• by Craig Witt , Columnist, November 30, 2017

New research suggests Hispanic Millennial shoppers are “a driving force” of the U.S. economy, reports Marketing Land. This means that a wide margin of the market’s $1.5 trillion purchasing power is now controlled by young adults between the ages of 18 to 32.

If you want to boost your online business in 2018, it’s time to start targeting this market.

And what better way to do that than through language? Univision reports that nearly 72% of Hispanic Millennials speak Spanish at home, and some insist it’s important for future generations to speak Spanish, too. It's also one of the best ways to build customer trust and streamline the transactional experience.

Mobile is important for this group as well. Google research identifies Hispanics as “power users” of mobile devices, and with good reason. Nearly half prefer accessing the web via their mobile devices. Hispanic Millennials, in particular, spend 25% more time on their phones than the general population, per Marketing Land. Research suggests that they are buying more online than they were a year ago.

You must also optimize for SEO. This goes beyond localizing keywords. While using on-site keywords will drive organic traffic and improve engagement, smart businesses do even more to drive further activity.

For instance, are you localizing “under the hood” text that resides in website metadata? This content is often neglected by traditional translation services and can greatly improve a site’s search rankings. Localizing this hidden content doesn’t just help search engines locate and display your localized website. It also works within the unique pixel and character limits of regional search engines, so that the localized site “plays by the local rules” to further improve its ranking.

Another way that you can boost localized SEO is by translating structured data. These coded markups highlight or sample snippets of content in search engine results pages. When your Spanish site’s structured data is optimized for SEO, search engines will identify the type of content provided on the website and display it accordingly. This strengthens both brand visibility and click-through rates.

You should also consider other digital assets, like banner ads and email campaigns, that need to be translated to suit the shopper. These must seamlessly speak to the shopper in their preferred language, with the right cultural references throughout.

Consider leveraging social to reach Hispanic Millennials, too. Research by Viant suggests they’re more open to interacting with brands on social media. For instance, nearly 50% of Hispanic shoppers reported they had either discussed a brand online with others or used a brand’s hashtag in social messaging compared to 17% of non-Hispanic shoppers.

Lastly, it’s important that marketers remember that U.S.-based Spanish speakers won’t be the only customers visiting a localized site. Data that we have collected suggests that U.S. Spanish sites following these best practices may receive up to 60% of their “free” organic traffic from underserved international markets such as Mexico and Latin America. These shoppers are most-often searching for products unavailable in their local market.

With the Hispanic Millennial market skyrocketing, and with smartphone adoption rates hitting new highs, companies that engage these consumers on their devices of choice—in their languages of choice—stand to gain a powerful competitive advantage.