Pants Vs Trousers: Using Performance Linguistics™ in search marketing

This is further complicated in online marketing, where search engines or social media platforms impose distinct rules on the length of copy, the use of particular terms, punctuation etc., which copywriters need to understand. If that wasn’t enough, moving into new territories adds a third dimension of complexity. A phrase in English may take far fewer characters to express in another language, so how should you extend your content? One word in English may translate into three different terms in French, all of which are linguistically correct. So how do you pick which one to use? When somebody in the UK reads “pants” do they scroll past your ad because they are looking for “trousers” and read your ad as selling underwear?!

So how do you know if the words you’re investing in are worth it?

Offline advertising struggled with a similar question for many years. Online marketing then revolutionised the industry by using data to track the effectiveness of campaigns. Brands can see how increased media spend, new campaign build outs, bid optimisation etc. impacts the return on their initial investment by tracking the impressions, clicks and conversions generated by specific online campaigns. By applying this approach to online content, brands can understand the effectiveness of the copywriting and translation services they use.

Back to pants vs trousers…. Putting my digital marketer’s hat on, I can easily identify that there are more searches for “trousers” than for “pants” in the UK. So changing the copy from “pants” to “trousers” will increase engagement and ultimately sales; simple. However, the copywriter in me still feels that “pants” is right. It feels more luxe and exotic, which is exactly the brand positioning I want. Delving back into the data, I then see that “pants” drive higher order values on my site, and the cost of advertising for “pants” is lower than “trousers”, so removing “pants” could have a negative effect on ROI. The answer is therefore to create two versions of the ad (one with “trousers”, the other with “pants”), capture all the demand, and manage the ad spend based on the relative performance of each.

Then I start to wonder which word the translator used for my “pants” campaign in China. It turns out that they used the most common word for “trousers”, which has plenty of search volume – phew! However, “trousers” is only two characters in Chinese, so they had space to mention that we offer three leg lengths. However, as they either didn’t know that or were focusing too explicitly on being a translator rather than a marketer, the space was left blank.

By combining native linguistic skills with online marketing knowledge, brands can ensure their international content strategy is delivering. We call this Performance Linguistics®

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