What’s the Potential of the Hispanic Market in the United States?
We often think that the potential of a market segment is simply how big it is. In this case, the U.S. Hispanic population is 62 million people (that’s more than all of Spain and Portugal’s population combined).
Don’t get me wrong - that’s impressive, but I feel that a stronger guage of potential is the number of businesses that community is building themselves. If their purchasing power and influence has matured enough that the U.S. Hispanic community is “starting nearly 1 in 4 of all new companies in America and are the fastest-growing segment creating businesses for themselves” - it means it’s time to pay attention.
The U.S. Hispanic population is one of the most vibrant, entrepreneurial and hard working. That is why this community now represents more than $2.8 trillion in purchasing power (yes, trillion with a T). All of this and more is why we believe it’s important for you to truly consider the potential impact the Hispanic market could have on your business.
What’s the potential for MY business?
That’s one of the most common questions we get. “it’s all well-and-good that there’s a big, National Hispanic market - but what is the potential for my specific business”.
This is particularly important for local businesses, however, even for brands that are nationally available - your potential market may fluctuate significantly depending on the product or service you provide.
You might not find this answer very satisfying, but our goal is to be as upfront and direct as possible. If you want an in-depth and highly specific analysis of the size of the market for you, we can provide this - you’ll just need to reach out and let us know more about your company.
What’s the best way to reach the Hispanic Market?
According to a report by Televisa Univision, 88% of the Hispanic community would prefer it if businesses spoke to them in Spanish. In fact, they reported “that businesses who invest in the Latino community deserve their loyalty”.
That’s an important first step. Next up is what channels to leverage. According to a report by Ad Age, Fortune 500 brands focused their U.S. Hispanic media ad spending on the following channels (in order of importance):
TV
Digital
Newspapers
Radio
Magazines
Unless you have a budget in the hundreds of thousands or millions, you might want to skip TV and jump straight to digital. It’s the most cost effective, scalable and it offers trustworthy tracking and data.
One important thing to note before we dive into the details, is that there's no "one-size-fits-all" approach to capture the attention of all Latinos in the country. Therefore, marketing strategies must take into account the differences within this market and strive to be culturally relevant.
In terms of digital channels, we recommend focusing on three in particular: Digital ads, SEO and Social Media.
Digital advertising
Generally speaking, the cost per click is going to be lower for Spanish-language search engine marketing (SEM) as the competition is lower.
Let’s look at an real-life example. One of our clients is a digital banking service and they wanted to go after the keyword “digital banking” or “banca digital” in Spanish. Here’s a quick SEM snapshot:
Digital banking: $3.68 CPC; 0.41 Competitive density
Banca digital: $2.03 CPC; 0.16 Competitive density
The cost and competitiveness for the Spanish keyword is pretty much half what is in English. What this means is that you’ll be able to go a LOT further with your digital advertising budget as you go after the Hispanic market.
SEO & Content Marketing
This is one of the most untapped channels when it comes to the Hispanic market in the U.S. There are millions of Google searches in Spanish every day that lead to unsatisfactory experiences or just dead-ends.
Why is this?
The simple answer is that in many cases the businesses that could be creating relevant content isn’t aware of the opportunity or doesn’t have the capabilities to produce Spanish-language content.
This is the moment to change that. It’s not as challenging as you may think it is to produce high quality, culturally-relevant content for the Hispanic market. Whether you do it yourself or work with an agency like Conversa - the important thing is to look at what search terms are most relevant to you and produce search optimized articles or videos.
Social Media
There are two layers to this channel. The first layer is focused on leveraging existing social media channels, while the second is building a new one from scratch.
Leveraging existing channels: There are thousands of existing Facebook groups, forums and reddit substacks that are dedicated to topics relevant to your business. For instance, if your business provides Legal services, there are online groups dedicated to supporting each other with legal issues. If your business runs an app for financial services, there are online groups dedicate to financial education. The strategy is to find these online, Spanish-language communities and engage with them so that they can discover your offering.
Creating a new channel: This is a more involved process, but should not be ignored. If your team has the bandwidth to take this one, we highly recommend it. In short, this method involves creating a new social media channel that’s entirely in Spanish, dedicated to your area of expertise. Here’s an example of a social channel we built up for a health care membership:
PODERsalud channel: We built a TikTok channel that quickly garnered nearly 6,000 followers, producing highly engaging content around health care related topics.
Understanding the Hispanic Market
Launching a product or service in the Hispanic market requires more than a clear strategy, it's important to understand the culture and needs of your Hispanic consumers.
This means that, to be as effective as possible, we recommend conducting market research, hiring Hispanic experts, and adapting your message and your product or service to resonate with this audience.
There are commonalities within this market segment, but there are also major differences depending on the exact demographic you’re going after. Spending that extra time diving into what portion of the 62 million Latinos in the U.S. are relevant to your business will make all the difference.
Common Marketing Mistakes with the Hispanic Market
The first and most common issue we’ve seen is companies assuming that thanks to their existing marketing, the Hispanic Market already understands who they are, what they offer and why it should matter to them. You’ve spent enormous amount of time, energy and money into your existing marketing, so what’s already there should suffice. You just need to translate it a bit and voila.
Nope…
You need to look beyond what you’ve been doing and think about the cultural context. In order to come across as authentic, it’s important that you review all your existing marketing material with a Hispanic market lens, and see where you can make some relevant adaptations.
If you’re not sure where to start with this, you can always speak to an expert.
Another common mistake we see is only going in halfway. There are a lot of companies that decide to create a few social posts in Spanish, or put together a couple of relevant articles; and yet their actual product or service experience is entirely in English.
If you want to garner loyalty and dedication from the Hispanic market then don’t go the half-hearted approach. Invest in them, and they will invest back into your brand.
Don’t forget that we’re talking about 1 in 5 of every American is part of the Hispanic market. If 20% of your potential audience felt like your brand didn’t speak to them, that’s an enormous loss of business.
How We Can Help You Conquer the Hispanic Market
Hiring a content marketing agency specialized in the Hispanic market can be an excellent way to understand and attract the Hispanic market. They can provide you with their research, insights and advice on how to speak to your exact target market.
A Spanish content agency can assist a company in several ways:
Conducting market research
Developing effective marketing strategies
Advising on adapting products or services to meet the needs of Hispanic consumers.
Let us Help You Get Results
Conversa Strategies is a content marketing agency that has recognized the value of Spanish content and can help you embrace the Hispanic market. We use a variety of marketing strategies to capture the attention of the Hispanic market, which include:
Keyword search with SEO
Creation of optimized blog articles
Copywriting for products and/or services
Management of social networks
If you’re interested in seeing some of our work, here’s a little preview - PODERcard, a digital bank for the Latino community in the US:
We achieved some pretty great results with our bilingual content strategy:
A 4.8 user rating for the app
250k users in the first six months
A churn rate of less than 10%
More than 80k organic visits per month
It’s More Than an ‘Extra’, it’s the Future
The Hispanic market is projected to grow to 128 million by 2050, that’s more than double where we are currently. That means that whatever your business is doing now to speak to this market is only going to become even more relevant as time goes on.
That’s why it’s so important to let go of the old mentality that marketing in Spanish and creating culturally-relevant strategies is an ‘extra’. With the demographic changes happening in the U.S., the brands who adapt first, and best, will be the winners.
If you believe, like we do, that it's important to invest in authentic and high-quality Spanish content that attracts the country's growing Hispanic population, then why wait? We’re here to help.