropriately in the target language, you will be able to maximize the impact of your marketing strategy and, as such, the return on investment that you achieve from it.