How MarTech Can Help You Step Up Your Multicultural Marketing Game

Mario Carrasco

September 13, 2018

You’ve seen the data. The demographics show more dots on the map and purchasing power is tipping the scale. Your company, however, is still struggling to get a real multicultural marketing strategy off the ground. But, you’re not alone. Out of the 88 billion dollars spent in digital advertising this past year, less than 10% went to the largest minority group in the U.S., Hispanics, who make up almost 20% of the population.

Given the fact that by the year 2045 the U.S. will be a minority-majority nation, marketers are scrambling to reach these consumers now to start building relationships. But, the C-suite—and holder of the purse strings—isn’t always onboard, forcing marketers to be more creative in their approach to get advertising dollars to fund multicultural marketing. MarTech was born out of the need to get better quality and more timely market research affordably to run smarter campaigns, which could help you get the C-suite on your side.

But while your MarTech stack may have an abundance of data, it may be missing 35% of the U.S. market if it doesn’t have representative data of Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians as part of the core data infrastructure.

What does representative data mean?

MarTech has, unfortunately, drunk the “more data is better” Kool-Aid with little regard for quality or level of representation. This isn’t to be blamed on marketers, but rather MarTech companies who have successfully marketed the latest and greatest tool by the amount of data they are processing daily. However, for marketers, specifically strategists tasked with creating marketing strategies at the beginning of the marketing funnel, representativeness is key. When looking at the U.S. population, high-level segmentations such as rural vs. urban, housing type, education, and an increasingly important segmentation variable, ethnicity, are rarely thought of when gathering data. The “wide net” data approach is useful for some applications. But for strategists looking to build detailed personas, missing data from these segments can lead to marketing disasters, some of which we’ve seen in the past 12 months. Making sure your MarTech tool has representative data of all ethnicities in the U.S. is essential to creating a multicultural marketing strategy.

Your MarTech tool is representative, now what?

So, you’ve found a MarTech tool that has a representative sample of multicultural consumers. So, now what? Take these steps:

Define your audience.

You know some things about your client’s consumer, such as purchase habits, geographic region, age, etc. Tools with a representative sample of multicultural consumers will allow you to input what you know and answer your first question: “are multicultural consumers engaging with my product or service in a meaningful way?”

Define your multicultural audience.

Now that you’ve established that multicultural consumers are engaging with your brand, it is time to go deeper. What multicultural audiences are you specifically targeting? What country of origin are they from if they’re Hispanic or Asian? Geographic regions? Remember, multicultural consumers are not a monolithic group. Clearly defining who your multicultural consumer is, at a granular level, will help you hone your messaging and build a winning strategy.

Compare & Contrast.

Your current marketing strategy and clear psychographic profile of your current consumer can help shed light on your multicultural strategy. But for that to happen, you must compare those two criteria to the multicultural consumer profile. Understanding the nuances and similarities/differences in how multicultural consumers interact with your brand vs. general market consumers can give you insights that you wouldn’t otherwise consider.

Multicultural marketing has historically been an expensive and time-consuming path to go down, which may explain why it hasn’t evolved faster. But, with the advent of MarTech, this doesn’t have to be the case any longer. Adopting a MarTech solution that works for your business objectives can be a more effective way to build a multicultural marketing strategy that’s laser-focused on the needs and wants of this trillion-dollar opportunity.

Mario Carrasco

Mario X. Carrasco is Co-Founder and Principal of ThinkNow, an award-winning, technology driven cultural insights agency based in Burbank, Calif. Mario’s expert knowledge on multicultural consumers is evident in his contributions to Hispanic Millennial Project and We Are GenZ studies. Mario is a contributor to Forbes, eMarketer, Quirk’s Magazine, Online MR Magazine, and MediaPost. He presents at industry conferences such as the Google Multicultural Marketing Forum, Vision Critical, and Hispanicize LA. He is the SBA 2017 Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award recipient, an SBA Emerging Leader Recipient, Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Institute Graduate, and USC Marshall School of Business Graduate.