Scaling multilingual content marketing for business growth is challenging. Connecting with global audiences requires localized content that delivers a consistent experience across multiple languages, countries and cultures. Managing multilingual campaigns at scale often leads to inefficiencies and potential translation mistakes.
Keep reading to discover effective strategies to optimize and streamline your multilingual content marketing.
Complexities of scaling multilingual content marketing for business growth
For anyone doing business internationally, localizing content—such as ads, websites and social media—is a must. Your brand’s value depends on how customers perceive it, and delivering a personalized experience is key. While much online content is in English, the numbers speak for themselves:
- 76% of global consumers prefer shopping in their native language.
- 40% refuse to buy from websites in other languages.
- 75% are more likely to return if customer support is available in their language.
- Localized mobile campaigns convert 86% better than English-only campaigns.
Creating and localizing content for multiple languages isn’t a solo effort. Even with a skilled in-house team, you need experts—native speakers who can translate, edit and craft content tailored to each market. Whether managed in-house or through an agency, these specialists ensure translations go beyond words, capturing cultural nuances and brand messaging.
Translation software can help with efficiency, but it’s not a complete solution. Poor translations risk miscommunication, irrelevance and cultural disconnect. For example, an English sports idiom may not resonate when directly translated into German, or an overly casual tone could offend in markets where formality is the norm.
Taking each of your target markets’ languages and cultures into account, as well as conveying your message, brand and value proposition in a locally authentic way, is much more complicated than pressing a button. It’s necessary for effective multilingual content marketing but challenging to scale.
Managing this complexity often involves juggling multiple teams, outdated processes and manual updates, leading to wasted resources and increased errors.
Outdated or inconsistent localized content further compounds the problem. It’s important to regularly update content with new features, services or regional holidays to keep it relevant and accurate. Without streamlined systems, brands risk missing opportunities to connect with their audiences.
Effective strategies for scaling content marketing in multiple languages
Maintaining multilingual content marketing for business growth involves many moving parts and the work never stops. There’s always a new social media trend, local celebration or product your company is launching. However, there are ways to scale content effectively.
Here are some of the best strategies:
1. Know your audience
First, define how you’re going to separate your markets. Will you divide them by language or country? Will there be countries you group together?
Be honest about your resources when doing this. Do you have the budget for social media accounts in 15 languages? Are there smaller markets where English is fine for now?
Once you’ve defined your audiences, it’s time for some market research. Don’t just get the basic demographics in each region. It’s worth investing some time into this process to deeply understand cultural nuances, preferences and behaviors in your markets.
For example, if you already have a webpage that attracts different audiences, segment each market and track things like purchase behavior and content engagement.
2. Establish standards
For each language or country you have as a market, you need to define quality standards, style guidelines and terminology used. This way, your brand will stay consistent in its messaging while still adhering to different cultural norms.
Don’t forget to set standards for visual elements as well. Certain colors or even emojis can mean one thing in one culture and something completely different in another. For example, white can signify purity in one culture and mourning in another.
See also: Emoji localization: How to adapt to global markets
What kinds of images and symbols will you use? Can they be the same across all cultures, or do they have to change?
Pro tip: Kyler Canastra, VeraContent’s Head of Business Development, recommends building out a tone and style guide as a reference for your team. It should include things like whether you want to be approachable, use slang or be more formal. It should also include feedback from all previous projects from both the company and linguists so that future linguists can learn from earlier work.
“Having a clear style and tone guide helps your team work better. Each new linguist, even if it’s someone you haven’t worked with a lot, will be briefed more thoroughly and efficiently. This will make the content more consistent.” – Kyler Canastra, Head of Business Development at VeraContent
3. Develop your strategy
Managing multilingual content projects requires a hybrid approach: centralize KPIs and strategy while relying on local content creators.
This structure localizes your content while aligning it with your global brand, ensuring a consistent user experience and meeting both short- and long-term goals.
