by Martin Heimann
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Hispanics have recently become the largest minority in the US, and a lot of marketers are trying to tap into this growing market. While many businesses now publish their information in Spanish and advertise in Hispanic print media and TV, relatively few are considering the Internet as a medium for reaching Hispanic consumers.
Traditionally, Hispanics were perceived by the mainstream as low-paid workers new to the country. The assumption has been that most Hispanics have neither the technological savvy nor the means to afford luxuries like computers with Internet connection. Whatever might have been true in the past, that certainly isn't the case today.
A March 2004 study by AOL/Roper ASW shows that 14 million Hispanics in the US are online. While this is already an impressive number, the growth rate is even more impressive. About 20% of online Hispanics had connected their households to the Internet less than six months earlier. More than half who were not yet online expected to connect within the next two years.
The Hispanic community is going online in large numbers, and it's happening right now.
So how are businesses serving the increasing online demand? So far, Hispanics feel there is a lack of online content and advertising available in Spanish. Although it is true that many Hispanics speak English fluently, at least half prefer to read content in their native language, according to a 2003 report by comScore Media Metrix.
They are more at ease with information they read in Spanish and pay more attention to Spanish-language advertising. Although English content can reach and does reach large numbers of Latinos, marketers who want to target this market in full must also provide content in Spanish.
Another interesting fact was revealed by a 2003 report from Univision Communications: the more Latinos connect online, the less time they spend with other Spanish media, such as print or TV. Marketers will increasingly want to reflect this shift in media consumption in their advertising budgets.
For marketers who have understood the significance of the emerging Hispanic online community, this is the next question: How can marketers reach this audience on the Web?
Three core elements are crucial when building a strategy:
1. Language translation
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