Multi-Lingual Support

Did you know that the United States does not have an official language? Only 78% of our population speaks English exclusively at home, and that remaining 22% is by no means a small number—it represents over 72 million Americans! More than half of these are Spanish-speakers, of which the US has the second-most in the world, only outranked by Mexico. All businesses can benefit from a deep-dive into your PMA demographics and determining if a substantial amount of your potential customers could be reached by marketing in more than one language.

Once you’ve determined which language(s) to feature, you’ll want to research that demographic’s culture and habits. For example, Hispanic mobile phone owners have higher rates of using their phones to access the internet, buying apps and consuming digital media than all phone owners in general. The most active of all ethnic groups on social media sites are Hispanic adults. Knowing this, you may want to tweak your media mix for Spanish content specifically in a different way than your overall strategy—focusing a little more heavily on social media and less on broadcast or print.

You do want to be careful in this arena with your intent. Your goal in producing multi-lingual content is to make more of your targeted demographic feel included and welcomed, and that has to be genuine. The easiest way to come across as disingenuous is to use non-regional talent or poor translations. For example, there are over 22 Spanish-speaking countries, many with diverse regions featuring their own different dialects, vocabulary and slang. It’s important to know which areas your target demographics come from, as this differs all around the US. If your local Hispanic population is primarily from Mexico and Puerto Rico, they’re not going to identify as strongly with a commercial featuring somebody speaking Spanish with a Columbian accent. Many businesses lean upon their bilingual staff to help translate written content, but a lot of fluent Spanish-speakers in the US didn’t learn Spanish in school. If they learned it primarily from speaking with others, their knowledge of grammar and spelling isn’t automatically going to be up to the standards of professional publication, and Spanish speakers regularly exposed to written Spanish content can tell the difference immediately. It takes a delicate hand and a lot of careful work to make sure you’re genuinely welcoming a group and not coming across as uncaringly checking a diversity box.