A recent sur­vey shows brands are mar­ket­ing to cus­tomers out­side the U.S. in a lan­guage not native to their coun­try. Instead, brands con­tin­ue to mar­ket to their glob­al cus­tomer base in Eng­lish only. Cre­at­ing con­tent for con­sumers in their own lan­guage great­ly increas­es the odds they’ll buy from you. Should trans­la­tion be a pri­or­i­ty for your brand?

How many of your cus­tomers speak a lan­guage oth­er than Eng­lish? How many of them don’t speak Eng­lish at all? Are you mar­ket­ing to this sub­set in a lan­guage they can under­stand?

These are some of the ques­tions that Smartling, a trans­la­tion man­age­ment com­pa­ny, sought to find answers and solu­tions to in the study, “Trans­late or Pay the Price: Over­looked Mar­ket­ing Oppor­tu­ni­ties for Glob­al Busi­ness­es.”

In the sur­vey of 160 mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als from “emerg­ing” brands in the U.S., Smartling found that 22 per­cent said 21 per­cent to 50 per­cent of their cus­tomer base came from out­side the U.S., while 41 per­cent said up to 20 per­cent came from out­side the States.

How­ev­er, the major­i­ty – 70 per­cent – report­ed that even though they mar­ket­ed to coun­tries out­side the U.S., it was in Eng­lish only. Smartling called this shock­ing.

From the report:

“Com­pa­nies that fail to deliv­er mul­ti­lin­gual con­tent may be miss­ing out on tremen­dous buy­ing pow­er. Com­pa­nies that com­mu­ni­cate with mul­ti­lin­gual audi­ences in Eng­lish only risk dri­ving cus­tomers and prospects to com­peti­tors.”

Why Brands Should Speak Their Customer’s Language

With all the care and strat­e­gy that goes into cre­at­ing Eng­lish-lan­guage con­tent for a brand’s mar­ket­ing, to have it fall on deaf ears in the tar­get mar­ket seems wild­ly inef­fi­cient.

In anoth­er study from 2012 by the Com­mon Sense Advi­so­ry, it found that 72 per­cent of con­sumers said they were more like­ly to buy a prod­uct with infor­ma­tion in their own lan­guage.

Seems like a pret­ty obvi­ous point, but are brands ignor­ing it?

Actu­al­ly, it’s more a case of a lack of bud­get for our mul­ti­lin­gual world, accord­ing to the Smartling report. Which is odd, con­sid­er­ing:

• Inter­net usage in all parts of the world is grow­ing: Those in remote parts of the world are gain­ing Inter­net access at an alarm­ing speed – and these could be your next cus­tomers. The report cites that the num­ber of Inter­net users in Africa, for exam­ple, went from 18 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion in 2013 to 38 per­cent in 2014.
• Domes­tic brands also have oth­er lan­guages to con­sid­er: In the U.S., Span­ish is a preva­lent lan­guage; in fact, the report cites 53 mil­lion peo­ple in the U.S. are native Span­ish speak­ers. And 78 per­cent use the Inter­net as their main infor­ma­tion source, accord­ing to Smartling. Does your brand have a His­pan­ic cus­tomer base?

Multilanguage Marketing: Challenges & Tips

Mar­ket­ing to mul­ti­ple lan­guages may not be as easy as sim­ply gar­ner­ing bud­get, espe­cial­ly with the tech­ni­cal imple­men­ta­tion involved with a brand’s web­site con­tent.

Bill Hunt, pres­i­dent of Back Azimuth Con­sult­ing, said the ques­tion of bud­get is often a “cart before the horse” sit­u­a­tion when talk­ing about local­iza­tion mar­ket­ing.

“While local­iza­tion for your tar­get mar­kets is the opti­mal way to tar­get non-Eng­lish mar­kets, com­pa­nies may not have the bud­get to do so. There is oppor­tu­ni­ty, but you can­not tar­get it until you have the local­ized ver­sion, and you can­not local­ize until you can prove there is mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

Hunt rec­om­mend­ed first start­ing by using sim­ple Eng­lish in a brand’s approach to mar­ket­ing to a glob­al audi­ence, and even try­ing to under­stand “how peo­ple from around the world might search for that prod­uct” online.

“Many com­pa­nies do very well with just an Eng­lish site if they make sure they are answer­ing the ques­tions of the con­sumer. I have seen sites in 40 lan­guages that fail to do that. So ensure you can make it easy for any­one to do busi­ness with you first, then focus on gain­ing addi­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty with local­iza­tion.”

Hunt adds that in the case of a brand’s Span­ish-speak­ing audi­ence, sim­ply mar­ket­ing to one His­pan­ic audi­ence isn’t gran­u­lar enough.

“In the case of Span­ish, where there are 22 coun­tries with Span­ish as the offi­cial lan­guage, it is hard for most busi­ness to accom­mo­date all of the vari­a­tions,” Hunt said. “What I sug­gest is start with mar­kets that use com­mon phras­es and devel­op for them.”

How­ev­er, huge glob­al cam­paigns can be extreme­ly com­plex, espe­cial­ly in Chi­na, accord­ing to Michael Bon­fils, man­ag­ing part­ner at Inter­na­tion­al Media Man­age­ment. For exam­ple, he point­ed out the dif­fi­cul­ties brands face mar­ket­ing in Chi­na.

“The Chi­nese mar­ket doesn’t trust sites enough to buy direct­ly from them, unless you use a shop­ping por­tal, like Taobao or tMall,” Bon­fils said. “For Intel, we have to get 15 dialect vari­a­tions of one key­word. When you have 1,000 key­words, that turns into 15,000 very quick­ly. Not only that, the cost to oper­ate in Chi­na and the amount of red tape and gov­ern­men­tal autho­riza­tions one needs to go through is immense and can take a year to process.”

This study by Smartling is anoth­er reminder that brands can iden­ti­fy and have an impact on moments in the lives of non-Eng­lish speak­ing con­sumers with per­sua­sive, rel­e­vant mes­sag­ing, thus expand­ing their glob­al reach to bring ideas, prod­ucts, and ser­vices to peo­ple around the world.