Marketers, SEOs and other stakeholders in online marketing are always looking for new means and ways of boosting their performance. Although new tricks of the trade are always evolving, there is one that I feel is not being exploited enough – using language translation to re-package and promote content.

Recent statistics clearly show that content marketing in all its forms is here to stay, for the short to mid-term anyway.

Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that an amazing 93% of B2B organizations rely on content marketing for brand building and demand generation. Webdamsolutions.com found that 78% of CMOs think custom-built content such as articles, white papers, blogs, etc. are the future of marketing and 57% of marketers see such content as their top marketing priority for 2014 (Altimeter).

So, with producing and sharing content such a priority for many it is important to make sure this is maximised to its fullest.

As someone that works in localization and who is also responsible for our own marketing efforts, repackaging content through translation has always been an obvious way of achieving maximum ROI.

If I can produce an article, a video, an infographic or a quiz in English to drive traffic or get links, why would I not translate that content into another language and double up on that potential?

Let’s look at a very simple example.

Last year around this time I wrote an article about Ramadan and its impact on business. It was for link building reasons primarily. I had it published in English on one site which got me a link, some social shares, brand exposure and some paying business.

One of our in-house translators then went and translated that same article into French and voila! we had it published on a French language website.

I essentially doubled my marketing ROI – the only thing the French version didn’t deliver on was the paying client, but hey, that was a bonus anyway.

Now anyone can repeat this same process with any type of content – blogs, articles, memes, whitepapers – the whole content marketing shebang.

The Benefits of Repackaging with Translation

Now let’s be clear, you don’t need to have international expansion plans for this to be relevant to you. Naturally if you do have a product or service that could sell globally this is going to make even more sense, but really using translation can benefit anyone and everyone.

So what are some of the main benefits of using translations?

1.    Link building: link building is far from dead and we all know that good quality links from decent websites is going to help with SERPs, SEO and all that good stuff.  If you are posting rubbish then translating rubbish then don’t expect anything other than rubbish in return; but if you are all about quality then this is a simple and powerful way of building up your link portfolio.

2.    SEO: concentrating on your domestic market can be great for local search results, but it you want your website to do well in international search you have to build up your international exposure. By gaining links, traffic, authority, etc. from say France, Brazil, Russia or China you achieve exactly this.  

3.    Keywords: When Google or other search engines see your content in other languages, it helps them understand even more so what you are all about. For example, if you sell belts and Google starts to see your associate content with words like ceinture (French) or gürtel (German), it helps boost your association with that keyword.

4.    New audiences: Perhaps the most exciting benefit of all is that fact that you gain exposure to a brand new audience, whether buying customers or consumers of your content. It is more than well documented how languages such as Spanish, Chinese and Arabic are gaining in terms of their importance online. Through translation you put yourself in front of a whole new audience.

5.    New digital relationships: As well as finding new audiences, you also have the potential to form new relationships with people who can share and boost your content giving you much more exposure. Whether its social media curators, journalists, PRs or other marketers, these are people that have the potential to help you even further.

There are of course other benefits such as brand exposure, creating a global image and increased sales, but the message is clear – there are lots of easily attainable benefits.

Tips on Using Translation for Content Marketing

Once you know how, using translations to complement your marketing efforts is easy peasy. However, if you don’t know your way around language, it’s important you prepare well to avoid disappointment. Here are some factors to consider before you run off and start translating.

1.    Work with professional linguists: please oh please do not use Google translate. It’s fine if you want to understand the gist of something in another language but for good quality content it will only let you down. You need professionals; these can take the form of a translation agency, in-house translators, freelancers or even crowdsourcing. Make sure you work with someone who knows the language(s), how translation works and what they need to do to make it effective for you.

2.    Pay attention to keywords: when adapting content into another language, research what keywords people are using in that language or location, not what you assume they are searching for. For example, if you sell jeans and you decide to target the Spanish speaking world, you would stick with the keyword ‘jeans’ across much of Latin America but in Spain the keyword would be vaqueros. Use this in Latin America and people will think you are selling cowboys. Look at alternatives including slang terms too.

3.    Beware of language differences: following on from the above, it’s important to be aware of differences in a language. Just as the US, UK, Australia and South Africa might all have differences in the English they use, the same applies to languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French and German. Decide who your audience is and adapt the language accordingly, or similarly, if you have translated an article into Portuguese for a Brazilian website, make sure it’s been translated by a Brazilian not someone from Portugal who may not appreciate the subtle differences.

