Parlez Vous Francais? Do you speak French? Chances are that you don’t. The more important question that your business should be asking is whether your target market speaks French.

Take a look at these stats and imagine the marketing opportunities for your business:

• French is spoken as a first language by 136 million people worldwide
• French is spoken in countries such as France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada etc
• In France alone there are over 60 million French speakers
• There are more than 43 million Internet users in France

Working example: say you own a hotel in Limerick and Munster are playing a Heineken cup match against Toulouse, will your website be visible to the traveling French support? Will the French support be able to understand your website? Answer: Probably not.

How people search: Think for one second about how you would search for a hotel in the return fixture.You go to Google and you type in a search phrase like ‘hotel in Toulouse’. You will more than likely be using a local search engine like Google.ie and you will more than likely be searching in English. Putting yourself in the position of the French supporter you can see that they will probably be seaching on Google.fr in French.

If your website is not available in French then these potential customers are blind to your business.

Solution: Your website needs to be translated into French. You need French web content translations but you also need French Internet marketing translations. If you run a targeted French PPC campaign a few weeks before the match and use event related keywords then this highly targeted campaign will put your website in front of millions of French eyeballs. Many of these are potential customers.

Take action: The best way to target this new market is to get your your website translated into the language of the target country. In this situation you would translate to French. For maximum results you would translate your entire site. However, for many businesses this is to expensive. Instead you might just create a new French language landing page with all the relevant details on it in French. This is a low cost solution and it will get you visibility in French search engines.