Incorporating Hispanic Marketing to Your Search Marketing Strategy

With the proliferation of penalty algorithms, the increased difficulty required in building links, and the preference given to brands by Google, companies must find ways to expand their marketing initiatives and reach new audiences. There is a massive source of untapped traffic that most ignore and only smart marketers are profiting from:

“With 52 million in the U.S. population, Hispanics collectively have an impressive buying power of $1.2 trillion.”

You read that right. $1.2 trillion. And guess what – much of that is spent online. Let’s learn a little bit more about the U.S. Hispanic market:

So how should this knowledge impact your search strategy?

Create a Spanish version of your site.

Most believe that Hispanics search in English like their Caucasian counterparts, but studies show that they search in both English and Spanish:

Give visitors the option to navigate your site in either language, and immediately open your site up to Spanish visitors as well as to rank for Spanish queries in Google.com. Make sure that the Spanish version uses culturally relevant imagery and language, so you are appealing to their culture and behaviors.

Geo-Target and Geo-Locate Your Site

Go to Google Webmaster Tools and register the Spanish version of the site, whether it’s a subdomain, subdirectory, or microsite. If it’s a microsite, make sure you add the www and non-www version of your site. Then, select the preferred version that you want Google to use. Finally, select the target country.

Make sure you also create local signals. Get links and citations on other Spanish-speaking sites in the target country. It’s not enough to simply geo-locate the site with Webmaster Tools; you also have to build enough ranking signals so that your Spanish pages can be picked up.

Be Where They Are

According to a Nielsen report, Hispanics adopt new technologies quickly and easily, spend a significant amount of time surfing on mobile, and love video content. If you are launching a content marketing strategy focused on Hispanics, you need to heavily invest in social media, video marketing, and make your site mobile-friendly.

As mentioned above, make sure your strategy includes imagery of Hispanics. They should be in your videos and in the pictures of social media that you’re sharing. Hispanics have a lot of cultural pride, and want to feel that they are being directly spoken to in your marketing materials. Don’t believe that you can include your Hispanic marketing assets with the English marketing strategy, or you will not be targeting your audience effectively.

Case Study: Mattel

Mattel creates bilingual versions of all of their campaigns. You can see by their strategy how attuned they are to the U.S. Hispanic market. In this page, you can see most of the key elements mentioned in this article:

• The site sits on their English domain, www.fisher-price.com/ and has a Spanish subdirectory geo-targeted at the US: /es_US/
• Most of the pictures show Hispanic looking babies, while also including images of babies of other cultures
• They show a picture of Shakira, a very famous Hispanic singer, and talk about their partnership with her
• They launched a sweepstakes in Spanish, where all of the winners have Hispanic last names

Mattel “gets it” when it comes to reaching U.S. Hispanics, and is an example for other companies to follow. You don’t need to be a billion dollar company to succeed with the Hispanic market. The example presented by Mattel can be mimicked by smaller companies to reach this audience with vast potential.