Eric Ingrand is the vice president of content marketing at EnVeritas Group, an innovative European-based multicultural content agency that creates and translates digital content for brands in various industries, with a great emphasis on travel, tourism and hospitality, education, and B2B. This global agency works with freelance writers across all five continents and in more than 30 languages.
When Ingrand joined EnVeritas Group, it was called 10Best.com, and produced city/destination guides in an advertising-type model, selling the same information to various companies. In this interview, Ingrand explains how he managed to become a key player in the multicultural digital world and the challenges that multicultural content marketers face today.
Q1: What prompted you to make the shift from your original model to content marketing?
We were selling quality information that was the same for everyone. Very quickly, we realized that — as the competition was starting to get richer and richer on the travel e-commerce scene — what would make the difference was the price (because everyone had the same), not the technology, because it was affordable to have a website that provided that kind of info. The difference would come from the additional information that we provided next to those products such as images, text, a story, or whatever else helped us display our selection among prices.
We understood then that this type of information was generating greater conversion; adding quality, useful content at the right place was allowing people to stay longer on a page and eventually come back, increasing the chances of conversion.
At that time, you would only hear about SEO. No one was talking about content marketing. People were talking about tricking search engines with some dark SEO practices and I was thinking, “Well, this doesn’t make sense to me because, really, you don’t want to optimize your site only for search engines, you want to optimize it for your audience. And you do that by creating relevant content.”
That’s what brought me to this topic.
At the same time, I realized that there was this whole movement in the digital scene called content marketing and content strategy. I realized that what we were doing for the past three to four years, creating quality content that generates greater conversion on digital channels, was content marketing.
Q2: What about multicultural content marketing?
Our strength was to use this amazing network of people that we built to create city guides. Our focus is to have writers based on five continents who write and research really well. To start creating custom content in the travel space, we had to localize our content.
At that time, 90 percent of the content on the internet was really bad; it was things that made no sense — just a lot of crap. I started thinking, “Why don’t we do a better job at translating? We should translate less, but better and more unique, content.” That became the value proposition we brought to our customers.
We began to use our network of local people for translation work. We just used humans; no machines to translate.
Q3: What do you mean by “localize” the content?
It’s translation, but we call it “localization” because we create content for an audience in a specific location. We use the original content as a base, local journalists to rewrite, and then use an editor. There are two people involved.
Q4: Are you using local writers?
That’s how it started: using our amazing network of travel journalists and bloggers. They were not only writing in the travel industry; their job was to write about their passions and specialties, which included travel. We eventually expanded that base to a network of freelancers.
We also have on-staff writers and editors, but we believe that great content is written by local people, and you can only do that by having freelancers. What we try to do is to manage and edit content in-house.
Q5: In the whitepaper A Christmas Story: Content marketing for ecommerce success in a multicultural world, you say that multicultural content marketing is the most effective way for brands to engage local audiences in the international market. This is especially true for retailers expanding their operations to countries where English isn’t the main language spoken. Can you tell me more?
The money to create, recreate, or translate content is not much compared to how much we spend on advertising.
When you launch a new product, the one thing you want to have right is the content that appears on your website. If your tone or the words you use are bad, you instantly lose your credibility. Whatever advertising you do, you’re not credible anymore because you come to a market with the wrong understanding of the local language. This shows that you don’t care. You’re basically saying, “I don’t care about you, I just want to sell you my product.”
What people will think is, “These guys are not serious. They come to us and they can’t even write properly in our language.” We see that so many times.
The whole phase of a product launch will be changed by how closely your content comes to reflect the habits of the people you’re selling to.
If you’re a new brand and you’re ready to spend money on advertising, do it right from the beginning. Don’t spend money on every corner and have your main meat wrong. It’s a very common mistake
Q6: Do you think that companies are ready for multicultural content marketing?
Not many people are active on that topic. People seem to talk about content in a very general manner and will discuss content marketing for digital, or for other channels, but never for various cultures.
Q7: Why? You would think that in today’s digital world, with globalization etc., companies have that need right now?
When I talk about it, everyone agrees with me, all the time. But when you actually sit down with the customer and say, “Today you spend X amount to translate each version of your site, and now I’m going to ask you to pay three times that,” that’s when the hurdle starts. You always need to prove ROI. You need to convince them.
To convince your board of directors, who are not marketing specialists but business guys looking at revenue, expenditure, short-term revenue, it’s difficult. A lot of old-school executives believe that a sale is conducted through people not websites.
But once they are convinced, they completely embrace what we’re doing.
Q8: How do you get to that point?
Content marketing works really well for companies that are spending a lot on pay-per-click. The expenditure for buying traffic is huge; however, the better your content is, the better your ROI will be.
You’ll see very large travel websites spending millions and millions on pay-per-click and the only way for them to grow their conversion rate is content. They have to make sure their content is right, and it took them a long time to see that. They’ve been slapped by back-linking practices. But they do know.
More specific to multicultural is the fact that during these last few years, there have been many complaints about regular translation companies. Marketers are ready to pay top dollar for high-quality content because they understand that high-quality content means better conversions. Different expenses were not put in perspective. That’s very new.
All this together justifies the ROI by far.
There are also start-up companies like Uber: skyrocketing growth, using content marketing in their DNA, from scratch, using a community to localize and adapt their offering. Those guys were able to localize their strategy; their story.
Companies have started understanding that you have to put all your heart into the content you’re creating. There are now proven case studies that help entrepreneurs and boards of directors understand that. But it’s not a straightforward process.
You need to educate them, evangelize the topic. That’s why I speak at conferences and events.
Q9: Where do you think the U.S. stands in terms of multicultural content marketing?
In the US, the native market is still big enough that brands already have a huge avenue to grow in their own market. To convince US companies to grow outside is even harder.
The interest in multicultural marketing in generally is to reach local communities within the US: how can we sell to the Latinos or African-Americans in the US?
You also have many large companies. The bigger a company is, the more expensive it is going to be when you go for localization. If you do it from scratch, it doesn’t cost that much. But if you want to start after translating thousands of pages for years and years, where do you start from? Do you localize everything and it costs you huge money? Do you develop a strategy, and if so who manages that strategy internally? It’s harder for a business which has been there for years to navigate and take the right decision.
My advice, in those cases, is always this: start small, pick one language, and prove ROI on that one language or one product/one language.
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