Marketing to Hispanics Part II Released

Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic released part II of his Marketing to Hispanics report, the first part we discussed here. I have pulled out some of the highlights of part two, with Nacho’s help.

* Search engine optimization is the most popular marketing tactic to reach US Hispanics; more importantly, however, it’s likely the most important internet marketing effort because it relies on a pull strategy, based on users’ needs, rather than a push strategy that’s focused on brand awareness and potential reach.

* Shows a cool chart with a visual presentation of how pull marketing attracts a more targeted market like with the Hispanic audience and is based on persuasion, whereas permission marketing is more about communities, occupying a middle ground in consumer’s intent, and push marketing is used more for reach and awareness.

* When it comes to reaching Hispanics, search engine marketing is highly underdeveloped, with Hispanic advertising agencies having ignored search due to a lack of knowledge about the tools and techniques of SEM.

* In part 1, it referred to the language barrier as an important challenge. He mentions that the second-highest hurdle is the lack of tracking marketing results within the Hispanic market. Hispanic businesses and advertising agencies need only make use of web analytics software; and if they were to do so, their survey would not find that 30% of respondents don’t target Hispanics because “senior management is not convinced on the ROI.”

* Nacho mentions that when it comes to search engines, some believe that there is only one option for targeting Hispanics: Spanish-language search. Instead, marketers should be looking at the bigger picture: Hispanics doing search in any language. He points to “the database of intentions” from John Battelle’s book The Search to stress the point that he advertiser doesn’t control what the user wants; only the user controls what he or she wants, and that can be done in any language. It’s common for the thought process of US Hispanics to take place in English and so they speak in English, or other times to think in Spanish and so speak in Spanish. The same is true of search: The Hispanic user will search in both languages, based on their “desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.”

* Nacho says that what keeps him up at night worrying about the US Hispanic and the Latin American markets is: If Latino-focused ad agencies merely add SEM or any other Internet-based programs to their list of services as if it were just an SKU and pretend to know how to implement them-but don’t deliver results-clients will rightly be frustrated. As a result, such agencies are damaging the entire industry. SEM requires a full commitment to learn; and it doesn’t take a couple of days to pick up, either. To drive results, as with all media, it takes practice and skill. Ad agencies must invest the time and human resources to be able to deliver results. Imagine what happens when a client who allocated $20 million from the marketing budget finds out that an intern is handing its SEM campaign…. A viable option for Hispanic ad agencies is to partner with market leaders, which was the most likely case among those we tracked that were offering search marketing solutions in a professional manner.

The full report can be viewed at http://www.marketingprofs.com/6/hernandez2.asp.