Courting Spanish Speakers

The Hispanic community is one of the fastest growing consumer segments around the world. According to Internet World Stats, Spanish is the third most common language of Internet users (after English and Chinese) and Spanish users grew by over six hundred percent from 2000 to 2008 to its present size of 130.8 million users. Spanish speaking users represent eight percent of all Internet users and in the U.S. represent over eleven percent of all users. It is absolutely worth your time to understand whether or not you need to make special efforts to attract this large and growing market segment.

Are Hispanic consumers an attractive market for your products?
First, you need to look at the suitability of the Hispanic market for your marketplace. If you sell books in English, the English speaking Hispanic marketplace makes great sense but the Spanish speaking market does not, unless you also sell Spanish versions. On the other hand, if your merchandise is neither language specific nor ethnicity specific), you might be doing yourself a disservice by ignoring this group of consumers. Also, if your merchandise might especially appeal to Hispanic people (a majority of Spanish speaking people are Catholic, Catholic devotional products would be a terrific fit) you really must take a closer look at this population.

Understanding the Marketplace
Your next job will be to understand the marketplace that you plan to target. It is probably a safe bet that the Spanish speaking people of Gibraltar, a peninsula off the southern coast of Spain surrounded by water on three sides have different issues, needs and points of view than the Spanish speaking people of land locked Paraguay in South America.

You may want to start closer to home, where you do not have to think about currency exchange, shipping and more. Is your home country host to a growing Hispanic population? If so, start by understanding the needs within that group of people.

Develop a marketing message
Once you have researched you target population and gained a good understanding of their characteristics, you need to figure out how to sell your product. What do you need to say about your product to demonstrate its benefit to the Hispanic consumer? In the United States, your message will need to be calibrated based on

Country of origin: Spanish speakers in the U.S. are very different, depending on what country they came to the U.S. from.
Age: Age is a major factor in the degree of assimilation and understanding of American advertising.
Rural vs. city creates a big difference in experience, approach and needs.
This market may sound too complicated to consider but before you walk away, consider this:
Hispanics in the U.S. represent $800 billion in buying power.
According to Practical eCommerce, Best Buy reported last year that visitors to its Spanish language pages spent twice as much time on page as visitors to English language pages, presumably because the U.S. Spanish speaking community was starved for product information. This market is huge by any measure.
Translate your message
Translating your message from English to Spanish is critically important. Employ a savvy translator who can do more than move words from one language to the other. Be sure that your translator is able to capture the flavor that is needed to speak to this audience.

Develop a marketing plan:
Find your market as you would any other market then employ the same proven techniques of pay per click, social marketing, in both English and Spanish.It is work to tap into a market that speaks a different language but the ROI could be substantial.