One clear advantage social media offers is its ability to reach audiences globally – expanding the reach for all brands with global locations or ecommerce offerings.
What do Latino consumers want? Let them tell you!
The Latin American market is major. According to eMarketer, ecommerce sales alone are projected to surpass $66 billion by 2017 – with Brazil, Mexico and Argentina leading the pack. There’s a lot of potential – particularly for brands in line with those in the top categories in the region: Beer, Retail Brands, Communication Providers and Banking brand took the top five spots in the BrandZ Top 50 Most Valuable Latin American Brands report.
But no two consumers are the same – even within the same ethnicity or geographical region. That’s why it’s no longer a good idea to rely on demographics as your sole indicator of consumer preference. That’s not to say you should ignore demographics, however, as they are an excellent jumping off point, and you’ve got to start somewhere.
For example, if your previous analysis tells you the bulk of your audience is in Brazil, then naturally you’ll want to focus your attention there as a baseline. But what if exploring Facebook Topic Data shows you women in Argentina are speaking positively about your brand on that platform? Then it’s time to look at other social data and compare your findings.
Ultimately you know that all Latina Millennials don’t like the same things, and neither do all Latino males in their 40’s – no matter where they’re from. And with 20 countries and over 600 million people across Latin America, there’s bound to be a lot of variance even within the groups of consumers who do share similar interests. That’s true of any audience.
So how do you reach them?
You use the information they share on social to learn what makes them tick. Forget about telling them all that’s great about your brand – they don’t care, or if they do, they know where to find more information on their own. What you want to know is what inspires their passion in every aspect of their life – work, play, friends, family, and causes they care about.
You also want to know what brands and products they love – that means beyond yours.
And then what?
Appeal to their passions
If you want to talk to them about the things they care most about (and you do), you’ve got to narrow the field a bit – because personalization is still the name of the game, no matter the audience. You can’t craft compelling messaging for consumers without understanding what they’re all about.
Instead of the large demographic groups of old, you’re now looking to create multiple smaller groups of feel-alike consumers using psychographic information – i.e., attitudes and behaviors.
This is what our Audience 3D™ tool is designed for – segmenting social users by common interests. You might find segments like: stay-at-home moms (and dads!) who watch the same telenovela, fitness enthusiasts who love cooking healthy food at home after a workout, or anything you can think of.
And you can answer questions like whether the same messaging applies for drinkers of Brazil’s number one beer (Skol) who are native to Brazil, versus Brazilians living in or visiting the U.S., or elsewhere.
The important thing to note is how the segments you discover blur age and gender lines to connect you to audiences you might have otherwise neglected. We’ll get into more specifics about tailoring target audience size and groupings in a future post.
Are you talking to me?
For now, the important thing to remember is this: Social is a consumer-centric playing field. You’ve got to talk to consumers about what they care about, and speak their language. That could mean English – or Spanish in this case – whatever is the native language of your audience.
NetBase’s platform is fluent in 199 languages, but we’re not just talking about primary languages. Bilingual audiences are important to capture as well – and accurately identifying that audience comes with its own set of challenges (one we’ll be exploring in-depth in an upcoming post).
And you’ve also got to be fluent in the languages of social – i.e., slanguage and emojis.
When you’re limited to 140 characters, shortcuts matter – especially when you have a lot of emotions to share, as social users do. If you can’t decipher slanguage and emojis, your insights will have huge gaps, and you’ll be missing out on who-knows-how-many potential customers in your messaging.
But with the right tools, and a little bit of know-how, you don’t have to miss out on anything. You can become a skilled traveler across the diverse landscape of social media – able to connect with users whether they’re in Latin America or anywhere else.
Ready to begin your own social world tour? Ask us for more info about how A3D works!
Image from openDemocracy
The post How Social Listening Enables Brands to Reach Latino Consumers appeared first on NetBase.