The fact that the global economy has reached a somewhat stagnant state of late shouldn’t mean that businesses’ growth initiatives should stutter to a standstill too.
The need to proactively seek out new opportunities is as important as ever – if not more so – as companies must react to the economic conditions and find fresh ways of targeting new customers.
One way of doing this is through extending your scope beyond the English-speaking markets and targeting the 75% of the world that speak no English at all. This may seem like a daunting prospect, but tapping into new or emerging markets isn’t as tricky as it first seems…all that’s needed in the first instance is a foreign language website and a little online marketing savvy.
Online marketing is probably one of the most effective tools available to modern day business. It connects company with customer and facilitates the building of mutually beneficial relationships between the retailers and consumers of the world.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is now among the fastest growing marketing strategies, with 64% of European marketers indicating that they planned to increase their SEO spend in 2009. However, optimising a company’s domestic English-language website is one thing – launching a fully-optimised foreign language website is quite another.
A myriad of cultural and linguistic intricacies face those seeking to grow abroad. In the European Union (EU) there are 23 official languages spoken in the 27 member states. Although English is the most widely spoken, German has the most native speakers in the EU with almost 20%, followed closely by English, Italian and French.
Understanding the nuances within languages is crucial to the translation/localisation process. For example, the differences between French and German are obvious. But the differences between French in France and French in Switzerland or Belgium aren’t that obvious.
In France, déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Switzerland and Belgium it means ‘breakfast’. Additionally, dîner is ‘evening meal’ in France, but in Swiss and Belgian French the word is souper.
There are many such differences between the French dialects in France, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium which help to highlight the importance of properly localising your services for each specific target market. The same can also be said for German (Germany)/Swiss German, Portuguese (Portugal)/Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish (Spain)/Latin American Spanish and, closer to home, US/UK English.
Assuming you intend to adopt a fully localised marketing strategy, what are the practicalities involved in setting up a foreign language website?
First of all, you must establish a need for your service in a particular country. A good way of doing this is to check out the local competition. If there are similar organisations there already, that’s a good sign, as it demonstrates a genuine demand. However, be wary of too much competition, as a saturated marketplace can be difficult to penetrate.
SEO is central to any domestic online marketing campaign, and international markets are no different. You may already rank highly on Google for certain key search terms on Google UK, such as ‘Home loans’ or ‘accounting services’. However, when you have your website translated for your target market, it’s important NOT to translate the keywords directly: the correct dictionary translation may not be what people use to search for their product or service locally…they might use abbreviations, colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing.
So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimised. Google has country-specific versions of its keyword tool and is an invaluable means of identifying the correct key search terms in your desired market.
These key phrases should then be incorporated into a professionally translated website to organically optimise its position in search engines.
Another point worth mentioning is that it’s actually possible to rise quicker in foreign search engine rankings, simply because the competition for key search terms is much less than on the English language internet.
And there you have it. A multilingual marketing and localisation strategy should underpin any attempt to enter new or emerging markets, with SEO playing a central role.
About Lingo24
Lingo24 is a global translation services provider that specialises in website localisation. It has over 100 employees based in the UK, Panama, Romania, China and New Zealand, and a network of 4,000 translators. Its projected turnover for 2009 is £3.7m.
Speedie Notes.
This was not a paid for article but one we felt worthy of inclusion. As well as foreign language markets overseas, there are other smaller pockets of foreign language opportunities within the UK. Do you need finance or insurance content translated into Polish or German, or Japanese?