4.    Look out for cultural differences: not all your content is going to work the whole world over. If your main product is alcohol, then the Middle East and Arabic really isn’t going to give you much ROI. Pay attention to local conditions, the culture and potential banana skins in the form of taboos. Make sure you are targeting and adapting your content to that target market, country, region or audience.

5.    Adapt to the gatekeepers’ needs: as with any form of content marketing that relies on another party to assess and then publish what you have, you need to firstly do some research and find good homes based on factors such as brand, PR, traffic, topicality, etc. Secondly, you need to approach and ‘sell’ your content in a culturally appropriate manner. A German editor for example will be more concerned with the accuracy of your content, the way it’s presented and your professionalism. A Turkish editor on the other hand might be more concerned with who you are – is there a relationship? If not, you need to build one. Understand what these gatekeepers expect and don’t assume everyone does business the same way you do.

Whether you target a specific region or country and therefore one specific language, or take a truly multilingual approach and produce content in a few or many languages, you will soon realise the incredible potential that lies in using translation.

Repackaging content is a very simple way of maximising your investment, repackaging with translation can take it even further.

Whether we know it or not, culture impacts almost everything we do. Within business, one should always be aware of cultural differences. Yes, even within interior design!

When thinking about cultural differences, interior design might not be the first field that comes to mind.

However, in a great article on Prime Resi, Joe Burns explains that luxury homes will only meet the client’s wishes if the designer knows the ins and outs of their culture.

According to Burns, managing director and co-founder of interior design company Oliver Burns, central London’s property market is increasingly dominated by international buyers. These buyers might be looking to buy a second home or an apartment where their children can stay when they travel to England’s capital for their studies, but they all have one thing in common: all nationalities have their own culture that shapes their lifestyle preferences.

Burns believes buyers and developers must try to understand the cultures of their clients to create a suitable home for them.

He says that even though many rich clients have the same “international” taste that focuses on unique items of high quality, there are also individual preferences that need to be taken into account.

People that come to Oliver Burns often have specific and complex wishes, Burns says. However, all wishes may be different, but almost all clients have limited time due to their busy international agenda. This is why Oliver Burns tries to find out the clients’ needs and lifestyles immediately to make the most of their customers’ limited time. The company employs a multinational team that, according to Burns, can meet every single expectation of the client.

Burns says clients are greatly influenced by their families, which is especially true for British and Indian families.

A client’s choice for a new home is often dictated by the property style that he or she knows best, he says. When investing in foreign property, international buyers are looking for a “home away from home,” after all! Burns states that the British, Indians and Russians, for example, are interested in period detailing. This is why people from these countries often opt for London homes in the Mayfair, St James’s and Knightsbridge areas.

Middle Eastern clients, Burns says, are interested in homes with an older style and a luxury feel. This is why they often request textures such as marble and velvet, for example. They also like to walk barefoot in their homes, which is why they ask for carpets and rugs. Furthermore, Burns points out that people from the Middle East might ask for a prayer room, a separate sink to wash their feet in before they go into prayer. In addition, according to the Islam, Muslims mustn’t face the direction of prayer when they go to the toilet, so these cannot face the south east (in UK anyway).

Burns states that Chinese and Malaysian buyers have completely different demands, however: they like their homes to be designed in a clean and minimalist style and prefer apartments in modern style, as this is what they are used to in their own country. As Chinese investors are increasingly turninig their attention to Britain, Burns thinks it will become more and more important for designers to master the Art of Feng Sui. Chinese clients often have their own experts on the style that review properties and give orders to British designers.

Next to cultural preferences, clients have personal wishes as well, for example to have a separate his and her bedroom suite. Burns states that security is also a key element in the design of a house. If they move into an apartment, his clients expect round-the-clock concierge services, much like a hotel. This is especially true for people from the Middle East, he says, and even more so when their property in the UK is not their first home.

According to Burns, when designing homes, it is very important to understand and act upon the culture of a client. If the culture is completely understood, he says, designers can meet and even exceeds the client’s expectations. I guess that’s the message all businesses need to take away with them – pay attention to culture!

Being surrounded by other cultures can bring a great deal of benefits: new research has shown that living in a culturally diverse community can even make you smarter!

According to Gregory Rodriguez, humour is very important to Americans. In his article on the Washington Post he explains US citizens use humour to make living in the sometimes puzzling American society a little easier. The classic American joke that starts with “An Irishman, a Jew, and a Mexican walk into a bar” can thus be seen as a way to handle the cultural diversity in the country, Rodriguez says.

