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Net Gain: Latinos Are Going Online More Than Ever
Admen dream about Silvia Medina.
She’s part of a highly coveted demographic group, 18-34 year olds, that companies from Coca-Cola to Apple just can’t get enough of. Though her parents came from the Dominican Republic, she was born and grew up in the United States. She’s a fully bilingual, fully bicultural Latina, just about to finish her MBA. If you want to find her, you’ve got to go online.
Silvia has been on the internet since 1996, and uses it constantly for school, work, and at home. She communicates by e-mail, pays bills online, and prefers to shop at Amazon than go to the mall. Silvia catches up with friends on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. She follows the news on AOL Latino and keeps up with chisme on Terra. When she misses an episode of a telenovela, she downloads it on Univision.com.
But her favorite spot in cyberspace is the Miami-based portal Batanga. Last year, the company received a shot with a $30 million dollar investment. It’s paid off, since that’s where Silvia spends about 80% of her online time.
That comes as no surprise to Batanga’s CEO Rafael Urbina: “It makes her feel good that her music is being played there, that her language is spoken there,” he says.
Critical Mass
Silvia is not alone. In fact, she’s part of a growing trend among Latinos of growing internet usage. According to November 2007 figures from comScore’s Media Metrix, 18.1 million or 41% of Hispanics are online. These numbers make marketers salivate, though there may be even more. According to Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Professor and Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at Florida State University, who has been researching Latinos online since 2000, usage may be significantly greater. He would raise the ante to 28.8 million, or 65% of the Hispanic population.
Anyway you look at it, the number of Latinos going online has reached critical mass. But to understand these numbers, you need to segment the market. The first to go online were acculturated Latinos with a higher socio-economic level, according to Danny Allen from Admixture, an online ad network with about 75% to 80% of websites in Spanish. This is echoed by David Morse of New American Dimensions, one of the top multicultural market research firms. He explains that online Latinos are better educated and have a higher household income. The longer that they are in the United States and especially when they have school-age children, the more time they spend online. But this isn’t necessarily the case for all Latinos.
“We need to keep in mind,” says Morse, “that there is still a digital divide among the less acculturated immigrants that tend to be poor.”
Many recent immigrants lack the education to realize the importance of the internet. When you go to their houses you are more likely to find a huge stereo system or a big screen TV before a computer. But as penetration in the Hispanic market gets deeper, the lower socio-economic levels and the less acculturated Hispanics will start to get online in larger numbers. This segmentation is demonstrated by a 2007 eMarketer report which reveals 78% of English-dominant adult Hispanics are using the internet, compared to 71% of non-Hispanic whites. At the same time, only 32% of Spanish-dominant adult Hispanics were online.
Allen notes that the broad availability of cheap broadband and cheap computers has helped getting Latinos online. The ability to get online through mobile phones has also has been an influence, since Latinos generally over-index in the use of mobile phone’s advanced features. One theory is that this is because they don’t have a computer at home so they do most of their interacting through cellular phones. With the advent of the iPhone and its ability to cruise the “real internet” it’s becoming less of an issue that websites have to be mobile-friendly.
Viva Batanga
Where are all these Latino internauts going? When analyzing the top 10 sites visited by Latinos in comScore’s Media Metrix, one notices that the most popular are those from Yahoo and Google, followed a bit down the list by Amazon and Ebay. The most popular Latino-themed site, Univision.com, gets a lot of traffic but is barely within the top 30 properties.
Yet there are several very successful sites that have caught the attention of the Latino consumer, garnering loyalty as well as eyeballs. Todobebé.com has been around since 1999, evolving into a full-fledged multimedia company serving Spanish-speaking mothers not just online but via television, radio, print, and event marketing. Terra is the portal of Spanish telephone giant Telefonica. Its CEO, Fernando Rodriguez, shares that one of the most visited areas in Terra is music, and there the most popular are the artists’ own pages, in both Spanish and English. He emphasizes that what is most important is content, not language.
