The importance of targeting the U.S. Hispanic market with multilingual content

The Hispanic market is the fastest and largest growing segment of the U.S. population, and there are even areas in the U.S. where Spanish is the predominant language. Also their buying power is growing rapidly. As the importance of targeting the U.S. Hispanic market with multilingual content is becoming more important, you should consider multilingual content development for your website.

According to research done by Nielsen, the U.S. Hispanic population accounts for over 52 million people. Over 60 percent of them is under age 35, and 75 percent is under age 45. Given that the most frequent users of the Internet are those aged 25 to 49 years old, the Hispanic population can be considered a substantial and important target group that should not be included in a homogeneous group of U.S. consumers.

As most U.S. Hispanics, also called Latinos, stay true to their cultural heritage, about 35 million of them still speak their mother language Spanish at home. Research done by the ‘People en Español’ Hispanic Opinion Tracking, shows that more a large group of U.S. Hispanics can be assigned to a group that is least assimilated, living culturally isolated and in Hispanic dominant cultures. This group, which accounts for about 55% of Hispanics in the U.S., is best targeted in their native language.

Considering international business, creating websites that actually connect with the Hispanic culture and language is considered a necessity. Multilingual content development helps you to achieve this. It needs to be implemented as part of a total strategy and should be aligned with the company’s strategies for search engine optimization, pay per click, and social media. Some examples of practices for multilingual websites:

Language – it is advised to entirely translate or let your website translated rather than including a machine or using automatic translations.
Culture – in order to understand the cultural considerations for your target market, it is advised to conduct some user research before setting up a multilingual website.
Access – the user should be able to find your multilingual website via global navigation on the top right of every page in English.
Users’ expectations – make sure to clearly communicate to your visitor when he is going to navigate to English-only areas, an external website, or when specific software or a special program is required to access certain pages.
Online marketing – in order to reach the desired market, you should develop and execute a targeted multilingual online marketing strategy, including social media campaigns.

Hopefully, you understand the importance of targeting the U.S. Hispanic market and how to implement multilingual content to your website. Multilingual content development supports brand credibility and lead generation campaigns that can cover many geographical areas and help your company reach new markets. If you already have a website but you don’t have time to translate it to the languages with which you want to target your market, professional writers and translators can write multilingual content for you.