Getting To The Top Of Google: The Top 7 Myths Of SEO

Posted on June 30, 2009
Filed Under marketing, search engine optimization | Leave a Comment

SEO is hot.

It’s no surprise why. SEO – search engine optimization – is what you do to your web site to get it on page one of Google and the other search engines. That matters. A lot. Get on page one and your site gets viewed and read and business follows. Get on page five hundred or even on page five, and your web site and your business may as well be the Invisible Man. Your site gets no traffic and your investment goes down the drain.

But what exactly is search engine optimization? What (if anything) can you do to get your web site to rank better?

Well, there are so many things you can do to optimize your web site that that isn’t an easy question to answer. A book could be written about it. Several have.

But the rock bottom basics are that search engine optimization involves modifying and re-writing the code under the hood of the web site, and the text that people read on the surface, so that they both are more agreeable to search engines, and the ranking criteria they go by, than the code and text of competing pages. Search engines also rank sites according to how many sites link to those sites and (to a lesser degree) vice versa. Optimize the site code itself, optimize the text content, and optimize incoming elements such as links and directory listings. Put them together and do them right and they kick your page to the top.

I plan to write some coming columns on all three areas, so stay tuned. But the first thing you need to learn about SEO isn’t any of the above. The first thing you need to learn is to unlearn some of the myths surrounding it.

For instance?

1. “Google Is The Only Game In Town”

Afraid not. True, Google is the 800-pound gorilla. But Yahoo is a 500-pound gorilla. MSN is a 300-pound gorilla. And there are a whole score of 200-and-under-pound gorillas out there who are pretty hefty monkeys themselves! Contrary to myth, not everyone uses Google. Google always accounts for more than half of searches, Yahoo generally comes in under a quarter, and MSN and Ask.com usually get above five percent and below five percent respectively. But let’s be realistic. One study (last year, no less)indicates that there were roughly eight billion internet searches being done per month. Well, if there are over there are roughly two billion searches being done on Yahoo monthly, half a billion on MSN and Ask, what sane advertiser is going to ignore it?

On top of this, some sites that show up on Yahoo and elsewhere don’t show up at all on Google. And vice versa. Sites rank differently on different engines. The site that appears on page one of Google may be on page four of Yahoo and on page two of MSN. That’s not really good news if Yahoo and company make up a third of the market.

Then there are the niche search engines – Cuil, Dogpile, digg, del.icio.us, and literally hundreds of others. And nationalist search engines in Russian Cyrillic, Chinese, Bosnian. Compared to Google, the number of searches done through them are microscopic – which is to say, in the millions. But if you have a target market that uses them, do you optimize for them or not? Of course you optimize for them.

And – no less important – markets and searches vary from search engine to search engine. Some markets uses non-Google search engines than the Google search engine. Why? No one really knows. But they do, and it matters. Did you know that one study shows more people over 55 use MSN than any other search engine? That’s relevant if you’re targeting that demographic. Did you know that over 48% of people clicking ads in MSN buy, as opposed to roughly 42% in Google? Or that 43.1% of women click such ads as opposed to only 36% of men? Relevant again, if your market is women.

A lot more people may be searching Yahoo for your product of service this month than are looking for it through Google. Or not – you need to do the research and see. Just because there are multiple search engines doesn’t mean searches are not evenly distributed among those engines. Far from it! What good is it if Google covers over half of all searches overall, if for whatever reason only fifty people a day search Google for the special item or service that you offer and two or three or five times that number search Yahoo or MSN for it?

Yes, it is good if people are searching Google for something you offer, and it’s even better if you rank high when they do. But if you’re on page one of Google, you’re not necessarily exploiting your market to its fullest, and if you’re not on page one of Google, you’re not dead in the water. You can do very well indeed focusing purely on the other engines. You should work for a good ranking on every engine that’s relevant, of course. But if the majority of searches are being done on non-Google engines, the last thing you should do is ignore them. Work on getting good rankings wherever rankings count.

2. “SEO is only about your web site.”

No. You can optimize your press release and get it on page one. You can optimize your Craigslist ad and get it on page one. You can optimize the articles you write, you can optimize your blog entries and your commentaries on other people’s blog entries, you can optimize your Amazon book reviews, your eBay auctions, your Adsense ads – in fact, you can optimize just about anything you put out onto the web. There are things to can do to optimize even images and audio and video to make sure they come up higher in searches. And you can use all these non-web-site items all to build page rank for you site, and build links and generate traffic that boosts your web site ranking too.

