With both English and French having official federal status throughout Canada, it makes sense to advertise your products or services in both languages. Yet so many Canadian businesses lose out on potential business by advertising to a monolingual audience. Take Alberta as an example, with so much of the population speaking French at home, it makes sense to advertise to a French-speaking audience in addition to an English-speaking one.
Tapping into the potential and advertising to a multilingual audience helps your business grow its customer base, drive additional traffic to your website and physical location, and even generate more online sales or other conversions for your business. Even if the majority of your target audience are English speakers, it’s still worth adopting a multilingual marketing strategy. Here’s how.
How to Market to a Multilingual Audience
Research Popular Related Keywords in Other Languages
Marketing to a multilingual audience isn’t as simple as taking your most popular keywords and sticking them into Google Translate. It’s actually a tricky thing to master since you also need to consider that many things can’t be directly translated.
To add keywords in other languages, your best bet is to rely on a native speaker of the language you’re trying to advertise to or, better yet, a bilingual marketing agency. Doing so can help you get a better idea of the specific keywords you need to be targeting on your site, as well as reveal a few you may not necessarily have picked up on when marketing to an English-only audience.
Build Specific Buyer Personas for Audiences Who Speak Different Languages
With different languages come different cultures and heritages, and just because something works for English speakers, it doesn’t mean it will work for speakers of other languages. Search habits thought processes, and even expectations can vary from culture to culture, so be sure to build a specific buyer persona for the part of your audience that speaks a different language.
Conduct market research, find out what they care about the most, and appeal to it. If you have the data, take a look at what existing customers in your new target audience have in common, and create an ideal customer persona to gain a deeper understanding of how to effectively market your offer to this particular demographic.
Treat Your New Demographic Like a New Audience
When marketing to a multilingual audience, you practically need to treat each language as a separate audience. This means applying the same marketing principles as you would when advertising to a new audience. Research and understand your audience to find out how speakers of different languages use your website.
Look up similar businesses to yours already appealing to a multilingual audience and analyze the kind of imagery, design, and content they use. Use A/B split testing to experiment with different language pages, formats, and designs to find out which attracts the most users and produces the best results. In short, do the exact same things you would as if you were marketing to a brand new audience.
Multilingual Online Marketing in Calgary
If you’re based in a multilingual area such as Alberta, or practically any part of Canada, you’ll definitely want to experiment with tapping into the potential of a multilingual audience. Appealing to a multilingual audience ensures you’re making the most out of your local marketing and attracting as much business as you can. At the Three Marketers, we offer a wide variety of multilingual online marketing services, from website translation and optimization to pay-per-click campaign localization. Get in touch with us today to find out more about how marketing to a multilingual audience can help expand your visibility and grow your business online.
