A one-size-fits-all business solution is never a good idea. But from a marketing perspective, anything less than a tailored campaign that keeps the specific target audience in mind simply won’t do.

Every aspect of your digital marketing collateral, from your e-brochures to your website, must be carefully constructed with the target audience in mind. And with international markets, the waters are murkier still - a vast array of cultural and linguistic complexities faces those seeking to enter new, untapped markets.

Language is one of the last few remaining barriers in creating a true global village, but for many businesses it is enough of a barrier to limit them to doing business on a domestic level only – or, at least, to doing business with other English speaking countries.

Whilst English is the most commonly spoken second language across the globe, the simple fact is companies and consumers prefer to conduct business in their native tongue. And that’s why it’s vital for companies to adopt a multicultural marketing mindset.

If you’re thinking of going global, you really need to think local when it comes to developing your multilingual web strategies. For example, translating your website into Spanish using a professionally qualified translator from Madrid is great – but if your key target markets are in Argentina, Peru or anywhere else in Spanish-speaking Latin America, you’ll probably find that your marketing message comes a cropper at some stage.

And the same applies to other languages too, with the French spoken between France and Canada, and the German spoken between Germany and Switzerland, different enough to merit localised marketing collateral.

Multicultural marketing isn’t only relevant across countries that share a common language, however.  India, for example, has a staggering 1652 languages, over 350 of which are spoken by more than 10,000 people. And there are thirty Indian languages spoken by at least one million people.

English, of course, is one of the official languages of India and it’s spoken by a significant proportion of the population. And even a decade ago, marketers could perhaps get away with marketing to the middle class using English only.

Today, there is what is known as ‘Hinglish’ – a blending of ‘Hindi’ and ‘English’ – and is on the rise across India, slowly spreading into rural and remote areas via television, mobile phones and word of mouth.

With internet penetration in India at less than 10% of the population, it may seem foolish to bother marketing to Indian audiences on the Web. But when you consider that the population of India sits at over 1.1 billion, even 8% of the population amounts to just under 100 million people – roughly the same as Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands combined.

As a key emerging market and one of the so-called BRIC countries alongside Brazil, Russia and China, India offers great trading opportunities for businesses looking to spread their business wings across the globe. And because English is widely spoken, you can make contacts and build relationships easier than, say, in China.

But when it comes to marketing to specific groups in localised regions, as with any other marketing strategy, you have to compartmentalise your audience, and this starts with offering marketing collateral in the likes of Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

As much as it would make marketers’ lives a whole lot easier, multicultural marketing isn’t about finding ways to group people together into as wide a demographic as possible. Localisation is about looking at the smaller picture within each target market, and speaking to them in a language they understand.

tags: Multicultural Marketing, Multilingual Web Strategies