The Hispanic Wave Hits America's Heartland
--- $670 Billion Market Can't be Ignored
References to the huge Hispanic market have been made for quite some
time, but I always ignored them because it was referring to California
and Texas, right? Wrong!
Hola! The Hispanic market is big and getting
bigger in America's heartland.
I started taking notice of this recently because I
was seeing references to it over and over in different venues for
different market sectors here in my home turf -- Dayton Ohio. Read
on for "El
Diablo is in the Details".
Observation #1: Dayton Real Estate Market
I am a member of the Dayton chapter of the Women's Council of Realtors
(WCR). No, I don't sell real estate, but I do support the industry
by developing Web sites for top realtors in the Dayton area.
At a recent Dayton meeting, a statement about the "growing wave
of immigrant home buyers" was made.
The following question was posed to
the realtors in the audience: "How many
of you have website pages translated to Spanish for the benefit
of attracting Hispanic home buyers?"
Not one
hand was raised. This caught my attention.
I immediately thought of a Web site that I was redoing at the time
for Burnette Clingman (see Less is More: Extreme
Makeover of Flash Site in this
issue), a national corporate trainer who conducts custom workshops
for corporations and not-for-profits.
Burnette DOES have a Spanish-translated
page that brings
her a lot of positive feedback. Ms. Clingman is clearly a very
observant and intelligent business person who picked up on this
and implemented it in her original website a year or so ahead
of others in our locality.
Observation #2: Hispanic Market Growing 50% Faster
I subscribe to the Dayton Business Journal. Weeks later, in the January
21, 2005 issue, there was an article about the Hispanic market
controlling $670 billion in consumer spending and "growing at
a rate 50% faster than that of the nation as a whole".
I'm thinking: "Maybe I should be paying
attention to an opportunity here for my customers."
Observation #3: Dayton Health Care Market
In the same issue, there was an article about Dayton's Victor J. Cassano
Sr. Health Center hiring full-time Spanish interpreters for their
Spanish-speaking patients. This was actually a cost-saving measure
because the need was so great that it was cheaper to hire a full-time
employee than to pay hourly consulting fees.
I'm thinking: "Wow! This is closer to home
than I thought."
Keep Your Eyes Open for New Trends
I am a strong believer in keeping your eyes open for new trends and
drawing your own conclusions based on a variety of resources.
Why? Because personally I find that it:
- Further leverages the time spent attending all those networking
events & workshops and reading all those business & technology
magazines
- Is a way for me to provide value to
my customers and stand out above my competitors
- Is fun and challenging
You, too, can carve a niche out just by being alert and acting quickly
before everyone else gets on the band wagon.
Don't Sit On This Information
If you are in real estate or a field that is interested in opening
up new markets to grow your business, this is a great way to
be different.
Give me a call to find out how easy it is to get
even one website page translated into Spanish text or to add an
audio file done in Spanish to convey a short message.
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The original Flash website was graphically powerful and quite impressive
-- but it had the following problem areas:
In a word -- Structure. Structure for the page layout, structure
for the menu, structure for the text copy. This resolved all
of the problems. 