I have good news: if you’re a retailer looking for a new avenue of business expansion, there’s one market that’s poised to provide unprecedented levels of growth. These potential new consumers are younger, more media-savvy, socially empowered, and in the U.S. they represent $3.4 trillion in spending power.
The opportunity: almost nobody knows how to market to them.
According to a recent Nielsen report, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, and other multicultural consumers currently make up 38% of the U.S. population – and together, they will become the majority as soon as 2044.
Understanding who this new market is and where and how they can be found is key. In the travel industry, for example, estimates indicate that of the $263 billion spent every year on advertising, only 1% goes towards the African-American segment. By the numbers, there is at least 10% of the market that is being underserved or completely ignored.
Step 1: Know Your Audience
It isn’t enough to simply feature multiracial actors in ads. You need to understand the underlying elements and be able to express your product or service through each unique multicultural prism.
Step 2: Know How to Target Them
Unique to this multicultural market is the fact that most of them are firmly positioned on the modern side of the digital divide. They are over-index on mobile and are, more often than not, cord-cutters and consumers of digital TV programming services like Amazon and Netflix. Advertisers need to be able to target them in these online environments.
Traditional online targeting is built for targeting standard desktops using cookies. However, cookies have less than a 30% match rate to begin with, and their one-dimensional methods of variable selection leaves the advertiser with few choices – often “likely ethnic viewer” and not much else. Finally, cookies aren’t supported on at least half of the popular mobile devices, which is the device of choice among both Hispanics and African-Americans.
Semcasting Smart Zones™ can be a solution.
With an average 90-95% match rate to any offline list or CRM files, guaranteed unique users, cross-device support and over 750+ variables for demographic accuracy, Smart Zones may be a key to the multicultural marketing challenge. And with our database of 140 million households and 18 million businesses in the U.S. and Canada, we’re able to unlock that potential because we can identify and refine any audience using multiple selection criteria.
