Tips for Building a Global Marketing Strategy For Your Multilingual Referral Programs

Why go global?

A better question would be, “Why haven’t you gone global yet?” 

There are obvious benefits to having the whole world as your market, but it’s not easy. You will need a global marketing strategy for that. You need a plan for reaching a global audience.  For that you should consider referral marketing as part of your global strategy.

Your Global Marketing Strategy

According to an article published by Tomedes, a translation agency that helps businesses have an international profile, global marketing is marketing that reaches across borders of countries. Building multilingual referral marketing programs as part of your global marketing strategy can start with creating effective content in your main language. If your primary market speaks English, you start with that and then translate the content to generate positive results. 

Building a Referral Marketing Strategy

Before we go into creating a marketing strategy for referrals, we need to cover the basics. 

Marketing for referrals is a digital marketing strategy where you use your existing audience to spread the word about your business or your product. The standard model rewards someone who successfully refers a customer to you. The reward can be in the form of a commission, or it can be a discount.

Marketing for referrals is a simple yet effective strategy. It’s just the old word-of-mouth way of spreading information about a business or a product. While we are in the middle of the digital age, people still trust what others have to say before making a payment for anything. In fact, according to a survey, more than 80% of people trust the recommendations of people they know. Just imagine if you can get 100 people who will actively promote your company and your products or services to the people they know. You will get an influx of new customers for sure.

Building a Referral Marketing Program

Building a program for marketing for referrals can be a complicated process. Here are a few insights that you can use in building that program.

1. Make it easy for people to send referrals. Make sure that you have streamlined the process that would allow others to refer people to your business. Make that process as easy to follow as possible and facilitate. If possible, have someone try it out, who isn’t part of your team.
2. Make sure that you create a clear agreement that all parties will follow. You don’t want to have problems later on because some of the provisions of your agreement are not clear.
3. Try to use automation as much as you can. You’re already busy running your business, and running a program for referral marketing can add to the tasks you have to perform. Use referral software and other marketing tools to automate some aspects of the process. For example, you can have automated emails sent out to the referrer whenever someone gets referred to your business online translation service. 
4. Once you have a referral program in place, the next thing for you to do is to update your site. Most of the people who will be referred to your business will be doing their research first. So, you have to make sure that your site is presentable and has updated content.

These are the steps that you can take to create your referral program. Once this has been established, the next step is to have it translated as part of your global marketing strategies.

Tips for Translating Your Referral Marketing Program

Once you have created your program for marketing for referrals  in English, the next step is to have the program translated into multiple languages. Here are some of the tips that can be useful when translating your referral marketing strategy:

Analyze

Analyze the original content for concepts that are not a match for your global marketing strategy. Those are the concepts that are very local and are difficult to translate. Ideally, those concepts should not be included in the original program. It helps to have a team of translators backing you up right from the beginning so you can avoid those types of content that are untranslatable.

Determine Your Target Audience

Determine who the target audience is. It’s not enough to pick a country or a language you want to target, but you need to be more specific as to which segment of the population you will be aiming for. Do you want business owners to refer you to other business owners? Are you aiming for average consumers? You need to determine that for the kind of translation that will be done.

Consider Social and Cultural Differences

Accommodate social and cultural differences when doing the translation. Your marketing for referrals program cannot be directly translated from the original on a word-for-word basis. It has to be adapted to the culture and the norms of the location where it will be used. That takes language expertise.

Pick a Style and Tone

When the original referral program was written, a style and tone were picked to match the audience. The same thing should be done when the program is translated into different languages. The style and tone should be matched for the audience that you are aiming for. If you are aiming for professionals, then your language should be targeted for them.

These are just some ideas that you can use when you are translating your referral marketing program as part of your global marketing plan. It takes a lot of work but it will be worth it in the long run.