Why Startups Need to Invest in “Non-English” Marketing

The cost-per-click or what you pay for each click on your online ads rose last year by 9% for ads on Google and 19% for those on Amazon. This is a worrying trend and, as a start-up, growth is your top priority and your marketing budget needs to get you maximum bang for the buck. Often, successful founders and venture capitalists advise startups to have a narrow focus and to try solving a clear identifiable problem for a small cohort. Extrapolating this, you could apply your narrow focus on who you market your product to and how.

Personal experience

In my previous role as Head of Growth for a venture-backed menswear direct-to-consumer (D2C) startup in India, I had to find ways to launch a new product with a dramatically low budget: the pandemic had just struck and our anticipated next round of venture funding looked further away than before. So, I had to get creative and figure out cost-effective ways to still launch the product that we had already developed. Our marketing expenses were high because we relied on social media marketing and influencer marketing that were almost entirely in English.

Looking into our customer data, I realized that a substantial percentage of our existing customers lived in Indian states that had their own regional languages; for instance, the state of Gujarat has a majority that speaks Gujarati, the local language of the state. About 80% of Indians do not count English as their first or second language. Such regional languages don’t receive the same level of attention from digital marketers; this lack of attention meant that there was a lower demand for marketing in such languages, leading to lower costs. Utilizing our analysis of customer data and the target states we then identified, we worked with influencers in those local language to execute our launch. It was a success with revenues from those regions more than doubling in a matter of months.

United States: a case in point

Looking at the United States with a similar lens of marketing in a non-English language, the Hispanic people stand out. As of July 2022, the Hispanic population in the United States was estimated at 63.7 million (19.1% of the total population), making them the country’s largest racial or ethnic minority. The Hispanic population grew 26% between 2010 and 2022, significantly more than the nation’s 8% overall population growth. They also have a median age of 30, which is 8.8 years less than the overall median age of the overall population. In the recent two decades, there has been a steady increase in affluence amongst Hispanics in the United States. In fact, out of all the affluent subgroups in the United States, Hispanics now represent the largest, with particular growth among the younger generations. Today, one in five affluent Gen Zs is Hispanic, compared to one in fifteen affluent boomers/seniors. So, the Hispanic population has a few traits that make it quite attractive as a target audience for marketers.

Looking further into how they access the internet, a Google study demonstrates that 32% of U.S Hispanic consumers search the internet in both English and Spanish while a further 16% consumes content solely in Spanish. This is important to note: this means that you can digitally target a significantly attractive audience in a language other than English. Further, because demand for Spanish keywords is lower than that for English keywords in the United States, it is relatively more cost effective to advertise online in Spanish. Valley Family Health, a chain of medical clinics in Los Angeles decided to run an online campaign and realized that Spanish keywords’ cost per click was in the range of $0.59 to $2.75 while it would cost more than $6 for English. In addition, a review of some randomly selected popular keywords shows that some Spanish keywords could cost almost 90% less than those in English. Thus, overall, there is an attractive population that accesses the web in a language besides English and whose advertising cost is considerably lower – all the perfect ingredients for startups and marketers to observe and act on.

Things to note if you decide to target the Hispanic population in the United States

If you decide to focus on marketing to the Hispanic population in the United States, you should be careful about a few things. A study commissioned by Meta found that Hispanics do not just want brands to speak Spanish but also to speak it with respect and accuracy. In this context, literal translation could be very tricky as those interviewed in Meta’s study indicated that they often see content translated from English to Spanish very poorly and literally. This might be something to be careful about if you use a generative AI or online tool to translate; it might be necessary to have a Spanish speaker either fully translate or review the content translated by an AI tool. The other important insight was that Hispanics want marketing content to be culturally relevant. This would entail using Spanish-speaking actors or culturally relevant humor in marketing materials. Lastly, another study by IPSOS MediaCT (again commissioned by Meta) showed that 79% of Hispanics accessed the Internet on a mobile device – something to keep in mind when you are deciding what format to advertise in.

Choosing the less trodden path can be better for your marketing expenses. From my experiences, I can safely say that investing your energies and resources as a start-up on a language that is not spoken by the majority but is still spoken by a large enough population can make a tremendous difference to your growth efforts. In the context of the United States, I believe that the Hispanic population deserves more of your marketing attention. Focusing on them could very well set you up for success.