Relevance of Local Language in Today's World of Digital Content #4 reasons why you should use regional or local language for your brands and business.
By Kumar Asheshanand •
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The quantity of digital content in local languages is much less in compare to the size of its audience. This creates a big opportunity for startups and industries. They can target this huge size of audience with their content in regional Languages. In India, more than 50 crores people use Hindi as a medium for their daily communication. At the juncture, only 0.06 % of websites are in Hindi. It shows a huge mismatch in demand and supply.
As of Now, many of the startups and Industries have started realizing the importance of regional languages. They have started giving options for choosing local languages in their websites and applications.
Advertising Industries are early adopters of using local languages for their target audience. Talking of India, they are getting a significant increment in their CTR as compared to that of in the English language. Entertainment industry comprising of media, television, and films is a great example for the regional content audience. Social Media has benefitted most from the Internet boom in India for the reason that they are giving options to share content in local languages in form of text, images, audio, and video. The presence of regional or local content can help the internet grow in India to a large scale. Believe in data and data will tell you the size of the audience. Seven percent of Telugu users means 70 million users. This is a huge market for any industry. With the growth in internet reach and a decrease in cost of internet resources, people are consuming more amount of digital content in their local languages.
The main concern for a business is that the customers should know who you are and you should know what the barriers are preventing them from knowing your products and services. If the barrier is language, you should break it.
Four reasons why you should use regional or local language for your brands and business.
Huge Target Audience: Definitely size matters. At least in the case of internet user base, it does. If you are targeting audience in India, you cannot neglect more than 500 Millions user base of Hindi. Other languages like Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi etc have also a significant user base. If your product or services have good userbase for regional or local languages, then, trying to reach them through their local languages for promotion is not a bad idea.
Better response and engagement by users: Local or regional content helps users to respond in better ways and helps you in getting more engagement. One can measure this with social media advertisements and responses. Now, many brands are targeting customers on the basis of locations with regional content and it is helping in getting more reach. You cannot reach to all locations with the same language.
Marketing Advantage: Language represents the culture and people are emotionally attached to their culture. So, connecting them with local language is always useful. Even if the users know English, reaching them through their local languages will be more impactful. There are certain businesses and services which cannot be in regional language because of some feasibility like language support, translation or technical feasibility. But the marketing of those products or services with a proper demo in local languages can add new users or customers. Many products or services that did not support regional languages earlier, are now trying to reach to their users through local or regional language.
New Internet Users: The Internet is reaching all across the country and a significant amount of new users are using it daily through their mobile phones. Most of them are from villages or small towns and they communicate in local languages only. So, you cannot expect them to run a mobile application in a global language. If you want them as your customers, you will have to teach them how to use your application in the proper way through their local language. Otherwise, you will be losing them to get acquired by someone who is going to do it in the local language.
