HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN SPANISH AND ENGLISH DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

People often overlook the benefit of marketing in multiple languages, but it can greatly impact your success. Across all industries, audiences speak different languages, and sometimes multiple languages. Therefore, it is important to be able to speak to them in their native language. That’s where multilingual marketing comes in.

Multilingual, or bilingual, marketing means using multiple languages in your marketing efforts. There are many benefits of multilingual marketing. It can help your brand:

• Reach a larger audience. Just like making a profile on a new social media platform introduces you to a new audience, so does adding another language to the mix.
• Build trust. Speaking to your customers in their language helps create a deeper and more sincere connection.
• Establish a competitive edge. Are your competitors using multilingual marketing? What does your competition look like in a non-English speaking market? Marketing in multiple languages can put you a step ahead of your competitors and help translate your brand into another market without having to start from square one.

In this blog, we will be focusing on English and Spanish digital marketing strategies but these strategies can be applied to any language.

SPANISH AND ENGLISH SPEAKING DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES

When creating any digital marketing strategy, you have to look at the different channels you want to use, who you will speak to on those channels, how you will do that, and what you will speak about. Let’s start by looking at different marketing tactics.

SEO AND CONTENT MARKETING

The channel for this tactic is choosing how you will blog in multiple languages.

To create a digital marketing strategy for multilingual blogging ask yourself the following:

• How much time do I have?
• Should I translate my articles or write different articles for each language?
• Should my blogs be posted on the same site or different ones?
• How often should I post in each language?
• Will a translating plugin do the trick?

Before you can make a strategy, you need to understand what you are capable of doing. Blogging in two languages is a challenge and takes lots of effort and time. Once you know how much time you can put in you can assess the best way to blog.

If you have limited time, adding a translation plugin to your site may be the answer. If you have more time, maybe you can post two blogs per week, each in a different language.

EMAIL MARKETING

Creating an email automation or a newsletter in multiple languages is easier than blogging because you can segment your email list. When people sign up for your newsletter on your site, you can ask what language they speak, group them by language, and send them emails in their preferred language.

Of course, the challenge here is time management. The best way to approach bilingual email marketing is to translate your emails instead of writing completely different content to maximize your time.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Different social channels are popular in different parts of the world. For example, in Latin America, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter are the most popular platforms. When creating your strategy for social media, consider what platforms your audience engages with. If you notice that most of your Facebook audience is from primarily Spanish-speaking countries, post more Spanish content and resources there.

On top of researching your audience, you need to consider if you will post copy translations on each post or post different content in each language. That could look like posting Spanish content for your Spanish-speaking audience Mondays and Wednesdays and English content on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

ADVERTISING

Similar to email marketing, advertising is a little easier because you can target audiences based on language. Here’s how you do it:

• Create audiences based on the language they speak.
• Create the same ad copy in different languages.
• Create a landing page in the appropriate ad to send people to.

Keep in mind that things do not translate perfectly. If you are including a pun or something that relies on cultural knowledge, be careful translating the content so nothing gets lost in translation.

TAKEAWAYS

Making marketing campaigns in different languages takes extra time and effort because you essentially need to do twice the work. There are benefits though. Potential customers see that you are making an effort to support them as best as you can and bilingual marketing allows you to reach a larger audience.

Before you embark on a bilingual journey, ask yourself how much time you have and see if it is doable. The truth is, you may not have time. If that is the case or you are considering bilingual marketing but unsure, sign up for a 30-minute complimentary strategy session by clicking the button below! We’d love to talk all things marketing with you.