Multilingual Content Strategy Needed to Expand Global Reach

More than half of US marketing executives are including at most one other language, in addition to English, to their multilingual content strategy. But to have greater global reach, much more is needed.

A September 2015 Smartling study found that 52.6% of respondents were either creating content only in English or in English plus one other language. More than one-third (36.8%) have two to four languages in their portfolio in addition to English, and 10.6% have at least five.

When it came to how their marketing messages were resonating with multilingual customers, 36.8% of US marketing executives felt fairly confident, 13.2% were not very confident and 8.6% were not at all confident. In fact, only 10.5% were very confident with their multilingual marketing messages.

Almost one-third of respondents said their level of confidence was not applicable, because they either weren’t targeting multilingual audiences or they didn’t have insight into how people were responding to their messages.

Level of Confidence that Marketing Messages Are Resonating with Their Multilingual Customers Among US Marketing Executives, Sep 2015 (% of respondents)

March 2014 research by computer software company Mention found that in 1.11 billion mentions about companies, 64.4% were in English. French was the second top language used in online mentions worldwide (16.2%), followed by Spanish (11.3%). German (2.8%) and Portuguese (1.2%).

Language is important when marketing to consumers. For example, while English can work when marketing to Hispanics, Spanish has its place, too.

Courtesy of eMarketer