America is a multilingual country. With over 50 million Spanish-speaking citizens, and a wide presence in American culture it’s clear that America has a multilingual side. Now taught in most schools and present in American street names and culture, Spanish is becoming a new language for commerce all around the country. However, most businesses only translate their pages to Spanish when they seek to internationalize their operations. In this essay, I’ll explain the most fundamental reasons why it makes sense to have an Hispanic presence in your marketing materials.

1. Your competition isn’t doing it. Most companies that operate in America only do marketing in English, however, must Fortune 500 companies have websites and some sort of marketing in Spanish. This means that the biggest corporations have validated the importance of marketing to Hispanics in their native language. Better retention, brand affinity and higher referral rates are all consequences of targeting customers in their native tongues. Furthermore, because your competitors are not likely marketing in Spanish, you will be seen as an innovator and will be the first to target an ever more profitable segment of the population.

2. It’s a great change that can help improve your analytics. The more fragmented your marketing, the more insightful and rich your metrics. You will also gather important insights into which Spanish keywords can work best for your SEO or Adwords campaigns. You can create special campaigns for Hispanics and not only boost engagement but also optimize the message.

3. Operations will gain tremendously from it. Better customer support, increase in your potential client base and lower marketing costs are all potential gains that a multilingual strategy can bring. A streamlined communications process can improve relationships with your customers and provider a simpler web navigation experience your customers that don’t speak English natively.

4. You start the internationalization process without even trying. Customers from Spain and Latin America will discover your brand thru search engines and provide valuable market discovery information about twenty Hispanic countries or more than 500 million potential customers.

Additional Insights:

• 16.3% of the US population
• Spending power of over $1 trillion dollars
• Hispanics are the largest minority group in the USA

In sum my advice is to, before expanding to Latin America or elsewhere, consider targeting Hispanics in the USA using Spanish to better assess the market and prepare your expansion with richer and more realistic metrics.