So while the web site is still the main element in most all internet marketing campaign, SEO is far from being web-site-only. If you’re not using it as a critical part of your whole internet marketing efforts, you’re throwing away one of the best tools in the arsenal.

3. “Our company’s name is on page one so we’re already optimized.”

This one makes me wince.

What people new to search engine searches do not always realize is that people search with terms that they use, not terms that the company uses. If someone needs a Rochester copywriter, for instance, they don’t type in ‘David Pascal’ or ‘www.davidpascal.com’ into Google. They don’t know who ‘David Pascal’ is or anything about www.davidpascal.com. They type in ‘rochester copywriter’ because that’s the location and the service they’re looking for. I come up #1 because my page has been optimized not for my name but for the terms people use to search out my services.

It’s very easy to optimize the (fictitious) ‘John Q. Public & Associates Law Partners of Pittsford NY’ because there’s only one such company with that name. There’s no competition for the phrase. But if people needing the services of the John Q. Public firm are typing in ‘DWI lawyers Rochester’ or ‘bankruptcy Pittsford’ or ‘divorce help Monroe County area’ and the John Q. Public pages are not optimized for those exact phrases, the John Q. Public site may not turn up on page one or even on any page. Where does the potential client doing the searching go? They go to the firm that optimized for the right keywords.

Finding the right search keywords is a subject in itself. Amateurs, the public, and sites designed by guess. Be smart: don’t guess. I use Wordtracker and other keyword analysis services to ferret out what people are searching for, and it can be anything but intuitive.

Imagine that you own a pizzeria. Obviously you would want to optimize your pizzeria web site for the term pizzeria, no? That’s sounds sensible, doesn’t it? I went to Wordtracker to see. The term ‘pizzeria’ was searched for 46 times that day. Not bad. The misspelled version, ‘pizzaria’, was searched for 44 times that day. The term ‘pizza’ was searched for 5,191 times that day. So optimize for ‘pizza’ and you will have over a hundred to one more searches, literally thousands of more searches, daily.

You can overdo it in the other direction too. Say that the John Q. Public law firm specializes in divorce cases, so they want to get to page one for ‘divorce’. Sound reasonable? It may sound reasonable but it’s a mistake. Optimize for a bland general term and you get a hundred million competing pages to beat, a few of which are professionally optimized to the hilt. And if, insanely, you pay your optimization firm the exorbitant amounts needed to get the site to page one in that situation, what you get is often not the attention of the focused target market you want, but traffic from millions of page viewers who will never use your product of services.

Yes, the term ‘divorce’ may be searched by local clients who want a divorce. But it can also be used by a globe full of people who aren’t interested in legal help but who want counseling pages that help them to get over a divorce. Or that want to hear about Madonna’s latest divorce. Or that want divorce attorneys in Alaska or Nepal, but click on John Q. Public’s link and call because they glanced casually over the John Q. Public site and missed the location. It’s a great way to run up cell phone charges and overload your inbox with email inquiries from people who will never ever use your services. It’s an awful way to use SEO.

4. “SEO Means An Ugly Site”.

Wrong. In fact very wrong. Search engines, it’s true, have no more aesthetic sense than a rock or Arnold Schwartzeneggar in Terminator. They can’t tell pretty from ugly or (much, much more important) whether the visual elements of your site support and further the overall goal of your site, and the brand image you want to project.

But let’s be fair. They don’t insist on a bad or inappropriate visual look. It’s just as easy to have a beautiful, memorable, right-on-target look as an clunky geeky one.

You don’t have to have a good-looking site to end up high in the search results, and that’s the origin of this myth. SEO experts are hired to get you on Page One, not to make you look good once you’re there. So as a rule they don’t. Why should they? They’re not designers. It’s not their job. The price the client pays, of course, is a less attractive less appealing site, which results in a lower overall conversion rate of viewers to buyers. It’s too bad. The moral you should take away from this? Good design and bad SEO is bad. Bad design and good SEO is bad. Good design and good SEO is good. In fact, it’s the best.

How do you get it? Cross-pollinate: if at all possible, is to get good designers, and people who know the marketing implications of design, and people who are SEO savvy too, and see that they work together and work well together. If you can find all three in one tight agency or even better and more affordably, in one person, you’ve really struck gold.

Another reason for the myth of ugly SEO is, of course, Flash. Search engines do not like Flash, and many web designers and all agencies love Flash. Its effects are spectacular and its look can be stunning, it’s trendy, it’s cool, and people who do it can often charge a mint for it (even though “Skip Intro” is still the second-most clicked button on the internet). So Flash providers invariably howl. But what you hear is Freudian denial: Flash does have its virtues, but it’s never an SEO plus.

