How Translations Can Boost Your Emotional Marketing Strategy

Emotional marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with your users. But when you’re marketing to an international audience, it can be a bit more difficult since there are a lot of considerations to make.

According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, it’s not the rational side of our minds that makes purchases. Surprisingly, it’s actually the subconscious mind that makes 95% of all our decision-making in buying products.   

If you want to learn more about how translation services can improve your connection with your international users, then keep reading! 

The English Language is No Longer the Language of the Internet

Many people still believe that the language of the internet is still English. It might have been the case from the 1990s to the early 2000s, but decades later, it’s no longer the case as billions of people worldwide have access to it.

The Visual Capitalist reported that despite 60.4% of the top 10 million websites being in English, only 16.2% of the world’s population speak the language. Compared to Chinese online content, only 1.4% despite 14.3% of the world’s population using the language. 

In the world, about 7,000 dialects and languages are spoken, making every single one accessible on the internet difficult. However, it can be denied that the English language has been overrepresented online more than any other language. Most recently, more consumers have realized this. With search engines making detecting a user’s geographic location easier, users can use online translation tools or simple searches for content in their native language. 

It has led to more multilingual content created to promote a brand and provide relevant information to international users in their native language. Not only are users finding it more convenient, but on an emotional level, they feel more connected to it, making it easier to establish trust with them. If you’re planning to create a marketing strategy based on your buyers’ emotional and psychological triggers, the language of your users should be one of your top priorities. 

What is Emotional Marketing?

Simply put, emotional marketing uses psychological and emotional triggers to get buyers to purchase products or increase conversions. Part of creating the emotionally triggered marketing content is through the medium of language used. 

One of the biggest mistakes that novice marketers make in global marketing is assuming everyone understands English and has the same cultural background. Users’ emotional response comes from their personal experience, which can be achieved if marketers grasp the cultural and linguistic preferences of their target audience.

Why is Language the Driving Force in Emotional Marketing?

Communication is what makes or breaks a successful marketing campaign. Many big brands, such as KFC and Mercedes-Benz, mistranslated their slogans, but in this day and age, marketing campaigns can be reposted and disseminated in a matter of minutes. The mistake will become a PR nightmare if you fail to translate the content.

However, this shouldn’t discourage you from translating your marketing content for your target market, as several studies have shown how effective translating content in the user’s native language was in converting sales compared to English-only content. CSA Research reported that 76% of the 8,709 participants said they preferred purchasing products in their native language, while 40% said they wouldn’t buy from websites that weren’t in their mother tongue.  

From a psychological perspective, languages are our way of making sense of our perceived reality. Each language is intricately linked to its culture and the cultural reality it embodies. Because of this, when you’re communicating with someone in their native language, it becomes more personal.

How Emotive Language Can Enhance Your Marketing

Now, regarding how is emotive language effective in advertising?

It’s not enough to logically explain why your brand is the best among the rest. As mentioned, the subconscious mind is the driving force that’s the reason why we buy products and services. In order to emotionally connect and trigger customers to purchase from us, the way we market our brand must be emotive in the way we communicate to our international users.

Part of this involves, the way you write or talk to your audience: the structure and tone. The other part of creating an emotive language is finding the common ground from which your audience can relate to what you’re promoting and center yourself on the core emotions of it, like anger, sadness, and joy.    

4 Tips on Translating Content that Emotionally Connects with International Users

We’ve listed a couple of tips and advice on what you can do to ensure that the content you’re creating is relatable to your international users.  

1. Figuring Out Objectives During Pre-Planning and Planning Phase

One of the biggest reasons many marketing campaigns fail is that they’re half-baked and not thoroughly planned. The pre-planning and planning phase is crucial because much of the preparations and laying out of ideas occur during this period, affecting your marketing campaign’s outcome.

We suggest that during this period, find out your objectives for your marketing campaign and get down to what primary emotion you’re trying to provoke from your audience. In planning your campaign, you can begin to think about your campaign’s theme and storytelling aspects.    

To achieve the kind of reaction that you want from your users, you have to understand that there are five desired actions:

• Do Something or Call-to-Action
• Feel Something 
• Learn Something
• For Fun and Relaxation
• Gaining Authority

All content falls under one or two of those categories, which will help you make it clear to your audience what your intentions are.  

2. Collaborating with Translation Services Specializing in Your Target Market

Another reason many international marketing campaigns fail is that they didn’t reach out to their target market experts, like translation services and marketing specialists. Even though translation technology has come a long way in translating content into various languages, even if it’s translated word for word, the cultural and personal context of the message gets “lost in translation.” It leads to miscommunication and problems with how your users approach your brand.

Because of this, it’s always wise to work with language professionals and marketing experts that understand your target locale’s linguistic, cultural, and marketing preferences. They can provide insights and advice on the best approach when marketing your brand to your target users. They can also assist you in conducting market research, ensuring that the multilingual content they’re creating is relevant to your international users.

3. Creating Psychological Profiles on Your Ideal Customers  

It’s not just translation technology that’s evolving, but AI is now being used in content marketing to help with gathering data on your target audience. It’s used to identify keywords and conduct predictive analytics to boost user experience. You can try the latest AI tools to research and create your ideal customers’ psychological profiles.

You can also conduct psychographic marketing research, specifically looking into your customers’ psychological and demographic features from a specific region. You’re not just identifying their age, gender, and occupation but also researching their lifestyle, concerns, and values. You can conduct surveys or, as mentioned, use tools that analyze the data you receive on your target users.   

4. Running AB Testing on Multilingual Content

After you’ve done all your research and created a strategy to best optimize your content for your international users, you can run AB testings on the multilingual content you’ve made. We suggest you do this to ensure your content’s quality and determine if it evokes that kind of emotional trigger and desired action from users.

If you’re not getting the desired results, you can talk with your language professionals and marketing experts about what you can do to improve it. You can also have users from your target market evaluate the content and provide feedback. 

Final Thoughts

Even though we’d like to think that all our decisions are purely logical, it can be denied that how we perceive the world isn’t based on our objective observations but through the rose-tinted lens of a storyteller. 

Whether you achieve your objectives through the expertise of market researchers and translation services or simply by relying on your marketing skill, in the end, your users will look at the “authenticity” in how you connect your brand to an emotional need that they want satisfied. It’s been done time and time again by millions of brands worldwide. 

The challenge is how you can make your brand different from the rest that’s creative while hitting the right emotional triggers and responses.