eCreativa Target US Hispanics and Latinos

Lindisima

How to target Hispanics in the United States for new business?

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If you are attracted by the growth opportunity in the Hispanic market, you are headed in the right direction. As pointed out in our previous article, it makes perfect sense for companies to target the rapidly growing Latino population in the United States. The big question, however, is the language to be used for communication.

In our experience with our sister publication Lindisima.com, we started with Spanish. The website achieved tremendous success, but contrary to our expectation, the #1 country for our traffic was Mexico followed by Spain. United States came in third, followed by other Latin American countries. There were other problems with not getting more traffic from the United States. The advertising rates are significantly lower in countries outside of the developed world.

In recent months there have been a series of reports that indicate that as many as 50% of the Hispanics in the United States actually prefer English over Spanish. While it took us longer to realize this and act upon this piece of what we think was a very remarkable finding, we did act eventually and lunched the English version of the Lindisima Latina on the Internet in September. Result: We have seen a significant improvement in traffic from the US and have started to attract high-value advertisements.

It has, therefore, been interesting to watch how different companies are targeting the Hispanics. Here are a few suggestions to businesses that want to target the Hispanic population in the United States:

If you are an ebusiness (more tips on ebusiness strategy are available in the ebusiness blog) that wants to sell specifically to Hispanics (and already have a good website in English), a fully-functional (customer service included) Spanish language website will definitely draw more customers (not only from the US but also from other Latin countries) - buyers who speak English but feel more comfortable on a Spanish language website.

For certain products (e.g. personal care, fashion, gifts, etc.), while an English language website might do the job, the website might need to be "customized" for the Hispanic buyers.

The Hispanics in the US that either prefer English or do not mind it are also generally more upscale. They also tend to be very proud of their roots and heritage and typically give extra points to a marketer that understands this and clearly demonstrates it.