In a remarkable study Robert Putnam published eight years ago, the political scientist revealed that social trust can be lowered by cultural diversity. Rodriguez states that the study showed people living in diverse communities don’t trust their neighbours, for example, and don’t have much faith in the leaders of the community. In addition, he says, Putnam also discovered people living in a culturally diverse environment spend more time watching TV!

Rodriguez, however, feels Putnam should have gone a little further: he wonders how people can conquer the social distrust that cultural diversity can cause. He gives the example of a very devout friend of his who claims it would have been much easier to practice Catholicism if she stayed in her home country Nicaragua. Her US congregation consists of Filipinos, Mexicans and African Americans, to name a few cultures, which can be difficult at times. When the priest asked the congregation to vote for a new devotional figure in the church, Rodriguez’ friend didn’t vote for the Nicaraguan favourite, Our Lady of Immaculate Conception, but for the Holy Child of Atocha, the devotional figure loved by many Filipinos. She made this decision because she felt the Filipinos should be rewarded for their dedication.

According to Rodriguez, this example shows that people in diverse communities think about their decisions quite thoroughly. People in homogenous communities, he says, don’t need this extra brainpower, as their shared background means they agree on what certain institutions and practices mean.

It gets interesting when these values are called into question in culturally diverse societies, he says. Conflicting world views can be confusing for anyone and can cause two reactions: either people abstain from participating in collective life, or they become quite vocal in ventilating their world view to anyone who has a different one.

As the US has always been a country with a lot of immigrants, Rodriguez believes the difficulties that arise in diverse communities have always been part of American society. In fact, historian Timothy L. Smith even called migration to the country a “theologizing experience” in which newcomers have to adjust their behaviour in a culture that features many different subcultures. 

Rodriguez thinks that one of the reasons Americans are known for their direct behaviour can be explained by the fact that they had to find their way in an unfamiliar and changing society. As achieving an unspoken cultural consensus in a diverse community where people are continually migrating can be difficult, people have to express their opinions in a straightforward way to make sure others understand them correctly.

Even though diversity is a key feature of American society, many scholars that have studied cultural diversity have taken homogeneity as the norm. As Rodriguez, believes this a wrong assumption, he is glad that this year, a research team from MIT, Columbia University and Northwestern University wrote a paper that questions this practice. In their paper, the researchers referred to another study showed that when solving a problem, homogenous groups are more confident about their skills that they should be. The confidence of individuals in non-homogenous groups, however, is on par with the actual performance of the group. Thus, the researchers stated, diverse groups have a better objective index of accuracy.

Next to this study, the researchers also cited an experiment conducted in 2006, which revealed homogenous jury’s make “more factually inaccurate statements and considered a narrower range of information” than culturally diverse ones. The researchers believe that this outcome and that of other studies suggest people in diverse groups can look at things for a different perspective more easily and are less likely to unconsciously assume others share their opinion.

Thus, Rodriguez says, living in a diverse community makes you smarter. However, he still believes cultural differences are not easily overcome. People in culturally diverse environments question their worldviews, belief and institutions.

According to Rodriguez, “American ingenuity isn’t simply born of the fusion of peoples into your favorite metaphor for mixture Whether we realize it or not, it’s the good-humored hard work of living with people different from us that has always been the source of America’s genius.”

Global Training Manager, Caroline, gives some insight into an upcoming train-the-trainer course for business professionals looking to become cultural awareness trainers and coaches.

If you want to expand your brand and your business abroad, PR is a great way of doing so. But is PR the same the world over? Polly looks at some of the main considerations when taking your PR campaign international.

Increasingly, hipsters are using German words in their English sentences. This new trend might only be increasing now that Germany is the winner of the World Cup 2014: however, is the incorporation of German really a recent trend?

15 year-old Kit Barker, who spent a week with Kwintessential on work experience, gives his insight into why school kids need to be taking foreign language learning more seriously.

Move over, Google Translate! Microsoft is planning on launching a Skype translator that not only translates text, but speech as well.  

Businesses in the UK are increasingly looking for employees who speak foreign languages. However, the fact that the UK’s education system isn’t promoting foreign language learning means this need cannot be met.

Russians have a reputation for being loud and rowdy tourists when they travel abroad. However, this might soon be a thing of the past as an Italian hotel owner has created an etiquette guide for Russians who are visiting Italy this summer to try and te…