Reaching Your Target Market With Holiday Advertising: More Than Just Translation

This is the time of the year when companies tend to put out some of their best advertisements. Consumers are making purchases for the holiday season, and each company is vying for the business. Not only is the holiday season perfect for reaching your normal audience with the advertisements you have planned, it is also a great opportunity to reach a new demographic by considering translating these advertisements.

How you communicate with your consumers in an international or cross-cultural market will vary greatly from culture to culture. An advertisement that works well for your normal audience may not work well for your intended target audience. It’s important to remember that cultural preferences and things of importance will vary and therefore, you’ll want to ensure your advertisements are localized to fit that target demographic appropriately, and not simply translate them.

Since advertisements focus more on the concept and feel of the entire message desired to convey to the audience, it’s not enough to simply rely using correct grammar and lexicon in the translation. It actually may hurt the effectiveness of your advertising to do so. Instead, a localization team should be employed to ensure the advertisement will be well-received in the target culture. This may mean converting measurements, switching up graphics (using models or cultural references from the target culture may appeal more to that audience than the original models or objects, for example), and changing the original layout altogether to ensure the new text fits.

While your original idea may work well within your current audience, it is important to keep an open mind about what may work for your new audience. Your localization team can work directly with you to ensure that you agree with all suggested changes and find the best fit that captures your brand perfectly for the new audience. Your brand’s image should be maintained, but since what works in one language/culture may not work in another, there may need to be some tweaking to gain the best traction in the target culture. With the right team to help you along the way, localizing your advertisements could be just what you need to capture a brand new audience this (or any!) holiday season.