Automotive Marketers: 3 Tips to grow your Hispanic share

As an automotive marketing professional you need to understand the Hispanic market. Capitalize on this opportunity with a measurable plan that uses critical insights from years of experience and proven tactics from the Northwestern IMC program.

4 key Hispanic marketing predictions for 2015, by Hernan Tagliani, published on Orlando Business Journal, discusses the growing Hispanic market in the US. It suggests methods to market to this group. The author places the information into four key marketing predictions. These predictions could be distilled to say ‘be relevant’ and ‘be accessible.'

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David Barkholz, in his Automotive News article, As Hispanics buy more cars, stores add videos in Spanish, reviews a California dealership’s best practice of adding Spanish language vehicle walk-around videos to their website. It highlights the importance of video in the automotive shopping process and describes how using multilingual video can lead to incremental sales. 

Based on these articles and some leanings from Northwestern IMC, here are three guidelines to follow on your journey into this growing market:

Engage the Hispanics - Review your current campaigns to ensure they engage with Hispanic market in a relevant way.

Be Multilingual - Produce multilingual videos that showcase each vehicle in your roster.

Use Tools - Take advantage of social marketing tools that offer marketers new language targeting segments.  

Automotive marketing professional, Multicultural is going mainstream make sure you are there for the ride.

About the author:

Mike FitzGerald is an automotive communications professional and writer who loves motor vehicles and sports. He is pursuing a master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School. Connect with him through Twitter @The_Fitz or Linkedin

Brand Managers: 3 Tips To Creating An Effective Multicultural Marketing Strategy

As a Brand Manager, your ability to engage different cultures with every marketing effort is critical to your firm's success. As an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Graduate Student at Medill-Northwestern University, I came across these two articles that discuss the importance of Multicultural Marketing as well as what Brands should be doing to successfully reach and engage this market.

The first article is titled “Your Next Big Opportunity: The U.S. Hispanic Market” and is written by Lisa Gevelber, VP of American Marketing at Google. This article points out that U.S. Hispanics are an underserved market despite the fact that they will make up “ 30% of the population by July 1, 2050” and that they are also leaders in adoption of digital technologies. Also, the article explains that most brands don’t have a marketing strategy for Hispanic audiences and most agencies  “Were advising clients to invest in reaching them either somewhat or not at all.” Therefore, to secure long-term growth, brands should take action and leverage the opportunity to reach them through digital channels and with cultural relevant messages.

Source: http://www.permanentculturenow.com/

The second article “The Digital Marketing Revolution's Multicultural Core”  is from the Huffington Post Blog and is written by Cesar Melgoza, the CEO and Founder of Geoscape. The author explains that even though, marketers are starting to understand the importance to leverage digital media to reach and engage audiences, they still need to understand the importance of making multicultural audiences a key component of their digital marketing strategies. For example, Hispanics are not only the single-fastest growing population of young buyers in America but they “over-index on smartphone ownership and digital media streaming” and are “the leaders of today’s digital marketing revolution”.

Based on these two articles and my graduate learning in the Medill IMC Program, these are the three tips I recommend to creating a multicultural marketing strategy:

·       Integrate Multicultural - Make these influential cultural groups an essential component of your marketing strategy

·       Research Cultures - Study multicultural audiences to speak their "cultural language" and engage them in relevant ways

·       Leverage Digital - Reach and engage multicultural audiences where they are

Multicultural audiences like the Hispanic Market will keep growing in the U.S. gaining more economic power and cultural importance. Therefore it is imperative for Brand Managers to leverage this opportunity and make Multicultural Marketing a central component of their Marketing Strategies. Furthermore, by studying the different market segments within and leveraging digital and mobile technologies, Brands will be empowered to create “cultural relevant” messages that successfully reach and engage these Multicultural Audiences across effective channels.

Author: Isabel Mora

I am an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Graduate Student at Northwestern University and I have over eight years experience working with clients from a wide range of industries. I am passionate about uncovering powerful consumer insights to help brands tell more meaningful and relevant stories. You can follow me on Twitter @Icmora or connect with me on LinkedIn

Multicultural Marketing: Looking Forward to Tomorrow’s Face of America

This December, I will be graduating from Northwestern University’s Integrated Marketing Communications Graduate Program as an accomplished and intelligent professional ready to take on the Marketing challenges that tomorrow holds for the changing global marketplace.

According to Hernan Lopez’s article, “U.S. Hispanic Population is Growing, But This Isn’t Your Abuela’s Latino Community”, Hispanics currently make up 18% (50 million people) of the U.S.’s population – this is more than Canadians in Canada!  Hispanics are a young population comprising 21% of those younger than 25 according to The Economist.  All organizations who want to succeed in the U.S. need to recognize the importance of the U.S. Hispanic population especially since in the next 40 years, the Hispanic minority will become the majority.  By 2050, Hispanics will comprise 29% of the American population according to the Pew Hispanic Center.  If Hispanic’s current purchasing power is more than $1 trillion, just imagine what it will grow to in the next 40 years.

Knowing this, what should businesses do now to reach this growing segment in the years to come?  Businesses should take a cue from Wal-Mart and remove their multicultural budget from its silo and give it to each of the business units.  This will give each business unit and their respective marketers more responsibility and ownership and prevent them from thinking that someone else is thinking of the multicultural market.  According to Tony Rogers, Wal-Mart’s Senior VP Brand Marketing and Advertising, Wal-Mart is “Making multicultural part of everything we do” (Advertising Age).  This is incredibly smart and strategic of Wal-Mart.  This should help ensure that each marketer at Wal-Mart will think of the multicultural market with each move they make as they will be held accountable come year end.  Wal-Mart is looking forward to tomorrow and is doing what it can now to remain relevant in the years to come.

Companies who do not consider multicultural marketing important, especially marketing to the Hispanic market, will not do well in the future.  An article in Advertising Age found that companies who spend more on Hispanic media find their revenue growing faster than those that do not.  Currently, 57% of the top 500 advertisers spend less than 1% on Hispanic ads.  Less than 1%!  I believe this will change since the 2010 Census has shed light on America’s changing demographics.  If business did not see the value in targeting this segment, they should now.

Website, Facebook, and other social media content should also be tailored to the Hispanic community giving the end user the option to choose between languages.  As noted in the article Few Marketers Target U.S. Hispanics With Spanish-Language Facebook Fan Pages, Marketers should ensure that Spanish language content on websites and social media sites be just as rich as that of the English content.  Additionally, as any smart marketer will tell you, content needs to be tailored to your market.  Do not copy website content from your website in Spain as your U.S. Hispanic probably has different needs and problems to be solved.    

As a marketing professional and Hispanic, I look forward to seeing how businesses will attempt to reach the growing Hispanic population and hope to be a part of that communication.  My hope is that businesses will take the time to get to know the changing face of America and produce relevant and tailored content. 

Yanette Jimenez is a proud Longhorn & Northwestern Medill IMC Graduate Student and can be reached on Twitter @YanetteEJimenez.