Moderator and first presenter: Barbara Coll - WebMama.com Wants to talk about the long and short term look at this market segment. Offers the opportunity to ask questions at anyone's convenience. Will talk about the buying power opportunities, for those who are advertising in Spanish, reaching out to the Spanish marketing segment online. There has been a major growth in the buying power of Hispanics in the US as well as growth overseas. 10% of disposable income by 2007 will be from Hispanic community. Recent study by Media Channel shows that 82% of Hispanic online users made a purchase in the last year. Example: Pedro Martinez of NY Mets. 25% of pro baseball players are Latino. 2 weeks ago, the Mets decided to focus on the Spanish marketplace. They realized that the original community which was the Jewish community no longer lives near the stadium and is now Hispanic. Shows a search for "boletos de beisbol ny mets." Results (mostly English) do not reflect search listings in Spanish, and PPC ads are in English too. Same thing with "boletos de beisbol" one of the top organic results has Spanish content indexed as description, but the title tag still says official site of MLB is in English.
English enters into media for Latinos, but still need to focus on supplying Spanish content. Search advertising industry milestones: First SES Spanish session was Chicago in December 2003. Now IAB has a Hispanic committee. More focus now on standards. Online portal milestones: AOL Latino, Yahoo Espanol, MSN Latino, Yahoo purchases Terespondo in April 2005, the largest PPC network in South America. (https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002142.html). Recognition of the second language of the US gives credit to the launch of the new MSN search for having a tab for Espanol right on their search home page. For Google, you can do this, but you have to go to personalized home page. Problems: Is the search entered a typo or another language? "Camara" still interpreted as a typo instead of being Spanish. Difficult problem to solve for SE's. "Real estate in Denver" search: Hispanic market is fastest growing home sales in this market. All organic, 80% of the website (sorry missed it) traffic came through the Internet. Another thing to remember is that kws are different in another language.
Lucas Morea - Latinedge
Stared with monografias.com, now one of top 5 Spanish websites in terms of traffic, achieved thanks to basic SEO and original content. Wants to make an emphasis on the online to offline relationship. According to Jupiter, each dollar generated online, travel companies received an additional $5 in revenue from research that came online. "hoteles in Acapulco" search at Yahoo gives the option to change to English, but displays organic Spanish results. He also tried some searches at Google Mexico which showed that the total number of results found were approximately the same, but if the search is done in English, there is about 6 times the results.
Paid search landscape in Spanish? CPC and volume are both fraction of the cost of comparable English searches. Even though it is less volume, still certainly "worth it."
User sophistication: long tail example. In English the difference between one word searches versus multiple words: 3 times as many multiple word searches. In Spanish, the opposite exists where one word searches still dominate, but not 3 times as many. This reflects how Spanish users are still learning how to search.
How do they get on the net? In South America, many many people get online in an Internet Cafe, which makes it less likely to make a purchase online due to security concerns. How do they buy offline? In the US, phone sales can happen, and more accustomed to credit cards. In Latin America, cash is preferred. Human contact is very important to Spanish market. Must increase points of contact with potential clients. Need to provide email support. Users want to know that there are people on the other end. Good idea to reply with a name instead of just a company. If you can provide live chat: even better. Call center or support service very good too. Good way to make online work in Spanish market is by using lead generation forms in order to make the sale offline. People follow up filling online form. Another very successful marketing campaign has been email marketing to optin network in Mexico (only method used), which resulted in selling out of 10k units of stock, all offline sales.
Once again, important to increase points of contact, by adding a phone number to a site, sales increased by 54%. Also seeing the number there and knowing they could call someone if needed helped increase online conversions from 22% to 37% in one specific country of Hispanic origin. Other statistics point that the addition of the call center has increased sales. Conclusion: the more offline capabilities you have, the better you will do. Even with the perception of offline presence, people will be more likely to buy. Also, make sure your expectations are moderated because it is a small market. Goal should be considered as ROI of Zero in order to break even and gain future clients. ROI will increase thereafter. Make sure the site is consistent with your offers. Start right away: get ready to build reputation. Build landing pages in both Spanish and English unless targeting all Spanish speaking company. Provide alternate forms of payment.
Ignacio "Nacho" Hernandez - iHispanic.com (note this is a true leader in Spanish SEM. if this is your market, he, Lucas or Barbara Coll are three of the most knowledgeable people in this field, in my humble opinion). Nacho handed out a recent white paper discussing this topic. It is available at his website.
