Content Marketing in Spanish. When and How?

Content Marketing is a must for 95% of digital businesses worldwide:

• It helps raise brand awareness.
• It helps drive traffic to your site.
• It positions your company as an expert in your field.

Planning a content marketing strategy and putting it into practice is a challenging task. Moreover, when you operate globally, things get more complicated, even in countries that speak the same language.

As I explained in a previous post, Spanish-speaking countries share the same language, but they use country-specific terms.

Same language, different cultures and traditions

The same happens with traditions, celebrations and feast days. We have some in common, but each country has its own celebrations calendar. A celebrations calendar is a fantastic tool for content marketing, as you can create specific content that links some of those celebrations to your business.

The content marketing table below shows some examples of celebrations in Spain, Mexico and Venezuela.

As you can see, some of the feast days are the same in all three countries, but they have different dates.

On other occasions, even if all of the countries celebrate a feast day on the same day, they celebrate them in different ways—for example, the Day of the Dead. In Mexico, this is a celebration of death as a “natural phase in life’s long continuum”.

However, in Venezuela and Spain, among other countries, people remember their relatives no longer with them by visiting cemeteries, cleaning tombstones and taking flowers to their late loved ones.

Decorations for the Día de muertos in Mexico

Some traditions are not celebrated on a specific date but are intrinsic to a given country. A perfect example is the Fiesta de quince años, which consists of holding a coming-of-age party when girls turn 15, similar to the Sweet Sixteen parties in the US. Although this celebration is popular in most Latin American countries, we do nothing remotely comparable in Spain.

No community manager could live without automation tools these days, but if you schedule your content for different countries on the same date, you will not have the expected results. Something to be careful with in content marketing!

A girl in her Fiesta de quince años. Source: Pixabay

The right kind of information at the wrong time is the wrong kind of information

No matter how good your content is, posting it at the wrong time will not be useful for your audience. Moreover, it may affect your reputation as an expert in your field, and you may lose the trust of your customers or potential clients. It’s an essential part of content marketing.

You can, of course, reuse it and adapt it to a particular country. For example, imagine you want to create a blog post called Five surprising gifts for Mother’s Day. You can start by preparing the general content:

• Audience.
• Type of post: article, video, interview, presentation (you may also decide to make different content for each country).
• Content about relationships, types of families, etc.
• If you are talking about five gifts, you may consider having two that are common for all your Spanish-speaking audience and three that are country-specific.

And then work on the country-specific content:

• Publication dates
• Country-specific gifts
• Related content (pictures for social media, for example)

Of course, the one you decide to use as the master content will require the most effort, but once you are done with this piece of content, you can focus on the specific bits and pieces.

If you want to improve your post-SEO, it is also helpful to make a post series.

Once you create the master post, add the country name to each post—for example, Mexico: Five Gifts for Mother’s Day. Remember to include the links to the other posts of this series at the end of each post.

This way, you will be driving traffic to all your posts of the same series.

I know that content marketing is easy to say but not so easy to do. However, don’t challenges give you a shot of adrenaline?

If you need a partner to overcome your content marketing challenges in Spanish, contact me.

See you for the next post!