How affiliate marketing can work to reach African Americans, Hispanics and Asians.
It took traditional marketers more than 50 years to figure out that people of different ethnic groups respond differently towards advertising. Hopefully, it won’t take affiliate marketers that long because the theory has already been proven. Quite frankly, it was very obvious from the start.
If you are marketing to women, wouldn’t you include images of women in your campaign? If you are marketing to teenagers, wouldn’t you feature teens in the ad and perhaps some theme that appeals to that group? Of course you would. The same would go for senior citizens, and any other demographic you can think of.
There is no difference when it comes to marketing to minorities. There are an estimated 50,000 web sites whose visitors are primarily individuals who belong to a minority group. In addition, there are free services like ConnectPlatform.com that are being used heavily to create social networks specifically for minority groups.
Therefore, smart advertisers and networks should be advocating the development of culture-specific landing pages and creatives for their publishers.
Here are two ways to effectively reach this diverse audience with your affiliate offers:
1) Design your landing pages and creatives to have a multicultural theme. For example, incorporate a collage of pictures of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and Whites.
2) Design different landing pages and creatives for each ethnic group. This way, a publisher can choose which best fits their audience.
Consider this: Imagine you are a Chinese female that visits a website for a car loan quote. When you get there, you see a picture of a group of white business men. Would this resonate with you?
Probably not.
However, if you visited that web site and saw a group of Chinese people there, you are 75% more likely to complete the offer.
Imagine the increase in conversions that you could see by implementing this simple, low-cost change.
It is important that you do not design your creatives to include racial stereotypes. For instance, not all African Americans like the hip-hop culture and not all Hispanics are Mexicans, let alone speak Spanish. In addition, not all Asians eat sushi.
The key is to do your research, and gain a full understanding of different cultures.
Remember that BET is a $3 billion dollar company because they figured out how to appeal to the African American market. Univision is also worth billions because they understand how to reach the Hispanic market.
Combined there are over 70 million minorities in the United States who spend more than $2 trillion dollars annually. Can you really afford to be missing out on all those conversions?
Dante Lee is an affiliate marketer and the president/CEO of Diversity City Media – an award-winning marketing and public relations firm based in Columbus, Ohio.
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Articles from issue 2 of FeedFront will also be posted at http://feedfront.com/archives/category/issue-2/.
