It’s easy to get blindsided by the conventional processes of brand building, and forget what marketing is really about—customers. After all, a business’s first and foremost goal is to fulfill customer needs.
However, now that nearly every industrial sector is focused on delivering the same solutions to the same target market, you need to direct your attention toward the customer wants too.
Amongst a multitude of variables which dictate the success of addressing customer wants is cultural relevancy.
The U.S. has one of the most diverse populations is the world, thus the level of authenticity in ethic marketing is crucial. A misstep in one aspect can break your business.
Empowering Values
Cultural relevancy is not related to referencing mainstream media to get the material you need. Cultural relevancy involves the core values, the roots, the traditions that dictate how multicultural customers view and interact with the brands they are interested in.
Take Hispanic marketing for instance. As of now, Hispanics make up over 17% of the total US population. When marketing, businesses should focus on creating their ads in Spanish, right?
Wrong. Roughly two-thirds of the Hispanic population has varying levels of proficiency in the English language. Most US-born Hispanics have little to no knowledge of Spanish, and a major part of this population is made up of millennials.
These numbers and facts may seem to be a drop in the ocean compared to other details regarding product information or customer services, but they are, in fact, the very basis of directing the success of your marketing efforts.
Dedicate time and effort towards marketing, and pay special attention to the minor details when your marketing is focused on a multicultural audience. Here are some ways to incorporate cultural relevancy in your brand:
¥ Define The Target Culture
A national ad, created referring to multicultural population residing in Los Angeles will not have the same impact the people in St. Louis. Either create separate types of ad material relevant to different regions, or create a one-to-all message that resonates with your entire target market.
¥ Incorporate Traditional Values
Respect your customers’ history and their core values. One of the most controversial points of a multicultural marketing gone wrong is that the business either missed out on keeping cultural values intact in their ads, or mixed them up between ethnicities.
¥ Combine Dialects
Create ads which contain both the national language, and the dominant language of your market. It not only connects your business your business with its market, but helps connect other marketing groups with your market.
¥ Seek Out A Cultural Specialist
Don’t rely on what you think you know. Don’t rely on your in-house marketing team’s insights either. Work with an ethnic marketing agency; with enough history, experience, research and resources related to cultural relevance at their disposal, they will take the right initiative when planning and executing campaigns.
GoDiversity lends a professional helping hand to businesses in becoming culturally relevant. We streamline the processes involved in reaching out to the multicultural markets by focusing on relevant information and tools.