 |
| You can attract more clients by using their language--a little or a lot. |
Lift your head. Perk up your ears. Take a walk around your community. And listen to people speak. To each other. On their phones. When they mumble to themselves. When they count out loud. Their singing when they're engrossed in another activity.
What do you hear?
No, not what are they saying. I mean what languages do you hear? English? Spanish? Mandarin? Other languages that you cannot identify?
When you actually start listening for languages, you'll probably find them all around you. If not on your street, then on your television. If not among your friends, then on the radio. If not within your own family, then definitely on-line.
Your customers' languages are an important marketing tool
If you're a business owner or a marketer, that means that languages are a tool for you to market better and to more people by strategically using a language (or more than one) in your marketing.And you don't even have to be bilingual to do it!
If you are bilingual, then great. You have an invaluable resource in your brain.
You don't have to be bilingual to do bilingual marketing
If you're not bilingual, I'll show you how you can use just a little bit of the other language--but well--for big returns.There's so much more to say and to explain about bilingual social media marketing for non-bilinguals and bilinguals alike--and what it can do for your business. That's why I decided to begin this blog. To give you big-picture information along with detailed strategies that you can directly and easily apply to your specific marketing situation.
How to create and implement a bilingual marketing strategy
Here's what I will cover as I blog, along with anything else important that comes up:1. Why bilingual social media marketing is important
Whether you're a business owner or marketer, language is everything to you. You talk about your services and products. You write about them. You converse, explain and convince. You listen, proble and double-check. Language is what you do. Yes, English is a dominant language in the world of business. But it's not the only language, and there are very good reasons to know when to use it--and when not to use it. I will show you actual data about languages in the US and around the world so that you can understand why bilingual marketing is so important for your organization and your sales.
2. The basics of bilingual social media marketing
At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I teach the "Business Spanish" course. In it, I put students into teams and help them do the bilingual social media marketing for a local client. Over the years of teaching this, I have come to see the areas where people struggle, the preconceptions that must be over-turned and the specific marketing practices that require detailed tutorials. I want to share them here with you, too. And let me just make this clear right here:
Google Translate is NOT the answer to bilingual social media marketing!
3. The profile of your target bilingual customer
You know that there are all kinds of people who speak English. You know very specific ways in which you are different from your parents, your boss, Hollywood stars, Southerners, New Yorkers, factory workers and the CEOs of mulinational corporations. They might speak the same language as you, but you know that for effective marketing you will need different messages for each group. Somehow, some people forget that when it comes to speakers of other languages. They clump "Latinos" into one big group. Or Muslims. Mexicans (even if they're actually talking about Latin Americans--or US Latinos!). You need to be able to "understand" the people who you can't necessarily understand when they speak. I'll help you work through that.
4. Curated bilingual posts
Social media is just that: social. You follow others, and one of the highest compliments you can pay others is to share what they have put out into the social media world (with proper credit, of course). This is also one of the easiest ways to step into bilingual social media marketing. But even sharing has its potential pitfalls for your brand. I'll help you understand how to evaluate the information so that you can curate and share effectively.
5. Written bilingual posts
How can I write bilingual posts if I'm not bilingual? If that's your question, then my answers here on the blog will spell it out very clearly. Even if you are bilingual, I'll have helpful information for you.
6. Visual bilingual posts
People say that young people today are visually-oriented. That might be true. (It's true for me, too, and I'm not necessarily young!) But the fact that they consume visual information often and easily doesn't mean that they all know how to create visual content. Or even that they have well-developed ideas about how visual messages work. I'll share what you need to create marketing images that resonate with speakers of other languages.
7. Video bilingual posts
If you think that only way to do bilingual social media marketing with videos is by having a native speaker of the other language speak on the video, then you'll be happy to know about all the other ways you can add other languages to videos. In other words, you can incorporate other languages in big and small ways, in the video and/or in the technology behind the video.
8. Case studies of bilingual social media marketing
Examples always help. It's one thing to read about bilingual social media marketing in theory, and it's another thing to see it in action. I'll show you lots of examples that will clarify concepts and inspire your own bilingual marketing.I'm excited to begin blogging to you about how to add another language to your marketing so that you can count more clients among the people whose lives you enrich. Here we go!
