Content marketing is everywhere nowadays. If you want to be found online for terms that are pertinent to the products and services you offer, it’s likely that content marketing will form the lion’s share of your online marketing campaign.
According to the Content Marketing Institute…
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
It probably hasn’t gone unnoticed that this very piece of content you’re reading now is an example of content marketing in action.
The statistics show that content marketing is here to stay, at least for the short to mid-term any way. Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that an amazing 93 percent of B2B organisations rely on content marketing for brand building and demand generation, while 78 percent of senior marketers believe custom-built content such as articles, blogs and whitepapers are the future of marketing.
The role of translation in content marketing
As a team of translators who are not only responsible for producing quality translations for our clients, but also for marketing ourselves, we’ve learnt a few things about how repackaging content through translation can be an effective method of increasing our return on investment.
When we’ve taken the time to produce an original article or piece of research that drives traffic to our website, we translate the same piece of work (as long as it’s culturally relevant) into another language to effectively double our content’s reach. Simple it may be, but it’s surprisingly effective.
The benefits of translating your content
This approach to content marketing is particularly suitable for businesses expanding overseas, but even if you don’t harbour international expansion plans, this strategy can still work for you.
So what are the potential benefits for your business?
1. SEO
Concentrating your content marketing efforts on the domestic market can help you climb the local search results, but it won’t have any sway further afield. If you want your website to perform well in international search, it’s important to build your international exposure by gaining links and increasing your traffic. Translating your content will help you do just that.
2. Link building
No matter how many digital marketers proclaim that link building is dead, we all know how important good quality links can be. If the quality of your content or translation is poor, then you can kiss the links goodbye, but if you go the extra mile to produce top quality work, you could give your website a powerful boost on the search engine result pages.
3. New audiences
One of the most exciting benefits of translating your content is the ability to communicate with new audiences and increase your business’ exposure. With prospective customers and interested readers consuming your content, it’s easy to make great strides in new markets.
4. Keywords
When the search engines pay a visit to your website they’ll expect to see plenty of references to men’s shoes (if you’re an online shoe shop), or mobile phones (if you’re phone reseller), but none of these terms in different languages. If the search engines start to see some occurrences of the French or German alternatives to these terms in your content, they’ll start to associate your website with these keywords too. Before you know it, your content will be showing in the search results for foreign language searches.
5. New digital relationships
If you produce high quality, relevant and original content on a regular basis, good things will come. Perhaps the biggest potential benefit for your business is the opportunity to build new digital relationships with fellow bloggers, social media curators or journalists who want to be associated with your content. Meaningful digital relationships are the foundation of modern SEO, and every new relationship you form gives you the potential to reach a new market.
Get in touch
Have you tried translating your business content? Was it successful? We’d love to hear from you, so please share your thoughts on Facebook or Twitter.
Alternatively, if you want some help transforming your quality English language content into attention grabbing translations, just get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.