4. Choose the right tools
You need to work with the right tools to automate and streamline processes, reducing human error and saving you time and resources. Two important tools are a Content Management System (CMS) and a Translation Management System (TMS). Chances are you’re already using a CMS, but make sure it supports multilingual content creation, translation and publishing.
We advise integrating your CMS with TMS and Translation Memories (TMs). Integrating a TMS lets you manage translation and localization projects, workflows and resources more easily and effectively. All translation work becomes centralized, eliminating back-and-forth emailing to get different files.
Kyler recommends using a CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tool with a TM built in. The more you train it, the smarter it gets—it can recognize previously translated phrases and terms. You can also incorporate term bases, which allow you to define specific translations for certain words or phrases. These programmed terms will automatically appear for the translator, ensuring consistency from the start.
“Using translation memory not only helps with efficiency, but it saves money for clients, too. We charge by net words, so if we’ve translated parts of your new content before, those aren’t included in our net word count.” – Kyler Canastra
5. Assemble the best team
To make sure your multilingual content is properly localized and high-quality, you’ll need a strong talent pool of writers, editors and translators. Not only should they be great writers, but they need to know how to write for a wide audience, be able to follow style guides and adapt to your organization’s workflow.
“Hire people you trust or know to be experts in the language to review and edit all the content in a particular language. Their responsibility should be to make sure everything remains uniform.” – Kyler Canastra
Managing these teams is a huge undertaking, so don’t feel like you need to go it alone!
Many organizations hire outside translation agencies and localization experts. These agencies can ultimately save you a lot of time and money. You work with the agency to determine your goals and KPIs, and they hire and manage the best people through their extensive networks.
6. Test and optimize
As with all digital marketing, getting your content localized and uploaded is not the end of the process. Once your content is live, you need to monitor its performance. Is it meeting your marketing goals and KPIs? Use analytics tools to measure its efficacy and get user feedback in all your target markets. Is the content resonating?
As always, all of your content should be reviewed before going live, but you should also be proactive during your campaigns in identifying and fixing any issues, errors or gaps in the content. Plus, as needs and preferences constantly change, content must be updated and improved in all your markets.
Learn more about our multilingual content services at VeraContent.
Success story: Spotahome’s multilingual content marketing
Spotahome is an online housing rental platform based in Spain that has seen rapid expansion in the last few years. After launching in 11 European cities, the company went from operating only in English to communicating in Spanish, Italian, German, French and Portuguese.
The company was looking to target landlords in its operating markets to get them to list their properties on the platform. They approached VeraContent to create content based on topics like “How much is my property worth?” and “What can I do if my tenant stops paying rent?” They wanted website content on these topics in each of their operating languages.
As laws and regulations vary from country to country, each post had to be made from scratch in each language, not translated. Linguists recruited for the project had to be both experienced and knowledgeable about local rental laws and the current economic situations of each market. In total, 30 landing pages were created in just three weeks.
Kyler served as Project Manager on that project, acting as the liaison between the client and the linguists producing the content.
“I set deadlines, wrote briefings to ensure the articles were accessible to each linguist and created tone, style and SEO guidelines,” Kyler said. “We delivered everything in formats that allowed them to upload the content very easily to their sites, and a month and a half before the deadline so they had time to review everything and give us feedback.”
With so much content created, working with an agency like VeraContent was great for Spotahome because all their content in every language was in the same place. After launching their new content, traffic to the landlord-targeted areas of the website increased by 30%, and the website ranked higher in search engines for keywords in all six of its target languages.
Read our full Spotahome client story.
Let’s create multilingual content together!
Multilingual content creation is necessary if you want your business to succeed internationally. While it can be complicated and costly, it’s worth investing in to make your campaigns as effective as possible.
There are ways to make it easier, like creating a style guide, using CAT software or working with agencies to recruit talent and manage your projects. Whatever you do, always remember that audiences greatly appreciate and even expect content created for them and their culture.
Book a call with our team to find out if you qualify for a Free Content Consultation.