Can you optimize even for Flash? Yes you can. Can you get even a Flash site on Page One? Yes. But it’s like teaching a pig to do the Macarena. It’s possible but it just ain’t easy. In fact it’s so not easy that clients and designers should pause and reflect. If there’s a truly critical reason to use Flash, then your search engine optimization efforts will just have to work with it and work around it. But if there isn’t? Think twice before using it. Eliminate Flash (and reduce Javascript) and your site’s rise to the top will be far faster and far easier.

But don’t think that a web site optimized to the max must be ugly as sin. Or that if it’s attractive to search engines, then it has to be repulsive to humans. That’s not the case. Optimized sites can made into be things of beauty. And pretty easily too.

5. “SEO Means Text, Text, Text”

Wrong. Not, mind you, entirely wrong. Here it’s a case more of misunderstanding than myth. Sites optimized for search engine searches do tend to have more text than non-optimized ones. No surprise there. Search engines search for content, and while quantity doesn’t have an absolute edge over quality, for search engines the amount of content is definitely a factor. Is having a lot of text the same thing as being text-heavy, however? That depends on what you mean by text-heavy, and on how smart your content layout person is.

Pages you need to scroll down five miles to read, pages with no images or white space, pages with fly-speck type sizes, and paragraphs stretching one side of the screen to the next – these are marketing poison. They may be rich in keywords, but they won’t be rich in readership. Studies are definitive: people just won’t wade through text unless the text is eye-friendly. Search engines may give them a high ranking, but search engines don’t squint or suffer eye strain. Search engines don’t actually read at all, which is one key to understanding them: they just assess keyword density and the like.

But, as with design, search engines are not hostile to readability. If you make the font elegant and large enough to be readable, ease and guide the eye with white space, use sub-heads, sprinkle in an occasional image and a caption or two, break the same amount of content up into multiple on-topic pages instead of one mammoth catch-all, and in general arrange your content so that the visitor can go right to the information he or she wants – then you can have your cake and eat it too. In fact search engines like topic-specific pages and well-laid-out site maps. You can be rich in content without being heavy with it. And search engines will respond.

This myth holds that SEO is all about copy – the text on the site. That’s a major factor, true. But anyone you says content alone will get you on page one is just plain wrong. You can have the best content on the net and get booted off Google totally if you violate certain guidelines – guidelines that are anything but obvious. Already legendary is the story of Google booting BMW’s site out their search engine results for over a month. Their site violated Google guidelines. Content be damned: out they went.

6. “SEO Beats PPC.”

Two of the worst SEO myths are PPC – pay-per-click – myths. One is that organic search results are better than paid, partly because ‘nobody clicks on ads’.

First, people click on ads. According to one study, thirty percent of internet users click on pay-per-click ads. Granted, 30% is not as good as 70%, but it ain’t bad. Who wants to pass up 30% of the market, much less a global market?

And understand something: the people who click on an ad know it’s an ad. So even if they’re not completely pre-sold, they’re at least predisposed to listen to a pitch and buy. The people who don’t click on ads because they’re ads do not want to buy. That’s their privilege, but that doesn’t mean they’re good traffic. Would you rather present to ten people interested in your product who made the effort to walk in your door, or ninety who aren’t interested in buying and who avoid you like the plague?

Another myth is that when you use pay-per-click, you lose money, because you pay for each click. Since you don’t pay for organic clicks, you don’t lose money. Big savings! Sorry: big losses. The idea that SEO is cheaper than PPC is a joke. It can take months of labor-intensive work to build the linkages and code revisions and develop the content to really build organic SEO. It’s worth it, and even little changes can have big positive effects, but it’s neither easy nor cheap. Who pays for it? The client.

The client pays for each click with pay-per-click, but does it really cost more? Sometimes it might. Sometimes it might not. It’s not that easy a call, and it’s wisest to experiment. Don’t get me wrong – better organic results through SEO are good. But pay-per-click results are good too. I personally prefer to develop them together for a client. Better to get on Page One with pay-per-click today and stay there till organic SEO results catch up later, than to put money in and stay hidden in the wings unnoticed for months.

7. “Get On Page One And You Stay On Page One.”

