Digital Marketing Needs Some Explanation
Just Say NO!
Does this happen to General Market agencies? A client asks the agency to create some banners for them, but the agency fails to ask, to what purpose? They take the assignment for what it is and run with it, eager to reap the benefits of the additional SOW- and the opportunity to get into digital marketing-, without realizing that in the end, it would work against them, just because they didn’t ask the right questions.
This is why. The banners are not pointing anywhere that is relevant for the Hispanic customer. If they point to the general market website, what is there for Hispanics to do if the website is in English? Same thing applies if the banner points to the Brand’s General Market facebook page. It’s in English and, even if the Hispanic just so happens to be bilingual, the conversation may not be relevant to him or her. But, most importantly, the main reason why the agency should say no, let’s not do some banners for you until we understand what it is that we want to accomplish with them is because they fail to ask this simple question, when was the last time you clicked on a banner?
But, let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the offer to do banners is just too appealing for the Hispanic Agency, so it decides to move forward with the banner assignment. Most of the time, the agency will present two or three different options for the client to choose. Some of these options may take endless hours of design and copywriting time because traditional copywriters and art directors, who are not familiar with the process of neither writing for the web nor designing banners that meet the “weight” requirements of most sites, create them. So, when it’s time to present the banners what usually happens is that the when the client finds just how long it took to get them conceptualize, then adjusted to meet the medium’s requirements plus re-design them with at least three or four different spec requirements for the different site specifications, they are shocked. Finally, usually there aren’t enough variations for A/B testing in order to select which banners generate the best response. God forbid the agency spends more time on this, simple assignment, all this on top of the fact that the banners don’t get clicked and, if they do, they don’t point to a place that is relevant to the Hispanic consumer.
The client gets upset, the agency gets frustrated and, of course, blames the client, and the Hispanic Digital initiative is put to bed, forever. All this happens because the traditional Hispanic Agency didn’t ask the right questions like, where will those banners point to? Is the destination relevant to Hispanics? Are you aware that banner ads only get a 0.05 response rate, on average, if you are lucky, and, finally, shouldn’t we spend the man-hours to discuss a more robust digital strategy that will actually yield results, rather than confusion and frustration for our Hispanic audience? Additionally, the agency could ask to instead spend the time to translate the website into Spanish, or at least a part of it, or create a landing page, with Hispanic relevant content and optimize it for the search engines so that it appears on top of the search results organically, in other words, without having to pay for the clicks.
For this and other questions your agency should be asking about Hispanic Digital Marketing, let me know. I’m Lalo Wakefield, freelance Latino Creative Director, Click on the button below to see some of my work, digital and traditional. Thanks!