Following up on our previous article regarding the need for companies to advertise in Spanish to reach US Hispanics, it’s also important to look at how linguistics can affect general search engine rankings for digital campaigns. As we have already posited, using automatic translators often will provide flawed information as was most likely the case for many major brands who faced marketing blunders in the past, such as the Parker Pen Spanish advertising ball-point promotion where the English phrase “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you,” was translated to say “it won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”
While this is a more major example of poor translation and online translators have improved over time, each offers a case for potential errors, which, no matter how small, can still affect a campaign’s performance as well as general public opinion of a company. In the case of Google’s translator, if a company were looking to hire warehouse workers online they would most likely be surprised to find a different audience responding to their online Spanish content.
In this particular case, warehouse is generally translated to bodega, while jobs would generally be translated to either empleos or trabajos, but, hey, storage projects and warehouse jobs are similar, right? Probably not.
And, of course, we shouldn’t forget about the debacle that was rolled out when Facebook started using the Bing translator.
Apparently, it’s still happening as well as this was translated via Bing on one of our very own EC Hispanic Media Facebook pages:
While correct use of Spanish advertising in marketing campaigns is important as “Toy Feliz” helped to identify the Hispanic community with a phrase that appealed to their heritage, content online can also further affect ROI and SEO as improper Spanish can lead to increased bounce rates and ultimately decreased page interaction.
For companies looking to sell their products online or drive greater amounts of foot traffic to their store locations, bounce and abandonment rates would only increase as companies are not seen as being able to identify culturally with the shoppers they are directly targeting as Mattel saw before shaking up their marketing strategies. However, for companies looking to position themselves as online leaders and resources for any sort of information including, say, medical information, they would come off as uneducated without the correct terminology, or potentially even worse, run the risk of not being found, which of course leads to lowered page rank from lesser traffic and unsustainable business models.
As more companies are beginning to target the $1.2 trillion Hispanic consumer market, the need to create unique Spanish advertising campaigns that identify with the US Hispanic community continues to grow in order to set each businesses various products and services apart from the competition.
For companies not able to build in house marketing teams, utilizing a content marketing team that understands the particulars of various cultures only helps further enhance the overall return for each campaign while also helping improve the company’s image amongst individual nationalities.
If you are a part of a company wondering how you can better reach the US Hispanic market through Spanish advertising campaigns, contact EC Hispanic Media today!
