In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month, DMN is taking a closer look at how marketers can better connect with Hispanic communities. Note: This article was originally published in Sept. 2017.
The growing of the Hispanic population in the U.S. has created opportunities irresistible to retail marketers when it comes to reaching Hispanic consumers. Leading marketing research firms have heralded the value of courting Hispanic consumers because of their rising purchasing power and “always on” usage of digital media.
Their value is a “golden snitch” in an era in which traditional retailers struggle against the success of digital native retailers. Applying analytics report, such as those featuring demographics, is paramount for refining retailer outreach to Hispanic consumers — and, for some retailers, strategic long-term survival.
Understanding the opportunity
To understanding the opportunity with Hispanic consumers, marketers must understand the narrative behind ethnic communities online. In 2009 eMarketer first reported signs of increased digital usage among the African American and Hispanic population segments. Since then, researchers have found both groups to index heavily for mobile device usage, extending community and engagement.
This trend means that Hispanic consumers have the potential to adopt variations of BOPIS (Buy Online Purchase In Store) for brands and retailers that cater well to them. Marketers today have more means at their disposal to connect mobile usage to retail sales – from social media to apps that assist in completing transactions, and we’ve seen their successful application across a number of industries. For example, RetailDive reported in 2014 that 25 percent of Hispanic travelers surveyed had booked a vacation on their mobile phone.
Fast forward to today, and marketers can find data that demonstrates the Hispanic population being more inclined frequently to share experiences. In a report on social media trends among minority groups, eMarketer expects the number of Hispanic social media users to grow to 40 million by 2019.
Related: MiLB Taps AI To Connect With Hispanic Fans
Learn to listen
Marketers wondering where to start in reaching customers online should engage in social listening. In highlighting the online behavior of African-American and Hispanic consumers, studies typically mention Twitter among the top social media platforms of access. Twitter has benefited from cultural groups responding to real-time events, from favorite programs to social issues. Advertisers have long lauded Twitter’s diversity retention, noting an opportunity to tailor ads for specific demographics.
The logical next step is to monitor social media demographic reports to benchmark how well your brand engages Hispanic consumers. Twitter is a basic starting point given its reach. Twitter analytics include charts that display gender, interest, language, income, and other persona details. Examining these charts can aid refinements on gaining followers from regions with a Hispanic population, or social groups that consistently attract Hispanic Twitter users.
Related: Advertising Gets More Inclusive
Deeper analytics
A further step in the analysis is using the demographic reports in standard solutions like Google and Adobe to highlight how social media leads to website or app conversions. Marketers should be alert to the opportunity of augmenting a number of reports. For example, Google Analytics has offered a language report since its inception, ranking the potential language of visitor traffic. Savvy marketers can use this to confirm that they are attracting a Spanish-speaking audience consistently, then filter the report so that it shows segment features to see if there are opportunities to improve audience retention and drive better conversion.
Another supporting analysis identifies topics of interest among visitors by reviewing affinity reports. Doing so can help reveal what kinds of topics are of interest and guide any plans for content. The results in the reports can be segmented by location or device, so a marketer can better filter topics that are naturally attracting visitors who are potential Hispanic consumers. A marketer can also make comparisons, such as determining if non-converting traffic is seeing topics differently from converting visitors, indicating areas where improvement is needed.
If the source of a data trend is not immediately clear, advanced analytics features can offer approaches to cross-device attribution. One approach leverages User ID, an analytics tag feature designed to collect cross device visits as an identifiable report segment, while avoiding personal identifiable information from appearing in the reports. Every analytics platform has a variation of a User ID.
Overall marketers are seeing an environment of “more”. The American consumer marketplace is becoming more multicultural. Analytics is offering more measurement options. The confluence of these two trends mean marketers can do more to court Hispanic consumers.