No. Another strange view I hear from people is that once a site is optimized, the owner can take a snooze and let it run on automatic for the next year or two. Wrong! In the first place, Google changes its tune more times than a politician addressing different constituencies. Google’s infamous algorithm for determining Page Rank is altered incessantly and at the drop of the hat. Everyone wants to crack Google, and Google knows it, and Google does its best to frustrate them, by keeping its criteria secret and changing them frequently. So the rules that put you on Slot One Page One today can put you on Slot Two Page Two tomorrow.

You need to track such changes, and to keep your eyes open for upcoming changes too. It’s more than just Google’s ever-changing algorithm. Unaltered sites tend to gradually drop by themselves. Search engines likes frequently updated content, and if ‘optimized’ means ‘static’ if won’t stay optimal for very long. On addition, new competitors moving in work actively to get the top slots and push existing competitors down. And markets themselves change! There’s many a search for ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘foreclosure’ in dim economic times like the current Great Recession. But as the economy recovers, searches for those keywords will drop as searches for other keywords mount. Sites optimized for those keywords will need to change their strategies.

What to do? Monitor always. Tweak when needed. Rest assured, it will be needed.

There’s one more myth about SEO that must be mentioned, but I give it a special place of its own:

“Getting on page one is what it’s all about.”

This one is special because it’s the worst of them all, and because it’s a myth that stretches far beyond mere SEO misunderstandings. It’s the kind of error that produces bad marketing across the board. Because it’s not enough to get on page one. It’s what you present on page one once you’re there that counts. Sure, SEO can get more people to see your site. But if they don’t like what they see, your marketing dollar is worse than wasted – it may well backfire. And then your whole business can suffer.

One of the dirty secrets of marketing and advertising is that it can not only fail. It can backfire. A poorly marketed or advertised product or service can not only not get business, it can alienate people and actually lose business. What your offer is and the way you present it is at least as important as where you present it. SEO has to be seen and integrated into the bigger marketing picture, and in that picture, the product is the hero. Your product (or service) has to be desirable, it has to be addressed to an interested target market, the price or service has to be perceived as affordable, and so on. The best marketing strategy is to have a superior product.

This mistake is the worst mistake and you see it all the time. SEO firm after SEO firm promises to get the client’s site a higher ranking, but all too few look at whether that higher ranking impacts positively long-term on the client’s brand image or reputation or bottom line. Even initially higher conversions and sales can be deceptive, as with the recent Coke campaign. Marketing was deployed to get more people to try it; people tried it and didn’t like it; and thanks to the widespread word-of-mouth, sales plummeted disastrously. Back to Classic Coke.

SEO needs to be part of a greater marketing perspective if it’s to yield maximum results. Getting more attention is good, but what that attention is directed to is of critical importance. The product or service is always central, and good products and good services generate buzz naturally. SEO can help facilitate that. It can’t create value if the value is not there.

Don’t misunderstand. The value that it can add is not small. But it needs to used with care. Optimizing for search engines reaches deep into site layout, deep into underlying code, deep into text content, and deep into many of the social aspects of maintaining an online presence. It can be tricky, and, yes, you need professional help. There are any number of bizarre, quirky, highly technical issues involved. They’re not insurmountable and they can be learned. Unless you’re prepared to drop whatever else you’re doing for six months and crack the books, don’t bother. Get a professional.

But it’s not all about technique, or even about getting on page one. There are matters of judgment too. Just make sure when you use someone it’s someone who know that, and who knows marketing as well as just SEO.


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David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.

Ogilvy On YouTube

Posted on May 29, 2009
Filed Under advertising | Leave a Comment

I still remember the regret I felt when I first read David Ogilvy’s Confessions Of An Advertising Man. My hopes to one day write the definitive book on advertising copywriting were dashed. Ogilvy had said it all, and said it perfectly. There was nothing more to add.

Soon after, DOS turned into Windows, and writing and advertising and a lot else turned topsy turvy. Now there was email and web content and SEO copywriting, new territory Ogilvy had never trod. It looked like there were new things to say after all.

But to this day, no copywriter said them with more grace and wit of David Ogilvy — a Scottish door-to-door salesman, a chef in Paris ducking the eggs of his culinary overseer, a social worker in Edinburgh slums, an assistant to Sir William Stephenson in British Security, and the man who (after failing at farming among the Pennsylvania Amish) went sadly on to found Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, one of the largest, most notable advertising agencies in the world.

You would not have expected a man with a background as a Gallup research associate to write like an angel. But he did. And his two classics, Confessions Of An Advertising Man and Ogilvy On Advertising positively glitter with wise counsel for the aspiring copywriter. Consider:

Ogilvy has been called the greatest advertising genius of all time, and that’s an exaggeration. Few of his ideas were entirely original. Claude Hopkins and John Caples beat him to the punch in many a classic insight.

