This blog covers: 

1. What Is Multicultural Marketing? 
2. Why Is Multicultural Marketing Crucial For Digital Advertising?
3. Multicultural Marketing means Transcreating!
4. Five Steps to Create a Multicultural Marketing Strategy
5. Multilingual Marketing Strategy
6. International SEO
7. Analytics and Tools
8. Conclusion

1. What is Multicultural Marketing? 

Multicultural Marketing is personalized marketing for a targeted audience with specific unique identities like culture, country, language, age, interest, and so on.

By understanding the uniqueness of the targeted multicultural audience, effective content can be delivered and it helps resonate with the audience.

2. Why is Multicultural Marketing crucial for Digital Advertising?

Making your marketing multicultural is an important aspect:

• to be culturally sensitive by establishing rapport with customers, build relationships and ultimately increase customer trust and loyalty even worldwide.

• to expand your brand quickly so that you drive more traffic and sales while building relationships with more targeted customers.

• to keep up with the ever-changing culture of the digital world and future proof your brand!

• to ensure all elements convey the desired message for the desired target audience.  A well thought out message in one market culture might be unsuitable or even offensive in other cultures. Misunderstanding or even worse cultural differences ignorance may lead to failure and substantial financial losses. 

Understand your Multicultural Audience

Your buyer persona should include customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

What type of a specific targeted group within a given market?  For example, interest group? age group? ethnic group? or a specific region within a country? These factors are to be taken into account as language style and usage may vary significantly based on the audience demographics.

In the Hubspot report, Infographic by age shows that multicultural millennials are the highest content consumers. Additionally, this age group is the most active and engaged across social media platforms and take brand loyalty seriously.

Among millennial consumers specifically, brand loyalty increases by 28% with effective use of personalized marketing 

There are more than 75 million millennials (born between 1981 and 1996 i.e. ages 25 to 40 in 2021) in total, making up the largest population group in the United States. Hence, marketers are eager to capture millennials’ market.

Between 2012 and 2017, the US multicultural population – Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans – grew to 11.7 million people, these groups accounted for  two-thirds of total economic spending growth. Notably, these groups are younger and growing at a faster rate than their White counterparts. This makes multicultural marketing an essential component of advertising campaigns.

A real-world example of Multicultural Marketing 

Video Coca-cola – “America is Beautiful” Case Study

Coke’s campaign slogan “America is Beautiful,” took the world by storm, promoting both the Super Bowl advertisement by Coca-Cola and later at the Sochi 2014 Olympics.  

The version of “America the Beautiful” was sung in seven different languages, including English, Spanish, Hindi, and four others. Coca-Cola realized the diversity of America, and they sought out a campaign that spanned multiple cultures and different languages, to instill in Americans that diversity, united by common experiences of Coca-Cola is what makes America truly beautiful.

Featuring a culturally and linguistically diverse America, Coca-Cola coordinated with social media outreach to 87 million people. The commercial was the #1 trending topic on Facebook during the Super Bowl. 

3. Multicultural Marketing Means Transcreating!

Why transCREATE, not translate? 

In multicultural marketing, transcreation or creative translation is beyond translation as it is the process of recreating precise brand content from one language or culture to another while maintaining the existing tone, intent, context and style. Transcreating is the process of translating with cultural aspects in mind. To be effective, advertising must reach hearts as well as minds. 

Transcreation is often used in marketing campaigns and branding to create emotional connection with target markets.  It creates images adapted to the target audience. carried out using the right approach, trans-creation can make a big difference to how a brand and its products or services are received.

In order to effectively reach your target audience demographics, research industry trends and insights in your target region and transcreate with contextual creativity, extensive knowledge and expertise. Refer to Section 7 Analytics

McDonald as a transcreation example

McDonald’s uses the same basic message “I’m lovin’ it” around the world, while adapting its menus and marketing to fit local audiences. Just as the menu serves pork with rice in Asia, McCurry pan and paneer wraps in India, its websites and local marketing have been adapted to fit local preferences. McDonald’s uses in-country translation and localization teams to ensure and encapsulate Impactful taglines. 

4. Five Steps to Create a Multicultural Marketing Strategy:

1. The first step is to identify market and objectives, the target customer and their characteristics.
2. Secondly, the marketing strategy should identify potential consumer specifc relevant areas like a comfort zone, language or tradition, culture and so on.
3. The next step is to identify the media that makes sense for the marketing goals.
4. Fourthly, localized approach evaluation by marketer
5. Finally, the strategy must connect to the culture by understanding and respecting customers’ culture and tradition, building trust and connection with them in evocative ways, then making the company’ brand multicultural friendly.

Content Localization Strategy

Good marketing strategy comes with localizing your ecommerce websites for your intended audience. For example, if you have South African consumers, you might want to target relevant website content to them, rather than those of Asian. Research target audience demographics for  trends and insights in your target region, and transcreate!

By incorporating multicultural strategy, customers’ unique experiences can be enhanced through various interaction areas such as

• website
• blog
• video marketing
• email marketing 
• social media marketing
• PPC advertising
• Mobile Apps

As example of Multicultural Social Media Strategy

Adaption of new social platforms, meeting cultural expectations, and tweaking your brand to fit the market. Example: The rise of TikTok began in foreign markets before crossing borders before it became popular in English-speaking countries. Any brand that uses TikTok as part of their multicultural  social media marketing strategy has a major lead in the market.

