Marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites are very necessary to enhance the influence of the brand in new markets. Internationalizing a business, every day more, means having an adequate website in the different languages of the target markets.
Without these websites it is useless to carry out the best marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites . It will be a wasteful investment since you will only be able to bring traffic to a digital space that is not prepared for that audience.
This is why good organization and proper design is so important. It is the way to ensure that marketing campaigns for multi-language websites have the result you are looking for. And that they reach the users who will understand what you tell them.
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An open window to the world
Web pages are your window to the world. Regardless of whether they are professionals, for a brand, a product or a service, they form the platform with which you will make yourself known to the world.
The point is that, in all probability, if they look for you, or in their case, if they find you and your website is not in different languages, there will be users who, probably, will not understand it. They will not understand your content. The reason is simple. The texts will be written in your mother tongue. And if you have videos, logically, they will be edited in the same language.
Do you want to reach more clients in other countries? The question is key if what you want is to grow outside your current borders. The answer is that you will need a well-profiled, multi-language website to be able to apply effective multi-language website marketing campaigns .
And having a multilanguage website in perfect magazine condition does not only mean having the contents translated. You should also take care of the rest of the elements that make up the interface of the website: from the menus to the instructions you offer with your information.
In addition, you have to think about translating the contents of the blog and all the messages you launch through social networks . All this content that you generate daily must be in the languages into which you have translated your page. Or, at least, in the language of the countries that make up the markets in which you want to stand out. It will be the only way to build successful marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites.
Factors to take care of in a multilanguage website
Creating a multilanguage website is not easy. But there are some aspects that are not too complicated and will help you to make your marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites effective.
- Language possibilities : Automatic translations are not recommended. Although the message can be understood by the context of the website itself, there are too many failures that give a very bad image of your company. Therefore, the ideal is to work with a professional translation service.
- Knowledge of traditions and culture : It is essential that the translation be adapted to the culture of each specific country. Because French in Canadian Quebec is not the same as French in Marseille. Or California English and Scottish High Lands English. And last but not least, the resulting translations must also be adapted to the recipient’s tradition and culture.
- Simple language selection : You have to have a button in a main place on your website so that the visitor can choose the language. This aspect is one of the least cared for. But if you do not want users to leave your website without visiting it, you should make it easy for them.
- Satisfactory use of the URL : The best way to optimize SEO is to use a separate URL for each country. Although this factor depends on the constant evolution of Google’s algorithms .
- Constant updating : You have to be careful to translate the new content into the different languages of the web. Because another common mistake is usually having content in a different language than the interface.
Guidelines for a multilingual marketing campaign
You want to expand to new markets. And, with it, reaching new potential clients that allow you to improve your business. Thus, you already have the objective. Now you need to make a difference in your marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites. And, for this, there are two basic guidelines that you must take into account:
- Adaptation : The tone used in each of your marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites should be different for each objective and each market. It is essential that you adapt to reflect the values that will work best when marketing your product or service in a specific geographic area.
- Multilanguage SEO . It is one of the keys that will make these marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites work. You must help different search engines like Google to understand what languages your pages are in. And which ones should be directed to certain users. Therefore, SEO must be adapted to each of the countries you want to target. Remember that, although several countries speak the same language, there are certain characteristic idioms for each of them. Not taking it into account will penalize you.
Essential keys to international SEO
As you have seen, in any internationalization strategy there are many factors to take into account: Is that public open to your offer? Do you need a local partner? Can you customize the offer? Do you have the necessary financial muscle?
The SEO factor has been added to all of them for a few years. That is, all the actions that will affect the organic positioning of your page on the Internet. Without a good SEO for each of the countries it will be more difficult for the internationalization process to be fruitful.
To reach potential customers scattered across different countries it is no longer useful to have the website translated into several languages. In addition, these are some of the factors that will facilitate the success of your marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites:
1.- The selection of search engines
First of all, you can make the mistake of assuming that Google is the most requested search engine. But this statement is true only on part of the planet.
Baidu is, for example, the most widely used search engine in China. And Yandex in Russia. Two great powers in which you may be tempted to expand your business. Therefore, it is important that you take into account other search engines when internationalizing.
2.- Web structure
The technical aspects, even being more cumbersome, are one of the elements that you should take the most care of when creating marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites. These are some of the ways you can identify the language on your website:
- Parameters in the URL . The language is displayed at the same URL. For example:
- miweb.com/index.php?lang=es
- miweb.com/index.php?lang=fr
- miweb.com/index.php?lang=it
- Use of directories for each language . It is about having a common website with a generic domain, such as a .com, but with idiomatic content organized by directories. This has the advantage that all pages benefit because they inherit a part of the popularity of the initial page. For example:
- miweb.com/es
- miweb.com/fr
- miweb.com/uk
- Subdomains . They are independent websites that are under a general superior domain. In this case each language will be considered a different website.
- Territorial domains . They are independent websites. For example:
- mywebsite.co.uk
- misitioweb.fr
- misitioweb.it
3.- The website map
It is essential to include the design of the site map in each language of your website. And, in the event that you finally choose to use subdomains, it is practically mandatory. You should always keep in mind that the site map helps Google to index the website.
4.- The hreflang tag
Hreflang is an HTML tag that helps search engines understand what audience your website is targeting. In addition, it also prevents Google from penalizing you for possible duplicate content. It has to be used when you work with languages in different directories.
Success stories of multilanguage websites
To finish understanding the marketing campaigns for multilanguage websites, it is interesting to analyze some success stories to learn from. Or in which to be inspired when planning marketing campaigns for multi language websites.
To Facebook
An essential aspect in designing a multilingual website is to take into account the basic characteristics of each language. For example, designing to display languages from right to left, something that can create some challenges .
Facebook has made its home page look perfect with a left-to-right layout in some languages and a right-to-left layout in Arabic, for example. And this includes everything from text to image placement, navigation or calls to action .
B.- AirBnB
The AirBnB example is interesting because it shows how using global templates can give consistency to your website. Thus, when a user enters your website, the experience is the same regardless of the language in which it is displayed.
Having a consistent and instantly recognizable design not only helps reinforce your brand, it will also help simplify future updates to your site . As well as to reduce headaches when the different language versions of your pages need UI or UX changes .
C.- École des Roches
For its part, L’ecole des Roches is a good example of a website in 4 languages: Russian, Chinese, English and French. Because access to each language is easy. It is located in the upper right corner. But, in addition, it shows the same page that is being displayed in the required language.
D.- Chinese International School
You should never forget the user. There’s no point in investing tons of resources and time to build a multi-language website if you don’t make it easy for them to switch from one language to another.
The China International School has a very clean way of allowing users to navigate between English and Mandarin. The main navigation and open burger menu are seamlessly responsive and include natively translated words and content seamlessly.