But while Ogilvy may not have pioneered his views, he gave them classical expression, and, even better, embodied them in a set of model ads that remain unsurpassed, including what may be the greatest print ad of them all, “At 60 Miles An Hour The Loudest Noise In This New Rolls-Royce Comes From The Electric Clock”.

And for all his commitment to research and ‘reason-why’ copy, Ogilvy also subtly midwifed the birth of Branding with such classic campaigns as “The Man In The Hathaway shirt”, and Schweppes, featuring the bearded icon of Commander Schweppes himself and the unique benefit of ’schweppervessence’.

There’s more to say about David Ogilvy. But as always, he said it best himself. And we’re fortunate enough to hear it from the man directly now, thanks to an hour of Ogilvy in the Sixties graciously posted to YouTube.

Click, reader, and learn and enjoy:


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David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.

Four Rules For Marketing To Hispanics

Posted on May 22, 2009
Filed Under advertising, marketing | Leave a Comment

Marketing In A Demographic Revolution

Hispanic-Americans make up over 15% of the American population.

In 2002 Hispanic-American purchasing power exceeded $580 billion dollars.

In 2005 Hispanic-Americans filled one out of every three new jobs.

In 2007 Hispanic-American purchasing power was projected to rise to $926.1 billion.

This year it should exceed one trillion dollars. And keep rising at a rate roughly twice that of non-hispanics.

Hispanic-Americans aren’t becoming a major market. They are a major market.

Yet in a great deal of American marketing, hispanics and hispanic culture are minimal to the point of invisibility. And some of that marketing, even when it is visible, seems almost calculated to misfire.

What’s the best way to create marketing and advertising that reaches the Hispanic market?

Customize Thoughtfully

Some companies think the way to market to hispanics is simply to point existing marketing material at them. Why bother to customize? If a Coke ad works on one market segment, it should work on another. Right?

Wrong. In fact it’s so plainly wrong one hardly knows what to say. If you address English-language advertisements to a population a part of which doesn’t read English, isn’t it obvious that a serious chunk of your marketing dollar will simply not get through?

The whole broad edifice of market segmentation is built on the knowledge that markets are built of subsidiary markets with unique needs and characteristics. Know them and address them and you will do better. Ignore them, and at best you will communicate inefficiently. At worst you may more than fail, you may alienate.

Companies who understand this and customize to a target market can nonetheless make the mistake of addressing that market superficially. This is what I think of as ‘touch-up’ marketing: you take marketing collaterals aimed at traditionally non-hispanic markets and simply tack on a latino phrase or face or, often, cliche. The hamburger remains the same, only a dash of salsa is added.

This can misfire too. The surface may send out one message, but is the subtext sending another?

Take commercials that target the generic ‘American’ family. As a rule you’ll tend to see the traditional nuclear family, suburban and secular, of husbands and wives of roughly the same age and occasionally one or two children. But you’re not likely to see six children. Nor are you likely to see a family with live-in cousins and grandparents, or a wife of twenty and a husband with grey hair.

But sociologists note that in latino society, families are often extended families. A family picture without a grandparent is the exception. Old people and young people interact regularly, and older ones have a visible measure of authority and respect. Religious pictures and symbols are a common part of most household decor. Colors are alive. Food is spicy. Music is vivid rather than ambient.

Is there a standard latino style? Not really. But there are styles that are definitely not latino, pale minimalism and unisex understatement among them. One can tape a latino element to these, but it only produces the sort of faux-latino advertising that poses as being culturally sensitive but leaves a subtle or a sharp flavor of dissonance — the sort that can do more harm than good.

Showing marketing sensitivity to hispanic culture has another tall challenge — the fact that there is no hispanic culture as such. Or at least, no single such culture. It’s a multitude of cultures, rather - Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Salvadoran, Argentinian. We all understand why a campaign that might succeed brilliantly with New Yorkers might fail miserably with Southern Baptists or with Scots. The same applies to marketing to latinos: one size does not fit all.

The median age of a Cuban-American is 39. The median age of a Mexican-American is 24. Will that make a difference to a company selling life insurance as opposed to one making college loans? You bet. The numbers tell us that hispanics in the urban North are largely Puerto Rican, but those in the rural North are largely Mexican, whereas the hispanic population of Miami is overwhelmingly Cuban. Does it make a difference? It makes a difference.

