Language planning is the step most Richmond businesses skip and later regret. It produces a written answer to a simple question: for each thing you sell, which languages should carry the marketing, to which parts of the city, at what cost? Without that answer, translation spending tends to follow whoever gave the most confident advice last.
What a language plan is
A language plan is a short document, usually six to ten pages, that sets out the languages, audiences, Richmond planning areas and monthly budget for each of your main services. It also names the measure that will tell you, after three months, whether each language is earning its cost.
It is not a translation. No customer-facing copy is written at this stage. The plan is the brief that makes later translation cheaper and more accurate, because the translator knows exactly who the reader is.
Who it is for
The plan suits Richmond owners who sense they are missing customers but can't say which ones. Typical situations:
- A renovation or landscaping firm getting referrals from Cantonese-speaking households but running every ad in English.
- A clinic-adjacent service or retailer whose walk-in customers often speak Mandarin, with a website that doesn't.
- A trades business with one bilingual staff member who answers every non-English call, and no plan for when that person is on holiday.
- A business owner who reads the census figures and wonders whether Tagalog or Punjabi deserves a page of its own.
Richmond's 2021 Census profile gives the starting context: Cantonese at 23.3% and Mandarin at 22.68% of residents by mother tongue, out of a population of 209,937. Those are city-wide numbers. Your customer base may look very different, which is exactly why the plan starts with your records.
What is included
- Customer record review. We sort your last 12 months of jobs or sales by postal code, value and, where recorded, language of first contact.
- Search check. For your top services, we compare how people search in English and in each candidate language, including whether Chinese-language searches lean towards Traditional or Simplified characters.
- Capacity check. We list who on your team can answer a call, text or email in each language, and during which hours. A language without a reply path is removed from the plan or flagged as a hiring question.
- Translator brief. For each language that survives, we write the brief a qualified translator will work from, including tone, terms to keep in English and terms that must never be translated literally.
- Budget and measures. A monthly figure per language and a single number to judge it by, usually cost per enquiry against your break-even.
Timeline
Week one is data: you send records, we clean and sort them. Week two is analysis and the search check. In week three we walk you through the draft by phone and finalise it. If your records are thin, we add a 60-day tracking period and revise the plan once real numbers exist.
How results are measured
A plan is judged by what happens after it. We set one comparison for each language: enquiries, cost per enquiry and conversion to a paying customer, checked against your English-language baseline. After 90 days each language is kept, cut or adjusted. Our guide to reading Richmond's census language data explains why that baseline matters.
Mistakes we help you avoid
- Treating "Chinese" as one audience. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers can differ in script preference, platforms and even the words they search with.
- Translating everything at once. Start with the one or two services that earn the most margin, prove them, then expand.
- Advertising in a language nobody on your team speaks. The enquiry arrives, nobody understands it, and the customer goes elsewhere with a worse impression than if you had never advertised.
- Copying a competitor's language choices. Their customers and margins are not yours.
Once the plan is agreed, the natural next steps are multilingual Google Ads and translated landing pages. Compare plan costs on the pricing page, or call, text or email to talk it through.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a language plan take?
Usually two to three weeks from the day we receive your customer data. Most of that time is spent sorting your records and checking search behaviour, not writing the document.
What if I have no record of which language customers used?
That is common. We start tracking it from day one with a simple field in your call or job log, and use census figures and search data as a stand-in until your own numbers build up.
Will the plan tell me to use Traditional or Simplified Chinese?
It will recommend a starting point for each service based on who you are trying to reach, and it will tell you to confirm the choice with your translator. Our guide on the topic explains the trade-offs.
Can I take the plan to another agency?
Yes. It is yours. It is written so that any competent marketer, or your own staff, can carry it out.