Waking to the Potential of Online Ethnic Marketing
Simon Mathews, Senior Manager, Strategy

Ion Global has been building multilingual and multicultural web sites for more than 10 years. However in the last 18 months we have been finding increasing demand for in-language sites to target US ethnic audiences. What is driving this demand, and what are the challenges of reaching ethnic US audiences online?

From the clients coming to us, and from looking at other companies targeting ethnic audiences online, there are two main drivers. The first is a desire to serve existing in-language customers better. For example, we recently helped Southwest Airlines build a Spanish language site with full functionality (including booking), so that the US Hispanic audience can have the same experience as an English speaking customer on southwest.com .

The second driver is relevant to all companies, which is to enable growth, and hence revenue, in a potentially large and untapped sector.

The Online Ethnic Audiences

There are around 13 million Hispanics online in the US. There are another 8-9 million Asian Americans online (Chinese speakers being the largest sub-group). Looking at just the Hispanic audience, contrast this data with the fact that there are only 14 million online in the entire country of Spain. Add to this, that as most companies are already doing business in the US (in English), all the fulfillment and infrastructure is already in place and English language marketing has been creating brand presence for years, it's clear that targeting the US Hispanic market could produce strong incremental returns, compared to targeting a completely new sector.

One interesting anecdote from my day-to-day role is that we manage Spanish sites (for Spain & Latin America) for a number of clients. And, when I analyze the traffic to these sites, between 5% & 15% of visitors are coming from the US - indicating a potentially strong demand for a US Spanish site.

The 13 million Hispanics online is relatively new. The online penetration of the Hispanic audience has, since the web's introduction, been lagging behind the general population. This is not true of all ethnic audiences - the Asian American segment has been ahead of the general population in both the speed and penetration of adoption, with Chinese Americans today having an the internet penetration rate of any audience (over 70%). The Asian American groupings also have, on average, higher incomes and better education than the general population - and it's stats like that, that have driven companies like Schwab to have a Chinese language share trading site targeting US customers for years. The recent growth spurt of the Hispanic segment has now lifted that audience to prominence, due to its sheer size.

One driver that is interesting for not being important in the US market, although it may become so, is government and political intervention. Take Canada for example, where many US companies create French language sites just for French Canadians, an online segment of maybe just 3 to 4 million. Although clearly an important audience, the market size might not justify the investment, if supporting the French language were not a government priority.

Reaching them online

There are two facets to reaching any audience online, whether ethnic, geographic, or demographic.

First you must have the destination and functionality online for the audience to visit. It may seem obvious that you need a Spanish web site to target Hispanic audiences, or a Chinese one to target Chinese Americans. But many companies try to do the minimum they can, and hence fail.

This is an issue we have faced with clients for many years in building international sites - where, for example, their US site may have 2,000 pages of content, e-commerce functionality and a full self-service help section, yet they want to target Korea with just 100 pages of content and no functionality.

Your ethnic market site needs to be very close to the functionality (or the same as) of your US English site. Remember, a large proportion of US ethnic audience is bi-lingual to some extent, but just prefer to use their own language - meaning they can quickly flip to the English site and see in seconds if you are short-changing them.

This issue has been getting much better recently, but a quick look at the web site of Toyota, a company leading in terms of in-language content, shows an English site with 17 models, a Spanish site with 17 models (great!) and a Chinese site with just three models.

The second facet is outreach, persuading your audience to visit your site and, of course, ultimately buy your product. This is where things get trickier. Limiting ourselves to online channels (you can always add the URL to your existing ethnic print and TV ads) there are two main ways consumers can get your site: via search, or via banner (or other) ads. Here we are hampered by being in an immature market, because basically there is little online media we can use - and search is also limited.

Google, by far the most popular search engine, has versions for Spain (www.google.es ) and for Mexico (www.google.com.mx ) but not for US Hispanic. On both the Spanish and Mexico sites you can search for Spanish sites in Spain, or in Spanish (and hence get to US sites), but you can't do this on the US site. Yet, they do have a Google for French Canadians (www.google.ca ).

This issue means that we have to be extra-diligent in terms of our search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, to ensure our site shows up in the US indexes, as well as the indexes by language, whether Spanish, Chinese, Korean, or other.

Advertising suffers from a potential lack of media. There are only a handful of commercial in-language sites read by US audiences - such as www.sina.com  for Chinese. This lack of media means we need to get creative and use technology to our benefit. One tactic we have used a number of times, with some success, and sometimes, with less success, is to target US consumers when they visit overseas in-language media. For example, a Korean American may read the news or entertainment section of a site like Daum in Korea (www.daum.net ).

By using geo-targeting technology, it is possible to serve up ads just to visitors from the US, filtering out local visitors. By doing this we can reach these audiences - however we are then faced with some of the same issues of clutter and the ignoring of ads that are common on most web sites, in any language.

This may be particularly true with geo-targeting where users to overseas sites are used to ignoring all ads, as they have never been relevant to them. So, to make this tactic work, a breakout quality of creative is needed and an innovative media strategy. Ironically, one way to break free, maybe to use some English in the ads!

Get started

At the start of this article I asked why we are seeing an increase in demand our services to build ethnic US sites. The answer is really quite simple - the potential size of the opportunity. The harder question to answer is 'how?'

Our advice is threefold: Make sure you have a decent in-language destination; make sure you can be found by web search in-language; and be very creative in how your reach out, to negate the lack of media.

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