Then there is also Silvia Medina’s favorite, Batanga. She certainly is not alone regarding her preferences. Rick Marroquin, Batanga’s chief marketing officer, joyfully shared that in comScore’s, November 2007 Media Metrix, Batanga was at 3.5 million unique visitors a month inside the U.S., 1.1 million of those identified as Latinos.
Batanga was born in 1999 in Greensboro, North Carolina as a Hispanic online radio station. Around the same time, Venezuelan native Rafael Urbina started a company by the name of Planeta Networks, offering internet video on demand. In 2005, both companies merged, with headquarters in Miami, and Urbina now serves as CEO. In August 2007, Batanga raised $30 million for the expansion of its marketing efforts and online content. The lead investors, Tudor Ventures and H.I.G. Ventures, both manage multi-billion dollar manage large portfolios, and have funded a wide variety of enterprises. What’s the secret of Batanga’s success?
“In the past, the value proposition offered by Hispanic media companies was primarily the language,” says Urbina. “We believe that Batanga is one of the first media companies to break this barrier. From the start, it began with a bilingual interface, giving visitors the option of accessing our content in their language of choice. We focus in offering culturally relevant content for users. That is why music was the logical first step. Independent of your heritage, or where were you born, or your language preference, there will be one Latino music genre that will touch your heart.”
Urbina emphasizes that Batanga is living proof that Hispanics are online. The fact that most of them are late adopters compared to the general market has resulted in them connecting to the web directly through broadband, rather than a dialup connection. This creates an interesting situation given that Latinos basically leapfrogged an entire technology. Currently, less than 50% of the entire Latino market is online and the Batanga team believes this number will continue to grow in a much faster pace than the general market for many years to come.
English or Spanish?
Despite the success of Batanga and its rivals, the debate continues. Yet marketers agree that the important thing is to define who you are trying to reach and then devise strategies that are meaningful and relevant to them.
Matias Perel, the founder of Latin3, a Hispanic interactive agency, catering to Hispanic divisions of global corporations, takes a step further on the segmentation of the Latino online market. According to the 2006 AOL Roper Study, he sees the Hispanic online market divided into three: Mostly Acculturated 15%; Partially Acculturated 66%; and Relatively Unacculturated 19%.
The mostly acculturated Hispanics are achievement oriented. 74% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 4% in both languages, and 22% don’t have any preference. Partially acculturated are more into social and fan oriented. 34% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 12% in Spanish , 27% in both languages, and 22% don’t have any preference. The relatively unacculturated are mostly oriented to family and home. 9% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 31% in Spanish, 41% in both languages, and 19% don’t have any preference.
Curiously, research has shown that English-dominant Hispanics have more blogs than any other group in the U.S. while Spanish-dominant Hispanics have more websites than any other. The latter is due to the cultural tendency of trying to be connected, to try to have relationships and connections. Dr. Korzenny has heard reports that many immigrants build their personal websites to show loved ones back in their home countries how they live.
But by far the greatest controversy is which language to use.
Fernando Espuelas, CEO of Voy, a leading Latino social entertainment network, quoted a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center showing that 75% of the growth among Hispanic consumers will come from U.S. born persons as opposed to immigrants. The vast majority of the market place is American-born and the future of the growth will come from them. Also, Espuelas says, referencing another Pew study, English language adoption among Latinos is happening at a much faster rate. Therefore, he says, we can see that the U.S. Latino population is becoming predominantly English-dominant. Yet he is aware that Spanish language, culturally, is very important for the Hispanic community.
Some argue that English language sites should develop content in Spanish, since many users prefer reading in that language. But exactly the opposite has been happening with traditionally Spanish language websites. To reach a larger percentage of the Latino market, they have been producing bilingual content. Terra has been producing bilingual content, particularly to cover specific events like soccer’s Gold Cup and World Cup, as well as The Oscars. Terra executives have noticed that more and more bilingual and even English-dominant users are coming to their site looking for relevant content. Their conclusion is that language is secondary to the content’s appeal.
Keeping Pace
Have advertisers kept up with this growth?
