Lately, we’ve been writing about how important it is to localize your website, and how localization can improve your sales. In both articles, we focused on the languages with the most internet users, allowing you to penetrate large target markets, thus improving your odds of success.
These most profitable languages are just a small fraction of the number of languages in the world. What happens to the rest? Should visitors of your website be forced to browse and buy only in English, Spanish, or Chinese?
Unpopular languages localization might be the answer
Not taking underestimated languages into consideration while planning your global marketing strategy can prevent you from reaching high-potential markets. That’s why we think that localizing your website into unpopular languages may be a great idea for further business development and taking new chances. Why? There are two major reasons.
Number of users speaking unpopular languages
Over 2,5 billion potential internet users and buyers are not served by websites that are only localized into the top 10 major languages. One of the major languages not usually included in this top 10 is Hindi. Now, let’s take a closer look: almost 700 million people worldwide speak Hindi, compared to, for example, French, with close to 300 million speakers.
French is usually among the first choices for localization due to the buying power of the speakers, but there are also a large number of potential buyers in India. So, by skipping Hindi, you are failing to tap into one of the largest populations on Earth!
Saying that there are also other languages spoken in India, and all these languages are spoken by millions of people. Punjabi has close to 150 million speakers, Telugu has 80 million, while Marathi and Tamil have 75 million each. So, just in India, you could be reaching out to hundreds of millions of people by localizing your website or e-commerce into one of these languages.
Besides the languages spoken in India, as obvious choices, Turkish has 80 million speakers, Korean has 77, and Italian has 68 million speakers. These are all huge markets for your product and might be your way to go. This brings us to the second point.
Unpopular languages localization might help you find your target audience
Needless to say, you have to be aware of who your target audience is. Tracking visits to your website is certainly one way to go; however, these are only visits from the markets you are currently visible in.
What if you have an e-commerce that sells bike parts? One of the markets you should probably be looking at is the Netherlands, although Dutch is nowhere close to being one of the top 10languages for localization.
The rule of the three
We call it the rule of the three strategy: the most important things are
1) knowing your product,
2) doing the research, and
3) estimating where it could have an impact.
Remember that some products might have a broad audience while others might fit a specific market niche. In any case, it is worth defining where you want to start off, and why.
Another thing to keep in mind is that all these specific markets also require specific localization processes and might give rise to issues such as right-to-left writing and special characters. This is where our system can help, but you can test this for yourself by signing up for your free trial!
