The value of translation for online marketing campaigns

Advertising in one form or another has been used to garner business customers for hundreds of years, but the rise of the internet and social media has caused a marketing revolution. The internet has provided an exciting array of advertising opportunities, and businesses have been forced to embrace whole new ways of marketing.

With approximately 4.13 billion internet users worldwide, if companies embrace online advertising, they could conceivably expand their customer base many times over. However, in order to achieve this, businesses cannot underestimate the crucial need for translation. Let’s take a closer look.

Types of online advertising

The internet and social media have provided businesses with the opportunity to engage with a much wider, international audience. In order to be discovered by that audience, companies need to embrace online advertising in its many forms. Some examples of online advertising include:

• Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC ads come in many different forms, though often they are text-based and appear in search engine results. What unifies them is that the advertiser only pays if a user clicks on the ad.
• Affiliate marketing: this is where an affiliate -either an individual or company- earns a commission from sales of another party’s products or services that they advertise or link to.
• Display advertising: are paid ads that don’t appear n search results. They are usually visual, incorporating images, text, logos, videos, photographs, or animations. Typical examples of display ads include banners, popups, and landing pages.
• Native advertising: can be defined as paid ads that blend in with the format, function, and feel of the media they appear on, for instance, an Instagram ad that is similar to a normal Instagram post. They are generally less intrusive than other forms of online advertising.
• SEO: is an organic marketing technique that stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a digital strategize that promotes content by boosting visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), allowing more people to see a company’s content and, hopefully, engage with it. It achieves this by harnessing tools such as linking, keywords, and meta descriptions.

Each form of online marketing comes with its own benefits and drawbacks. Before deciding which methods you would like to incorporate into your marketing campaign, it’s advisable to do some thorough research.

The need for marketing translation

Online advertising has given businesses the opportunity of easily reaching potential customers around the globe. However, in order to engage with international audiences in a meaningful way, you need to embrace professional translation.

There is little point in spending money on marketing, such as display advertising, that the target audience cannot understand. For example, if a banner ad written in English appears on a Spanish website, the Spanish-speaking reader is most likely going to ignore it, leading to an extremely low click-through-rate. Even if the Spanish reader has a good level of English, they may feel alienated by an advert that is clearly not aimed at them.

Automated vs. professional marketing translation

Have you ever been scrolling through a social media platform and come across buttons that read ‘see translation’ or ‘see original’? These are handy tools that automatically translate content written in another language into your native tongue.

However, you may have noticed that these posts often sound a bit odd or don’t seem to flow naturally. That’s because, at least at the moment, automated translation is not able to successfully render the subtleties of languages, such as wordplay, slang, or nuance.

While the automated translation of your adverts will give international clients the gist of what your campaign is saying, it may leave them with a bad impression of your company and could even do more harm than good for your business’s reputation. Working with a reliable, professional translator who specializes in marketing translation will ensure that the message you want to convey to your potential customers is expressed well. This will give your marketing campaign the best possible chance to be successful on a global stage.

Why is localization essential for online marketing?

As we’ve established, professional translation is a key component to high-quality global marketing, but we must also stress the value of proper localization. While translation concentrates on faithfully rendering a message in one language into another while taking cultural differences into account, localization is specially focused on those cultural differences and ensuring that the new audience will receive a message in the intended manner.

Localization considers not only language but also visual elements such as logos, colors, and images, which may have a different significance in the target culture than the source culture. A localization expert will take topics such as religion, superstition, and history into account and will tweak your advertising campaign so that it works for the people it’s targeting.

The takeaway

As you can see, by investing in professional translational and localization, your company can make the most of the opportunities presented by the internet. Failing to customize your content for the target audience will lead to limited growth and could negatively impact your company’s international reputation.

If your company is planning to expand into new global markets, why not work with our experienced team of native translators? Get in touch today for more information or a free, no-obligation quote.