What kind of business needs International Marketing – Multilingual Marketing?
Import & Export Companies
Professionals in the Art field
Logistic Companies
Real Estate – Real Estate Companies and Agents;
Tourism – Tourism Departments, Travel Agencies and Agents, Touristic Attractions, Hotels, Resorts, etc
Trade Companies
Industries looking for export their products
Etc, etc, etc
Why International Marketing?
To make your web marketing to be as successful as possible in overseas markets, you need to think about properly localising your websites for the regions you are targeting.
There are several issues to consider: translation, country-specific domains and hosting, geolocation and SEO.
International Marketing – Multilingual Marketing
There are over 6,000 languages spoken across the globe. However,
many of these are spoken only in small pockets in localized regions.
Indeed, 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by only 4% of the world’s
population, while 90% lack any real representation on the Internet.
In order to remain competitive and attract new overseas customers, companies should make it possible for people to interact with them in a language they feel comfortable with;
More and more businesses are recognising that marketing campaigns, written in the language of the target client, are strategic to successful overseas development. For example, a simple five-language web site is capable of placing your products in front of an additional 412 million internet users; creating thousands of extra visitors to your site, leading to a potential four fold increase in generated income.
Multilingual online marketing works, simply because people will always use their native language first when searching the internet. How many potential sales are you missing out on each day?
Keyword translation
On that subject, though, you should not rely on machine translation, or even a dictionary, for your keyword translation. You know how important your keywords are to your SEO and PPC campaigns, so you need to be sure that your foreign language keywords are accurate and relevant. The only way to be sure is to work with a professional translator to develop a list of keywords in other languages. Don’t be tempted to use direct dictionary translations, as you could end up targeting the wrong keywords, meaning your website would languish in the outer reaches of the internet, rather than at the top of the page results – the most popular local keyword may be a term in the local language, a colloquialism, or an appropriation from English or another language.
Geolocation
Having gone to the trouble of translating your content into different languages, you want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to find the version of the site in their own language. The best way to achieve this is to automatically channel your visitors to the page which is localised for their language. Geolocation is the process of identifying a user’s location based on their IP address. There are a number of companies that provide IP address databases (e.g. IP2Location and Digital Envoy), which enable you to add the geolocation functionality to your website. Using one of these services combined with some fairly straightforward scripting will allow your visitors to be seamlessly redirected to the correct language.
Gelocation works well for most visitors, but some may be accessing the internet via a proxy server which is not located in their own country, so you also need to provide a manual method for users to access their language of choice. This simply involves adding links pointing to the various language versions of your pages. Try to avoid using country flag icons for the links because many languages are spoken in more than one country. It’s best just to have text links, which could be in a drop-down menu in the website header.
Country-specific domains
To achieve high rankings in local search engines, you need to register a domain name for each country you are targeting. For example, registering www.yourcompany.de will help you to get ranked in the German version of Google. You also need to host your country-specific domains on servers within the target country. Google operates localised versions in many countries around the world, so it’s important to do all you can to achieve good rankings.
Link building
You should also work on building links from sites within your target country. For example, if you have a .de domain, your rankings in local search engines will be improved by getting backlinks from other .de domains. The methods for building backlinks in foreign markets are the same as the ones you use on your English websites, but you may need the services of a translator for things like article marketing and guest posting on blogs. There may also be local directories which it might be worth submitting your website to. As with any web directory you are considering submitting to, do some research and make sure it is well-established and has a reasonable amount of traffic