What can help alert you to those distinctions? Direct market research is probably your best source. But just studying advertising in specifically hispanic locales helps too. Puerto Rico and Mexico and Brazil have their ad agencies, marketing awards, and print ads and commercials too. A quick review can be an illuminating one. Provided you review it thoughtfully.

Why? Because hispanic culture in America is far from being a patchwork of cultures from elsewhere. A hispanic culture native to America began emerging long ago. It’s here, it’s alive, it’s growing, it’s changing. One day it promises to be the mainstream.

So it isn’t just a matter of being of hispanic culture. You need to be aware of hispanic cultures. And, in the long term, of the fact that American culture is becoming a new hispanic culture all by itself.


Talk To People In The Language That They Use

Right now roughly one out of every four hispanic consumers in the United States understands Spanish well, but may have a degree of difficulty with English.

Companies can ignore that. They can save time and translation fees by continuing to produce marketing materials in English alone. And so, addressing a trillion dollar market, they will send partially or utterly incomprehensible messages to people that control a quarter of a trillion of those dollars.

Of course it would be an equally great mistake to treat hispanic Americans as being Spanish-speaking only. A part of the hispanic market in America doesn’t speak Spanish at all. And the emergence of ‘Spanglish’ is yet another twist for marketing writers to take into account. You don’t have to translate ‘baby’ for ‘Hasta La Vista, baby’ to get across in either language.

But stats are stats: a significant minority are still more at home with Spanish than English. And so marketing communications directed at the hispanic market needs to be, to some extent, bilingual. Any other decision wastes too large a part of your marketing and advertising dollar.

Admittedly this poses some challenges. How do you create successful marketing materials in two languages?

There are several ways. Parallel texts in English and Spanish may be used in marketing material. Headlines, read by over 90% of readers, can be in both languages, whereas body copy, read by less than 10%, might be in one. In video, visual text in one language might be accompanied by voiceovers in the other, or vice versa. Subtitling can be used with real wit. In a bilingual website I created for a client, one can click on a page and go from English to Spanish and back.

Here again American marketing can learn by looking across the border. Media awareness work in bilingual Quebec showcases a wealth of insights into multicultural marketing.

But however it’s done, some elements of a company’s marketing material will need to be in Spanish. It doesn’t have to be completely or exclusively in Spanish. It doesn’t even have to be a large or very conspicuous part of what you have to say.

But the critical part of your message needs to be made available in both languages. Otherwise you will lose business. And possibly a lot of it.

Think Globally And Locally

If all the latinos in the United States were counted as one nation, it would be the third-largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world. Only Mexico and Spain itself are larger.

But the global Spanish-speaking market is larger than all the people in the United States put together. As of 2005, the Gross National Product of Latin America alone exceeds four trillion four hundred and twenty-one billion dollars. Spanish is considered to be either the second or third most-spoken language on the globe.

If your business is purely local, this may not be a major consideration. But there are fewer and fewer such businesses in the age of the internet.

The phrase, ‘a world of opportunity,’ isn’t just words when it comes to marketing to latinos and latino cultures. If your business product can be shipped, flown, or downloaded, opening your business to Hispanic-American consumers can be one step in opening it up as well to a global Spanish-speaking market of dozens of nations and hundreds of millions of individuals.

Think locally and globally.

Remember That The Rules Remain The Rules

There are differences between Hispanic consumers and non-Hispanic consumers. Noticing and addressing those differences can get you more business. But basic marketing principles are basic marketing principles. And those don’t change.

If you want to get a good consumer response, you need to have a good product. You need to promote that product — to let the people who might want that product know that it’s available. You need to tell them why it’s smart to get it. You have to show why you’re better than the competition in some important respect. You need to show them where they can go to buy it. It has to be look good and work right and be affordable.

Hispanic people will not go to a restaurant if the food isn’t good. Even if the menu is bilingual, even if the waiters know Spanish, even if the menu mentions classic hispanic cuisine, even if the background music stretches from Segovia to Santana, the food still has to taste good, not bad, the price has to be appropriate not outrageous, the restaurant has to be minutes away, not hours or days away.

The product must satisfy the customer. Advertisements and survey questions have to clear. Product packaging has to let people know what the product is. Business decisions need to be based on studying the market and addressing the people that make it up.

Markets change. But marketing basics like these stay the same. The best way to reach hispanic consumers is by sticking to those basics: good business practices and good marketing approaches.

And the best time to start? Pronto.


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David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.