Often overlooked and underserved, Hispanics in the U.S. are an untapped audience of tech-savvy consumers with deep pockets and a penchant for making purchases online.
According to a recent Nielsen report, U. S. Hispanics are one of the fastest-growing populations of superconsumers — and have considerable economic clout: In 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the demographic’s buying power at $1.5 trillion, a 50 percent increase from 2010.
Now, a survey conducted by Consumer Insights and Ipsos MediaCT of 4,500 U.S. Hispanics ages of 18-64 who made at least one purchase online in the past six months has revealed a number of key insights and best practices for engaging this powerful consumer group:
- Connect with Hispanic consumers online. Seventy-nine percent of those surveyed said they use search engines as their No. 1 choice for gathering information before making a purchase. What’s more, 83 percent who access the internet from a mobile device do so while in a store, according to a Google/Ipsos MediaCT report.
- Online ads and sources influence U.S. Hispanic consumer behavior at a higher rate than other groups, and 66 percent of those surveyed by Consumer Reports and Ipsos MediaCT say they pay attention to online ads — nearly 20 percentage points above the general online population.
- To drive engagement and influence, provide content — ads, blogs, posts, videos — that’s culturally relevant to U.S. Hispanics. Seventy percent of survey respondents said this is important to them, and when the content reflects their culture, 88 percent pay attention regardless of whether the content is in English or Spanish. That’s because this online audience is genuinely bilingual. Still, the number of Spanish keyword searches is on the rise, so it can only help to provide content that’s bilingual too.
For online marketers and merchants, paying attention to this growing demographic will pay dividends in both the short and long term. This means implementing messaging and strategies catering to the many variations in this demographic, such as age, psychographics, location, country of origin and language.