Hispanic Heritage Month ends on October 15. While this month serves as an opportunity to recognize and celebrate Hispanic and Latinx culture, marketers can adopt best practices to ensure they are effectively reaching this impactful audience any time of the year.
Balance cultural trends with personal preferences
Hispanic culture is not a monolith. With approximately 63 million individuals across the world (Pew Research Center), this community is varied in cultural origin, representing more than 25 countries across continents. The community is made up of a mosaic of traditions, content preferences, food styles, sports and music. However, there are certain cultural trends and values that tend to connect the community, including work ethic, social codes, a sense of optimism, resilience, a focus on the collective and prioritizing family first. Members of this community tend to demonstrate trust in brands and celebrities, are influenced by friends and family, live in multi-generational households, and are avid social media users.
And with $2.5 trillion in buying power, they wield significant economic influence. Effective marketing to this audience must create a genuine and culturally relevant connection. This means putting your customer at the core of your approach. When setting your strategy, it may be helpful to consider values commonly found in Hispanic communities – like interdependence, family, and community – and how they might interact with your marketing P’s (Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People). Understanding this relationship can generate insights and a more nuanced and detailed customer profile, which will help you better understand consumer behavior and decision making within this cultural group.
Leverage language
Offering materials in Spanish alone is not an effective marketing strategy to reach Hispanic audiences. The use of language is constantly evolving, especially for the Hispanic community, which is diverse and often multilingual. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of Latinx people in the U.S. who speak English proficiently is growing. In 2022, 72% of people with Hispanic heritage ages 5 and older spoke English proficiently, up from 59% in 2000. U.S.-born Latinx people are driving this growth: The share of U.S.-born Latinx people who speak English proficiently increased by 9% in that same time frame, compared with a 5% increase among Latinx immigrants to the U.S. All told, 42.3 million Latinx people in the U.S. spoke English proficiently in 2022. All of this points to the importance of not making assumptions about your audience when developing marketing materials.
If you do offer materials in Spanish, simply translating content from English is not enough. Content must be specifically geared toward your audience with an emphasis on cultural relevance and accuracy.
Dig into data
Effective direct mail that supports sustainable relationships starts with relevant, accurate data. Data plays several critical roles in direct mail, such as calculating market potential and share, identifying geographic spread, determining the cost of campaign postage and providing a benchmark against which to measure your results. A common pitfall for marketers is failing to collect and analyze sufficient historical data to predict future interactions with their audience.
Data can help marketers develop meaningful, compelling, and creative content leveraging cultural insights to draft relevant headlines, speak to benefits your audience cares about, and offer authentic, multi-dimensional portrayals that reflect their experiences.
Successfully connecting with any audience requires an understanding of the complexities and nuances of diverse consumers at a macro and micro level. IWCO’s unique multicultural expertise, supported by technology like our Better Impact system, can serve as the missing link to help marketers build effective, sustainable connections with these valuable demographic groups.
Contact our team to learn how IWCO can Make Better HappenSM for your business.
