All too often, we hear iGaming affiliates complain about the saturation in the UK market. No doubt it’s getting tougher out there, with legislation and brand competition meaning that some smaller affiliates are left fighting over scraps. While it’s a hard situation to be in, it may be time to think of a solution to expand your reach and take your website multi lingual.
The world’s most popular languages
In terms of speaker numbers, the world’s most popular languages might just surprise you. You may think that English leads the way, but actually Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world. Just behind that we have Spanish leaving English as the third most spoken language.
You may be taking it as a given that most of these people will be able to understand English, but this isn’t the case. In countries like India and Brazil, native languages are much more commonly understood than English. Companies like Amazon are currently investing a lot of cash into these regions, even though they’re not returning a profit yet.
Within the iGaming industry, we’re seeing markets like South Africa and Scandinavia come into fruition as they mature. While we here in the UK grumble about competition and the commissions, there’s a whole world of opportunity out there to explore and target. So how do you do you claim it?
The process of creating a multi lingual website
There are a few different ways that you can create a site in another language, the choice you make at the start of this process will impact things further down the line.
One option is to create a main site, with offshoots that redirect your user depending on their language code or location. This is ideal if you want to support many languages, but you have to make sure your pages are tagged correctly. Using “hreflang” properly will allow users from all over the globe access different versions of your site.
You could also create subdomain for each of the languages you want to target. This is good for a site that has a high domain authority, as you can retain more of the value of your existing domain.
In terms of acquisition, there are opportunities in this market too. One of the fastest ways to make a splash in a new market is to purchase a site that’s performing well and then work on improving it. With the current state of flux on mergers and acquisitions an investment like this could yield a quicker return than starting from scratch to build reputation in each region.
The actual content itself can be somewhat trickier for affiliate brands to deal with, whatever you do, ensure you have a native speaker on your side to help with localisation. We’ve all seen brands get it very wrong so don’t rely on Google Translate or other automatic translation tools as this will lead to penalties down the line. Don’t be duped into thinking that English is the same in all languages either. Australian English is very different to the UK and South Africa for example – “Bar-B-Q”, “Braai” , Barbie – as an example. You also won’t be likely to make the conversions you need with the traffic that you do get, as it will be easily recognised as such by your end user. This doesn’t create trust and it won’t get you conversions.
Finally, we also have compliance issues to watch out for. While you may think the UK is the strictest for advertising compliance, challenges exist within every market out there. For example, the Swiss market has just changed massively in that foreign operators are no longer allowed to promote within the market.
Creating a multi lingual strategy isn’t a quick fix by any stretch of the imagination, but if you do this properly then you will be able to tap into new audience segments. Just make sure your content is on point , you’ve done your research and mapped out the opportunity before you make the leap to create a site that could bring additional commissions rolling in.
