With AI, great language skills are no longer a must. Great ideas, however, are still invaluable.
There’s a not-so-subtle reason North American companies often look to offshore activities like content creation, app development, or any other number of tactical tasks.
As demand for marketing content continues to soar, many marketers prioritize content volume over content quality. They do it by arbitraging between high-cost and low-cost locales to find the cheapest reasonable source to produce what they need.
It’s not nefarious, it’s economics.
Simply put: it’s usually cheaper to outsource to certain global regions than others. Marketers — especially those tasked with content creation — routinely recruit writers from places like India, the Philippines, or Nigeria with the expectation that they can pay pennies on the dollar of what they’d have to pay a North American writer.
And while there’s a raging debate about whether the practice is ethical, there’s no such argument that it’s more expensive to live (and therefore do business with a freelancer) in New York City than in New Delhi.
This practice exploits professionals for whom English is a second language which creates the illusion that they’re only capable of delivering lower-quality work that justifies lower pay.
In fact, the contrary is true.
The cultural background and linguistic nuances of non-native English writers can actually be your hidden power if only you’re brave enough to use it. Especially if you’re planning on expanding in foreign markets.
Let’s explore how.
A Stupid Language for Smart People
If we’re being honest, English, on the whole, isn’t a particularly difficult language. However, to sound like a native in any language takes years of exposure to the language in organic settings outside the school environment, which not many international writers may have.
Non-natives who don’t grow up with common idiomatic expressions, cultural references, or widely known subtext are at a significant disadvantage in an English-dominant industry. Or, so it might seem.
While companies often justify offshoring by specifically choosing countries with lower costs of living, they do so with the expectation that the quality of the work would be about the same as if they’d hired a domestic writer.
But instead of offering off-shore writers embarrassingly low rates like $.02 per word, which has been shown to damage brands’ reputations worldwide, marketing leaders should consider the impacts AI will have on this practice and embrace a new philosophy immediately.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, or writing specific ones like Writer.com, Writesonic, and a billion others, allow non-native English writers “Americanize” their work, while preserving their cultural nuances and knowledge intact.
While most marketing teams are busy using these tools for “ideation”, non-native English writers can sink their creative teeth into a topic and use AI to correct grammar, restructure sentences, and suggest more idiomatic expressions that bring their work more in line with their native-tongue counterparts.
Both native and non-native English writers are key for your marketing function, each one delivering different value — though not necessarily at a different price. Native speakers know the local context better and may be able to write faster and more colloquially. But non-native speakers may induce cultural references and appeal to different buying triggers across cultures which can be a winner if they’re selling to an international audience or foreign markets.
AI can only help uplift this content but not necessarily replace it, creating an opportunity for brands to gain access to better quality and more relevant content at the same or lower price of a domestic writer. Add to it the measurable benefits of inclusivity and greater diversity in the marketing function, and it seems like a no-brainer for companies to start evolving their operations now instead of down the road when it’s too late to gain and sustain an advantage.