Hispanic advertising agencies are starting to develop more and more interactive advertising capabilities and as they do they are looking for quality websites, declares Allen. In the last 18 months he has seen the agencies’ attitudes evolve from believing that Latinos weren’t online and they were going to reach them through print, television, and radio to now starting to realize that indeed they need to reach them on the internet. They are realizing that they are far behind the general market agencies regarding their online capabilities and are working really hard to catch up. Of course, there are some exceptions — several Hispanic shops have been doing interactive for a while.
Espuelas predicts that there will be a very rapid evolution of advertisers; those who never advertised in English to Latinos starting to do so and those who traditionally only used television will now broaden their buys to include digital. He foresees a very significant growth in the overall marketing and communications investment pie, and happening disproportionately in digital media as opposed to traditional media.
Media Economics Group tracks advertising activity targeted to multicultural markets. They have been tracking online Hispanic advertising for more than 5 years. Their president, Carlos Pelay, has seen a notable increase in activity in terms of the number of active brands advertising to Latinos online. The major advertisers are present on the major portals. In terms of campaigns, Univision.com ranks number one, then AOL Latino, MSN Latino, Que Pasa, Batanga,Yahoo Telemundo, and StarMedia. For major campaigns the big advertisers are buying several portals at once.
For example, Batanga currently has over 100 advertisers, and Marroquin believes there are still a lot more advertisers that should be opening their eyes to Latinos online. There is a lot of economic action amongst Latino consumers that is making the cost barrier to enter the web significantly lower than what it was even two or three years ago. The numbers don’t lie. When asked about advertising success stories on Batanga’s site, Marroquin said, “At the risk of sounding very arrogant, there are too many to count. Our advertisers have been doing unbelievably well.”
That’s good news for Silvia Medina, and for all Latinos online.
[Editor’s Note: Each month, Juan Tornoe joins us on GrokDotCom to share his insights on Hispanic marketing trends. This article is the debut cover story for LATINO magazine, now available in limited edition print format. To learn more about how to receive LATINO magazine, contact Juan at Hispanic Trending.]
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Written by:Juan Tornoe
The Cost of Leaving Hispanics Lost in Translation
Talking about Latinos — especially Latinos online — is quite trendy these days. We’re online, alright, but the numbers aren’t as impressive as one might think. Currently, one in ten U.S. internet users are Latino. Meanwhile, the conservative estimate is that 18.8 million of the 44.3 million Hispanics living in the United States today are online.
But that’s changing — fast.
You’re probably aware that Latinos are the fastest growing minority in the U.S., yet most businesses don’t realize that by 2050, Latinos will be 29% of the entire American population.*
On top of that, their buying power is growing at even a faster pace. This combination of factors has to add up for businesses, especially online merchants.
But in the words of countless political pundits — who, if you turn on your TV right now, are analyzing our voting patterns — “the Hispanic population is not monolithic.” In fact, there are quite a few factors that, combined, illustrate completely different types of people, living different realities, yet all part of the Latino community. (Without getting too deep, these factors include: country of origin; heritage; generation; place of residence; socio-economic status; acculturation; assimilation; and language preference.)
Varias Personas
Consider the differences between these two individuals:
Alejandro Ramirez — 19 years old. Mexican-American. Bilingual (speaks both languages but reads and writes better in English). 2nd generation (born in the US from immigrant parents). Lives in Petaluma, CA, with his parents, who come from lower-middle class families in Torreon, Cuahuila. His family’s annual household income is $80,000. Although he was born and raised in the U.S. and is quite familiar with the cultural landscape, his parents have nurtured a strong love for Mexico and have ensured that he understands his family’s roots.
Fernando Zachniuk — 43 years old. Argentinean. Moved to the U.S. 10 years ago to start a business. He’s bilingual, but more comfortable in Spanish. He rents a condo in Boca Ratón. He comes from an upper-middle class Russian-Jewish family from Buenos Aires. He’s dating a Cuban-American divorcée who has a 10 year old son. Their annual household income is in the low $20o,000’s. He enjoys the amenities and comfort America has to offer, but he will always be an Argentinean at heart.
You wouldn’t market to them the same way, would you?
Exactly.
I could go on, referring to each single difference that defines Hispanic subgroups, but let’s focus on Language preference for the time being.
