There’s some big news in the marketing world that you may have missed: the U.S. multicultural population is growing even faster than previously realized. That’s according to revised 2020 population data from the U.S. Census bureau, which Claritas recently used to make projections in its newly released report, The 2022 Hispanic Market Report.
The report focuses on the Hispanic market, but it also projects the growth of several other U.S. multicultural population segments over the next five years. Take a look at the numbers: The U.S. Hispanic population will grow by more than 1.5 million consumers every year between now and 2028. The Black American population will grow by more than 250,000 each year. And the Asian American population will grow by more than 338,000 each year. But the White (non-Hispanic) American population? It will LOSE more than 1.15 million members each year between now and 2028 (see chart below).
The bottom line is that if your marketing team is NOT creating campaigns that target the fast-growing multicultural population segments, you are missing out on building engagement and sales with more than 147 million U.S. consumers – and millions more in the future.
So how do you create a campaign that targets multicultural consumers? As with any successful marketing campaign, the first step involves identifying the right consumers to target.
Step One: Identifying the Right Consumers
In the past, very little data were available on multicultural consumers. That’s no longer the case today. Consumer data are now available that give in-depth insights into the many uniquely different segments within larger multicultural audiences. That makes it much easier to understand differing preferences and behaviors within a specific culture – and to use those insights to build campaigns that turn multicultural consumers into paying customers.
For instance, Claritas CultureCode® segmentation tools give marketers in-depth data on more than 146 million consumers segmented into more than 245 multicultural audience groups. Perhaps most importantly, CultureCode® allows you to identify multicultural segments that are similar to your current best customers – and thus are highly likely to buy from you – and then create targeted messages that appeal to those diverse audiences.
As an example, if your biggest buyers are unmarried Millennials who shop at Target and earn more than $75,000 a year, you can easily create a list consisting of Hispanic, Asian or Black consumer prospects that fit that description. But it’s critical that you don’t stop there. While there are consistent attributes that your best customers have at a higher level, building a successful multicultural campaign requires understanding the behaviors and preferences of each segment of the multicultural population with granular detail.
Too many marketers assume that because a specific multicultural audience possesses a similar household income as the average profitable customer in their database, they can simply repurpose their broad marketing efforts across the multicultural consumer landscape and be successful. This is where things can go wrong quickly. Understanding key attributes that are specific to multicultural consumers – like acculturation, which measures the degree to which a consumer is assimilated into the U.S. culture – will ultimately lead to the most effective marketing strategies.
Step Two: Delivering a Customized Message that Engages Multicultural Consumers Across Their Preferred Channels
Identifying multicultural consumer prospects is just the beginning. The next step is figuring out how to build targeted multichannel campaigns that appeal to those customers. This can be especially tricky with multicultural populations, where consumers might have very different values and language preferences than others in their culture. As mentioned earlier, some of those consumers may not even be fully assimilated into the U.S. culture.
That’s where Claritas CultureCode can help. CultureCode provides information such as acculturation, country of origin, language preferences and other data that help you build targeted campaigns with messages that appeal to the unique background and interests of specific multicultural consumer subsets – and thus drive higher engagement and sales.
For instance, CultureCode insights allow you to determine which grocery stores are frequented by specific cultural groups – and can help you create in-store promotions based on their unique holidays and food preferences. It can help you create email or social media messages specifically designed to appeal to a particular cultural subset. It can also help you decide when to use advertisements delivered in a language other than English to boost engagement.
Logically, step two also involves delivering the targeted multicultural messages you’ve developed across the marketing channels that your targeted audience prefers. CultureCode can give you invaluable insight into what marketing channels specific consumer segments prefer. And some of what you learn may surprise you.
Just as an example, Black households are nearly 2X as likely as the average U.S. consumer household to subscribe to the subscription video service Crunchyroll, which specializes in Japanese anime and dorama, according to the Claritas report, The 2022 Black Consumer Tech Report.
Meanwhile, Hispanics use social media – especially Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok – more often than other U.S. households, and 70% of Hispanic households subscribe to Netflix, according to The 2022 Hispanic Market Report. And Asian American households are more than 3X as likely to shop for food at Costco than the average U.S. household, according to the Claritas report, Understanding Asian American Retail Consumers.
Today, Campaign Execution is Faster and Easier Than Ever Before
Claritas’ datasets not only help marketers determine which channels they should use to deliver their targeted messages, they also make it easier for marketers to execute their campaigns across multiple channels – including email, social, display, direct mail, connected TV and podcast. Marketers working with Claritas can quickly execute multichannel campaigns using pre-built Claritas segmentation audiences or audiences custom-built by Claritas based on very specific attributes and behaviors important to a particular marketing campaign or client.
Claritas has also developed partnerships with over 150 platforms and partners to make it easy for marketers to access and use Claritas segments – such as Claritas CultureCode, P$YCLE® Premier, ConneXions® and PRIZM® Premier – to execute their own campaigns. Major platforms such as Google, Facebook, LiveRamp and The Trade Desk now offer Claritas consumer audience data “on the shelf” so that marketers can essentially go to a library and select them for campaign activation.
As an example, Claritas worked with a well-known insurance company that wanted to generate leads to increase auto insurance sales, particular among U.S. Hispanic consumers. Claritas used CultureCode data to identify Hispanic consumers who were either bi-cultural or unacculturated and then deployed Spanish-language creative content to appeal to those audiences.
Claritas leveraged CultureCode data to build and manage a 90-day multichannel campaign using Facebook, Google, direct mail and the Claritas email platform. The results were impressive. Click-thru rates on display ads were 10X the industry average for the Hispanic audiences that were served Spanish-language content and click-thru rates on their acquisition email campaigns were as high as 40% for the Spanish-language emails. Overall, the campaign generated more than 50,000 new leads.
Step Three: Optimizing the Campaign to Boost Results
But it wasn’t only good prospect and channel data that made the insurance campaign so successful. Claritas worked with the client to adjust the campaign mid-flight to optimize it based on which audiences and channels were the most responsive – resulting in a cost-per-acquisition that was 37% lower than the client’s target goal.
When it comes to campaign optimization, Claritas offers you a leg up on the competition because it can accurately connect online and offline household activities with more accuracy and scale than anyone else. In addition, recent Claritas Identity Graph upgrades have enhanced the Claritas’ ability to match and verify consumer digital activity/identifiers such as email and in-app activity – while also reducing dependence on cookies and device data. This allows marketers to measure fast-growing channels such as connected TV, podcast and mobile activity more accurately than ever before.
As part of these recent upgrades, Claritas also improved measurement capabilities to understand how much each channel contributes to conversion in a multichannel campaign. Too many marketers rely on a last-touch attribution model, which gives credit to the last ad and channel they saw and doesn’t account for the other exposures that played a role in driving that consumer to take an action. Claritas’ new methodology can now assign a weighted score to each touchpoint to precisely measure the impact of a particular channel or message along the consumer’s purchase journey.
Why Savvy Marketers Are Going Multicultural
Over the next five years, multicultural audiences will account for 100% of population growth in the United States, and the number of multicultural consumers will increase by nearly 13 million. Marketers that capture the loyalty of multicultural groups today will be well-positioned to grow with these audiences in the future.
