Most modern marketing professionals would agree that content marketing is amazingly effective. Although content marketing has been around for decades – and even longer than that – it has become particularly popular since the advent of the Internet. Put quite simply, content marketing involves publishing and distributing content (articles, blogs, advertisements, etc.) that is designed to promote a service or product to a targeted audience. Of course, content marketing is only effective if the content is well written, interesting and relevant to the audience. In this digital day and age, when even the smallest company can market their products or services to a global audience, ensuring that your potential customers can understand your content is vital. After all, even the best content is a waste if your intended reader doesn’t comprehend your message, which is why translation plays such a crucial role in global content strategy.
One of the greatest challenges for today’s content marketing specialist is reaching the widest audience possible while still making their content pertinent and appropriate for different target groups. Considering the fact that those audiences are most likely speaking a variety of languages and living in entirely different societies and cultures, that challenge can be daunting, to say the least. However difficult it may sound, it can be done. In fact, top notch content marketers are accomplishing it each and every day. And the one thing that the vast majority of those marketers have in common is this: they began with one essential element of every content marketing campaign — high quality translation, combined with spot-on localization services.
Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to consider the consequences of NOT employing highly trained translation and localization specialists for your content marketing campaign. The first and most obvious impact would be that your audience would not clearly understand your message, so all the time and effort involved in creating quality content would be wasted. Without utilizing the services of a translator who is also a localization specialist – in other words, someone who not only speaks the language but is also intimately familiar with the society and culture of your target audience – your content could very well be misunderstood or (even worse) actually be offensive to prospective customers. Without the help of a language professional who understands why and how your product or service would benefit people in a certain part of the world, your entire marketing campaign could falter from the very beginning. Any good marketer knows how vital it is to make a target audience understand how they can benefit from a product or service. But when you’re marketing to the whole world, where do you begin? That is the challenge faced by marketers in today’s world.
Fortunately, there is a solution for overcoming that challenge. High quality translation and localization services are available from a variety of reputable, professional translation companies. In fact, matching the needs of a client (in this case, a content marketer) with language and localization professionals is at the core of the translation industry. Only an experienced translator will be able to not only convert text from one language to another, but do so while understanding the nuances of the language spoken in a particular region, as well as the jargon used in specific industries. Only a trained localization expert will know what language, images and even colors will be acceptable in certain regions of the world.
Selling a product or service around the world is, without a doubt, a challenge. But thanks to the efforts of trained, experienced language and localization specialists, content marketers are doing just that every day. If you’re looking for help with your global content strategy, start by contacting a reputable translation company.