En Español, Por Favor
Since many Latinos, especially those of us online, are either English-dominant or fully bilingual, it’s easy for a company to say they’re already reaching out to Hispanics. After all, if they’re online and able to read the content, isn’t that enough?
At first glance, that logic makes sense. But the reality is this: Even if the Latino who comes to your website is fully bilingual and looking for exactly what you sell, they may prefer to read about your offering in Spanish.
Example: If I’m reading about marketing, I have no problem — and may even prefer — reading a website’s content in English. But when the same bald guy (me) is suddenly presented with a desire or need for medical or financial investment information, you can bet the farm (la granja) that I would prefer reading it in Spanish!
The situation that bilingual and Spanish-dominant Hispanics encounter in many cases is that there isn’t enough online content that speaks to them. They either can’t find it, or — more often — it’ so bad that they go back to the site’s English version.
It seems most organizations aren’t taking their outreach to Spanish-dominant Latinos seriously. Instead, they choose to feel safe in the knowledge that there is a translation of their site — no matter how awful. Others pay some attention to the fact that a translated version should actually make sense, but such translations are often way too literal and don’t account for cultural nuance.
“Getting all your ducks in row,” a common phrase in America, is used to describe the action of being fully organized prior to starting a new course of action, but there is no literal translation of it that wouldn’t make a Spanish speaker break out in laughter! Same goes for “Barking up the wrong tree,” “Two peas in a pod,” “The whole nine yards,” and so on.
Translate Concepts, Not Sentences
If you’re serious about reaching out to the entire Latino community, your site should be bilingual. And when it comes to bilingual sites, “transcreation” is what separates the men from the boys. (Hey, it’s just a figure of speech!)
To paraphrase Lingo24’s definition, transcreation is a form of translation, closer to copywriting, resulting in a text linguistically and culturally adapted for its intended audience. Transcreated material is supposed to have the same impact on the target audience as the original source text.
Transcreation is like taking the scenic route instead of the direct highway, so it requires a greater investment to fuel it. Still, the rewards for businesses — especially considering what the numbers tell us about current and future supply and demand — are plenty to justify the expense. It will most certainly take more time, money, and effort to end up with a transcreated site, but my advice to anyone marketing in the U.S. is that they shouldn’t risk not having one.
Back to Alejandro and Fernando for a moment, since this could be the crucial element that either converts them into clients or sends them elsewhere looking for what they need.
Let’s assume they visit your site today. How will you speak to them? Will you give them the choice to experience your content in their preferred language? Will the Spanish section of your site be a straightforward translation or a transcreation? If they navigate your site in Spanish, would they actually care if the language were stiff, confusing, or (worse) boring?
I assure you, they will care.
. . . .
* Pew Hispanic Center report on social and demographic trends
[Editor’s Note: Each month, Juan Tornoe joins us on GrokDotCom to share his insights on Hispanic marketing trends.]
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Written by:Juan Tornoe
The Search Engine’s Love Affair With Blogs
You’ve heard it time and time again: “Search engines love blogs.” You’ve read in one too many places that your website should include a blog in order to get better positioning in search engine results.
It’s not as simple as some may lead you to believe.
First, there’s the issue of relevance. A blog won’t magically give you a top ranking position on Google, Yahoo! or the like. The content your blog has, the frequency with which such content is being updated, and the amount of relevant incoming links to your site are some of the factors that will make-or-break the effectiveness of your weblog.
Don’t add a blog to your site if you’re not willing to consistently invest time and effort. An outdated blog will reflect the opposite image of whatever it is you want potential customers to know about your company.
Some bloggers are a bit obsessive-compulsive when it comes to “keeping it fresh.” No, you don’t need to add 10+ posts per day; what you need is consistency and relevance. You can update your blog daily, weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly, but you need to do it on a regular basis.
More importantly, write about your product/service/industry from as many angles as you can imagine. Link and opine on news and commentary related to your business. Doing so will benefit your customers as they try to wrap their heads around the issue (or problem) that your organization is able to solve.
