SEM Tips for Language Minorities
Jose Villa, founder and CEO of Sensis, offered some advice the other day on targeting the growing Hispanic market in the US with a search engine marketing campaign. His tips included:
• Adapt your Spanish keywords appropriately. This means not only doing translations from English to Spanish, but also considering the acculturation of your target audience.
• Target long-tail searches and keywords. These may be especially relevant for good conversions on PPC ad copy. Clicks on long tail keywords have better conversion rates, as they target most specifically what the searcher is looking for.
• Geo-target your ads. Hispanics in the US are most concentrated in Florida, Texas, New Jersey, California, and Arizona. But those in California are most likely to be Mexican, while those in Florida are most likely to be Cuban. This produces regional variations in Spanish and use of the language. They might also be entirely different markets for your products or services.
• Test! Be sure to continually test variations in ad copy, keywords, geo targeting, and (Spanish-language!) landing pages. Testing is the best way to ensure that you’re running an optimal SEM campaign and spending your budget wisely.
Although Jose wrote with the US Hispanic market in mind, his tips can be applied to many other markets as well, especially those with multiple languages or large minority populations. Depending on your products and services, you may want to better reach markets that might previously have been underserved yet demonstrate strong potential. These tips encourage you to research and to get to know and understand your market. Having good background knowledge is good for your campaign and, naturally, good for you business. To show that situations like these aren’t that uncommon, I’ll leave you with a (very small) list of places where you might consider having separate language/geo-targeted campaigns for you PPC (and SEO):
• Germany: Turkish population is still very active and growing
• Belgium: The country speaks French and Dutch; make sure you’re using correct local French and Dutch vocabulary
• Spain: Basque is a vibrant minority language in the north (and into part of southern France)
• Switzerland: There are four official languages: French, German, Italian, and Romansh. Be sure that you get the correct Swiss vocab for the French, German, and Italian.
• South Africa: The country has 11 official languages. English and Afrikaans are the most prevalent, but targeting a native African language may be worthwhile.
• China: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Min, Xiang, Hakka, and Gan are just a few of the dialects of Chinese in China. Speakers in Hong Kong and Macau may also be familiar with English and Portugese.
• Taiwan: Mandarin is the official language, but many speak Taiwanese, a dialect of Hokkein Min Nan Chinese
• Malaysia: The most common languages are Malay, Chinese, English, Tamil, and Javanese.
• India: Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, and 15 more. What languages are most relevant to your audience?