Announced by Barbara that Nacho has just convinced Jupiter Media to hold an all-Spanish conference in the near future: SES Latino 2006 in Miami, FL July 10-11th, 2006. (Applause)
Used an example of the empty chairs in the room to describe how you have a great opportunity to gain market share where your competition is not present. Why the Hispanic market? Covered by Barbara, but showed that total Hispanic population is 434 million, with an online pop of 61 million! Myth: US Hispanic don?t have credit cards. This is totally incorrect. Credit Card use among Hispanics had grown from 48% to 57% from 2002 to 2004. 13 Million online US Hispanics spent 5.6 Billion in 2003. Recent study (https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002254.html) showed that 5 of top destination sites for Hispanic users were search sites. Should look into paid inclusion and PPC. Focus on creative of landing pages and ads, both ?en espanol.? PPC issues: although most niche industries are still unexplored territory, competitive kws in Spanish have clicks cost rising 10-25%. Be prepared to see higher page abandonment if landing pages and process flow are poorly created. Be careful to not use pictures of non-Hispanic persons (blonde, blue-eyed people on the site, for example). Conversions may occur offline, but prepare to offer alternate payment methods. SEO strategies. If you already have Spanish content, then get it indexed first. Gave example of Univision.com now having 1.3 million pages already at Google. Y! only 119,000 and even less in MSN. Search for ?casas neuvas in san diego? at Google shows a good first result, but another listing shows terrible title tag, snippets and missing keywords in url. What language should I use? In South America and Central America, you should use Spanish, but in the US, make both versions.
Case study about mexgrocer.com focusing on Spanish keywords used by Spanish users, such as for example ?salsa verde Mexicana" and bilingual landing pages for keywords that may be reached by Anglo or Hispanic users. They used to have mexgrocer in English and mexsuper.com in Spanish, and they were ?butting heads? for some terms. Careful when doing kw research-often backwards in Spanish from the English version. Marks in words should be dropped. Misspelling is very important because 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics start to forget the language, for example ?Pozole? original spelling vs. ?Posole? which is now searched more. Sea
Search Engine real estate.. Shows a great example of hw they have dominated the top 5 organic listings as well as paid listings for a particular term. They are using a distributor?s site that has been optimized for the same term, and fulfilling orders through mexgrocer as well as their alliance with Amazon to gain real estate from 43% to 86% above the fold. Build link popularity?same rules apply: high traffic and relevant sites only. Use press releases with PRWeb and AmbosMedios in Spanish. Local search is going to be very big in the Hispanic market. Apparently 71% of Hispanic households are in just 20 metro areas. An example San Diego/Tijuana shows 41.4 million dollars per day are spent in San Diego by total defined market. An example would be to shop for ?Car? keywords in San Diego. English CPC $3.43, $2.80, $2.20 and $2.30 versus same keywords in Spanish .22, .21, .35, .16...a 94% savings! Results=Higher ROI. Don't panic, use tools such as Google, Yahoo Search Marketing and Terespondo while it's still available (https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002080.html) to find keywords. If you already have Spanish content, check your log files for kw's used to find. Look at SERPs for other relevant keywords.
10 tips: Have realistic objective strategy. Be committed to the market. Do a readiness assessment. Set aside enough resources. Do research as to what language to use. Use effective creative. Start with paid programs. Remember that organic results more competitive. Test. Hispanic market is not one size fits all. If you are ready to commit to this market, don't just target TO Hispanics, target AS Hispanics.
Q&A
"What about translations that are done poorly or translated into standard Spanish when the site targets Latin America. Would it be wise to translate it into regional Spanish. Would they think you are spamming?"
B: says "no"
L: Spanish from Spain is very different, and can be easily seen by Spaniards . There is such a thing as "neutral Spanish," which is what he would recommend translating-to.
Nacho: their services provide a process known as "standardization of the language." This is very intensive translation and works well by taking translations that have been done in multiple Spanish dialects and adapting them to a more common Latin American Spanish.
"How to start when trying to setup a call center in SA, for example?"
L: There are a lot of outsourced call centers that can do this.
"Any statistics regarding income level for local areas?"
N: Buy the Synovate Report (costs $1,000, but worth it)
Some attendees gave example of success stories based on the recommendations given by the 3 presenters in previous SES shows.