If you are selling Piñatas, talk about piñatas; how they originated, the different materials/manufacturing techniques being utilized, market share, growth opportunities, or give examples of when and where it’s appropriate to have one. Show piñatas across the world, client testimonials, the most commonly used characters, licensing issues, what NOT to put inside them, the best sticks used to break them, how to liven any party, how to grab the kid’s attention during a birthday party . . . you get the picture.
Don’t go off on a weird tangent by addressing personal interests (outside of Piñata World) in your company blog. Have the need to do it? Start a personal blog and be as weird, nerdy, cool, public or anonymous as you wish to be. And, when it’s appropriate, link to your company’s blog.
Here’s a personal example of the true power or blogs: “Hi, my name’s Juan, and I’m an obsessive-compulsive blogger.” I have to blog on a daily basis about my passion, the Hispanic Community.
Every single post on my blog has something to do with Latinos; marketing and advertising, culture, religion, language, sports, business, buying power, politics, education, health. Bottom line: If it’s relevant information that will help you acquire a stronger grasp of Hispanics, you will find it on Hispanic Trending.
Through many years of non-stop blogging on the subject, I’ve been blessed to have established good relationships with many interesting people, from all walks of life, with the same interests as me.
One such individual is Dave Schechter, a news editor at CNN. In late September 2007, when interest regarding Hispanic Heritage Month was reaching its zenith, CNN and CNN.com launched a very insightful initiative, both on and off line, under the name, “Uncovering America,” with humongous coverage of everything Latino in a very professional and thorough manner. Early morning on September 28th, I received an email from Dave, requesting that “Uncovering America” be mentioned on Hispanic Trending. He even emphasized that coverage would be on both CNN and CNN.com.
Knowing that the entire coverage would be extremely relevant to the blog’s readers, I complied with my friend’s request and added a simple (and truly short) post that evening, with a link to “Uncovering America’s” landing page on CNN.com. Programming began on September 29th and everything was business as usual at Hispanic Trending. Being addicted beyond hope to my site’s analytics, on October 1st, I noticed abnormally high traffic numbers (trending towards 4 times the “normal” number of visitors for a single day). My analytics showed that the traffic spike was being generated through Google, specifically for the search term: “cnn.com/uncoveringamerica.”
I was fascinated by the phenomenon and kept digging deeper into it. I went to Google Trends (also captivating) and finally grasped the magnitude what was going on. For reasons beyond my control (I’m guessing the mention of the website on CNN’s TV coverage), “CNN.com/UncoveringAmerica” had reached, according to Google Trends, “On Fire” search term status that day; ranked #2, right between “veratril” and “aliens in america.”
Google Trends not only shows the most popular search terms of the day, it provides links to the news articles, blog posts and websites people are visiting after performing that specific search. There were no results under the news articles section, and my guess is that there wasn’t one article from any tracked media outlet that included the specific term being searched.
Under blog posts, I was pleasantly surprised to see my blog ranked number one. Then, looking closer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The actual CNN.com site had the #2 and #3 positions behind, you guessed it, my blog. People were searching for the term “cnn.com/uncovering america” and clicking on my blog. Once there, they found a prominent and clear link to the information they were looking for and off they went. Since that day, the blog’s readership — although not at the record level it reached — was permanently increased to a new level that otherwise would have taken much longer to achieve.
The power of a relevant and consistently updated blog is not to be taken lightly, nor is it for the faint of heart. Years and years of posting relevant information about the subject made Google consider the blog so relevant that, when this specific term was searched, they listed it “Numero Uno.”
Advertising investment: $0.00
Hispanic Trending didn’t reach this milestone because of a catchy name, a nice design, or by who I know; it was a combination of perseverance and focus over time.
Sure, a blog can do wonders to increase traffic to your site, but do you must consider it a long-term investment.
Has blogging helped your organization? Got any lesser-known examples of how blogging has or hasn’t helped business?
[Editor’s Note: This is Juan Tornoe’s first guest post for GrokDotCom. He’ll be joining us at least once a month to share his insights about blogging and online Hispanic marketing trends.]
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Written by:Juan Tornoe