It is crucial to have an online strategy that incorporates mobile sites and applications since mobile commerce is rising worldwide. Ensuring content including video, blog or website, works on the smartphone screen, can be key to reaching a wider audience.

You don’t have to be a native speaker to put together and execute a marketing multicultural strategy. However, you can’t rely purely on Google Translate either. A native expert is highly recommended.

5. Multilingual Marketing Strategy

A multilingual marketing strategy enables companies to reach many customers globally by ensuring all marketing materials and content are trans-created appropriately in a number of languages. 

Making your products and services accessible to foreign markets is a cost-effective strategy to grow your brand, and provide expansion opportunities, even during the pandemic.  

However, go multilingual because of market demand, not just because you can. The first thing you need to do is to assess your analytics to decide whether or not your store even requires a multilingual strategy. Please refer to the Section 7 Analytics for more information.

‘Can’t Read, Won’t Buy-B2C’ research, published by Common Sense Advisory in 2020, indicated that 40% of individuals will not buy in other languages and 65% of users prefer content in their language. These numbers show how native language content is a key factor in the sales funnel. 

The most popular languages other than English include: Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, French, Spanish, Portuguese and more.

Sites that are in English only lose out on huge segments of foreign markets due to language barriers. Investing in professional translation helps to prevent this loss. By having a marketing strategy that directly focuses on customers from certain language segments, with transcreated content, companies and their customers will benefit dramatically.

Professional Human Translation is important to ensure that marketing and sales language is appropriately understood correctly in another language and cultural context. Direct machine translation can lead to poor grammar and awkward phrasing that put off potential audiences. 

Another advantage of multilingual marketing is that translated content can be adapted for different markets. A multilingual strategy provides more value for the same content to reach many more users. This is because Google penalises duplication in English but it doesn’t recognise the same content in translation. 

Implementation of Multilingual Functions

A language selection menu is a solid compromise between a manual translation and not building separate websites. You are still manually translating the pages yourself (with the help of freelancers if necessary), but there’s no need to build new sites.  It is a great way to improve the user experience because it allows the site visitor to pick a language of their choosing.

• Add a language selection menu for user to pick 

For instance, Air Canada uses a pop-up to let some users select their language, and country, sending them to a specific URL based on their selection.

Alt text pop-up, language option

• Add multilingual live chat

Adding multilingual chat support removes barriers to conversion. Customers from all around the world are able to take advantage of technology that allows them to get answers in their language in an instant. This improves the customer experience, and as research has shown increases conversions by as much as 2.8x.

6.  International SEO

International SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence so that search engines can easily identify what is the geo-targeted country and which language is used for business. Executing elements:

• Geo-targeting  country  with an SEO-friendly URL, e.g. Apple (apple.com/uk/ for users in the United Kingdom)
• use local language in content creation to engage users
• Internationalization techniques such as using hreflang to show search engines which languages are used.  
• Consider Search Engine Preferences: Google holds the largest share of Internet searches at 92% worldwide. But this isn’t the case in every country. In China, for example, Baidu captures 65% of the market segment share. Yandex is popular in Eastern European countries.

Adapting, researching, and validating multilingual keywords in each target market or country to achieve:  

• Tailoring content to suit your target user’s language and culture
• Rank high on local search engines like Baidu in China 
• Building links from local resources

7. Analytics and Tools

7.0 Geotargeting 

Geotargeting uses geographical locations derived from a user’s IP address to serve certain regions specific content or advertisements to them. Geotargeting purpose is to find the right customers for your brand.

Useful application of geotargeting:

• You have a business with one physical location only.
• There are different landing pages that you want to serve to people in different areas.
• You offer products that are seasonal to some areas, but year-round to others.

7.1 Google Analytics:

Target the right countries with your products using Google Analytics for PPC Advantage. Checkout traffic sources and identify top regions or countries  and focus your efforts on targeting them.  It’s much better and simpler to target just a few countries where demand for your products is high.

7.2 Geo Heatmap 

Geo Heatmap  for targeting multicultural regions, it gives a more visual overview of how users interact with your webpage, whereas Google analytics provide in-depth data on your website.

Geo Heatmap allows you to spot trends and patterns for a particular subset of visitors and understand how those visitors behave by region. For example, do you know whether you get more cart abandonment in the United States or Canada? 

7.3 Programmatic  Tools  for Individualized Ads 

Programmatic advertising is the use of artificial intelligence and algorithms to buy and optimize ads in real-time. It is looking at the adaptation of creative versus the different target audiences in real time.

For the multicultural marketing strategy, programmatic software is irreplaceable because it enables audience segmentation and targeting according to the language, area, IP, device type, preferences, etc. of the target audience’s characteristics. 

Thus, the smart system reduces the average cost-per-customer acquisition by channeling ads to the people who are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer. 

For instance, a brand that produces organic food but only targets food makers and restaurants might discover completely new customers who are interested in losing weight or sports fans.

8. Conclusion

Multicultural marketing focuses on the most important asset: customers and their individualities.

With modern technologies designed for analyzing, automating and personalizing the user experience, businesses can craft a robust marketing strategy that delivers better customer experiences and hence achieve brand success!

You can learn more information from The International Institute of Digital Marketing™ 

Biography

Shirleen Sim,

Digital Marketing Intern at  The International Institute of Digital Marketing™ 

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