Hispanic Marketing Campaigns and Translation Partners: A Roadmap for First-Time Ad Agencies
The success of your Hispanic marketing campaign hinges on your relationship with a qualified translation partner. This partner must understand the cultural nuances, rules, and mores present within Hispanic demographics and how these factors impact purchase behavior and brand affinity.
Translating content from English to Spanish or any other language isn’t just about getting the words right. It’s taking into account cultural context and other factors that can muddle your message or, worse, offend your audience if you aren’t careful.
In this post, we look at what it means to work side by side with a translation partner[i] to develop culturally relevant Spanish ads that engage your target audience. All while staying true to your core messaging and who you are as a brand.
Below are three essential elements to success:
- Briefing calls: determine the soul of the campaign
- End client reviewer: bring in deep knowledge
- Linguistic asset maintenance: look to the future
Briefing Calls – Determine the Soul of the Campaign
The first step in creating a successful Hispanic ad campaign is including your translation partner in the planning process upfront. The earlier the integration, the smoother the workflow.
At first, we find that many ad agencies are resistant to do kick-off calls with their translation team. But getting key stakeholders involved at the start is essential.
Why? Because when creating effective messaging in another language, your translation partner needs to have the big picture. They need to be briefed on campaign audience, goals, your agency’s production workflow and timelines, distribution channels, layout characteristics, and so on.
Click to download an easy to follow guide on the steps in working with a translation partner on your next Hispanic marketing campaign.
Frequent communication results in stronger partnerships and fewer errors, which will save you time and money down the road.
The End Client Reviewer, Bring in Deep Knowledge
Global brands like Coca-Cola have an army of creative professionals. Each with a variety of cultural backgrounds and worldviews that contribute to successful multicultural marketing campaigns. Such success wouldn’t be possible without a talented and diverse team bringing their multicultural voice to the creative process.
Unfortunately, not all brands get it right. In the 2020 Thanksgiving Day Parade, Macy’s mistakenly referred to Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, the first Black Greek-lettered organization to participate in the parade, as a “diverse dance group.” Macy’s quickly deleted the tweet but has since received criticism for their “reductive” and culturally insensitive description. This may have been avoided if more diverse talent was included in the decision-making process.
The same principle applies to translation and transcreation.
Having at least one expert bilingual reviewer on the client-side is essential for final decision-making.
He or she can assess if the translation partner’s work is going in the right direction. If not, the reviewer can provide linguistic suggestions to bring the copy closer to the style or soul (i.e., voice and tone) of similar campaigns. The reviewer can also nurture a strong relationship with the translation partner. This will help convey the campaign’s cultural subtleties and socio-linguistic dynamics.
The end client can then set accurate and clear expectations through its linguistic reviewer so the translation team can craft the campaign’s messages in Spanish.
If direct contact between the translation company and the end-client is impossible, the ad agency must step up to ensure this communication still happens. This will create a smooth information flow among all parties.
Linguistic Assets Maintenance, Look into the Future
When an ad agency creates a client’s marketing campaign, they create a repository full of resources categorized according to channel and purpose. They also create a control system for copy, designs, audiovisual material, and more.
The same process takes place on the translation side. Your partner will keep terminology lists and style guides specific to your target audience and continuously update these to reflect the latest verbiage, campaign taglines, product descriptions, etc.
These linguistic updates are critical, so an expert translation partner can carefully implement and retain client reviewer feedback.
Therefore, it’s crucial to communicate all campaign-related changes (with sufficient context) to your translation partner. This should continuously happen during the production and launch stages to ensure consistency across media channels.
The Result , Culturally Relevant and Quality Translations
Many translation companies have a remarkably similar value proposition , they promise top-notch, accurate translations.
The truth is, it’s not so much about word for word accuracy. It’s about accomplishing the same goal, feeling, or desired outcome in the target audience. That’s crucial when it comes to marketing and translation.
As Dr. Korzenny and many other experts in the multicultural marketing sector have mentioned, a linguistically accurate translation doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s culturally relevant.
In fact, we are surrounded by English ads that may be linguistically incorrect but still influence our shopping habits. Why? Because ads don’t speak to our intellect. They speak to our emotions.
Build Better Hispanic Marketing Campaigns
In summation, we recommend working with a translation partner whose value proposition is focused on cultural relevancy instead of meticulous linguistic accuracy. Make sure there is plenty of communication, a good rapport with the client linguistic reviewer, and an ongoing update of all linguistic resources to optimize your Hispanic marketing campaign.
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Content written in partnership with The Translation Team
[1] By translation partner, we mean a linguistic services provider who can offer a myriad of services, including translation and transcreation.
