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With over 222 million Arabic-speaking web users, and an online economic opportunity of 2.5 trillion US dollars in 2020, Arabic is an attractive option for global brands. Nevertheless, it appears on far fewer sites than its potential would indicate. Part of the reason is that localizing into Arabic is not a simple task as it is not a single digital language for content marketing and customer experience. The languages used in the Arabic-speaking world for conversation, social networks, messaging, and content marketing are not Classical Arabic. Instead, varieties – such as Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, and Maghrebi Arabic – reflect the great variety of cultures and empires through which they spread, naturalized, and absorbed words and concepts from both colonial and indigenous languages. They may share common ground with Classical Arabic, but they are, in many ways, very different.
If you do decide to localize into Arabic, you may evaluate different strategies for Arabic depending on your target audiences, industry norms, sales channels, budgets, and in-language marketing capabilities. Customers are far more likely to purchase from brands that provide them content in their own language, and Arabic buyers are no exception. In “Arabic for Global Brands,” CSA Research recommends five approaches to supporting the language, which range from delivering a single dialect to country-specific Arabic:
Which approach you take depends on your product type, your investment, and the audiences you wish to target. Although Arabic has a reputation as a tough language, those enterprises that make the right choices can find that it unlocks lucrative opportunities in a market with light competition. Strategic planners can use the information in “Multilingual Digital Opportunity: 2019” to build their own cases for localizing into various languages and developing strategies for other languages where dialects play an important role, such as Chinese, English, and Spanish. For those that want to take the next step into understanding which languages and markets offer the best potential return on investment, CSA Research’s Global Revenue Forecaster™ provides insights into revenue and ROI.
Senior Analyst
Focuses on language technology, artificial intelligence, translation quality, and overall economic factors impacting globalization
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