Multicultural Markets--The Trillion Dollar Markets You Never Considered

Written by Alvin Apple


What would you do if you discovered a virtually untapped market with a buying power of over a trillion dollars? You would try to market to them, right? Of course you would!

This trillion dollar market segment that has been overlooked for so long is composed of America's minorities.

Multicultural marketing is fast becoming, notrepparttar trend, butrepparttar 121464 norm in America. You see more ads featuring African-American families, commercials in Spanish with English subtitles or commercials that celebrate a minority culture.

Many advertisers who wish to tap into this market think that replacing a Caucasian actor or model with a minority is good enough. Wrong! Anyone can spot such a disingenuous act a mile away.

So if equal representation doesn't dorepparttar 121465 trick, then what does?

In many ways, multicultural marketing is no different than any other kind of marketing. The first thing you must do is understand who your target market is.

Here is a breakdown of your largest target demographics:

*The Hispanic Market--This market has seen explosive growth in its population size. Hispanic market spending power has reached $350 billion. The U.S. Hispanic population now numbers more than 30 million, comprising 11% ifrepparttar 121466 total U.S. population. By 2050, Hispanics will make up over 25% ofrepparttar 121467 total U.S. population. Today's Hispanics are living a different reality than those of previous generations. They have higher levels of education, are more affluent and consume a variety of different media.

*The Asian Market--This fast-growing market of 10.2 million commands an annual purchasing power of $101 billion. This market is younger thanrepparttar 121468 general market at an average age of 30. Asians haverepparttar 121469 highest average household incomes of any group inrepparttar 121470 U.S. and also haverepparttar 121471 highest levels of education as compared to all other consumers. The average household size is larger than that of other groups, because ofrepparttar 121472 Asian preference for multi-generational family households, further magnified byrepparttar 121473 immigrant experience.

*The African-American Market--The African American population is estimated to reach 45 million by 2020. They have a collective purchasing power of $450 billion, and spend more on luxury items like cars, clothing and furniture than their white counterparts. The Internet isrepparttar 121474 hot new medium for reaching this target population. Web sites such as www.netnoir and www.afronet.com attract thousands of African-American surfers with news, information, entertainment and products that are of interest to their specific audiences, as well as advertisers who wish to reach this specific audience.

SMS Text Messaging for Easy, Targeted and Responsive Online Marketing

Written by David Cameron Gikandi


It is no secret that advertising is not trusted that much by consumers. Sure, it works, but what isrepparttar response rate? Banner ads are lucky to score a 1% click-through rate nowadays. And even then,repparttar 121463 person who clicks through walks in cautious. They do not trusting thatrepparttar 121464 advertiser speaks inrepparttar 121465 best interest of consumers. Ads have poor click-through ration and low sales conversion ratio of about 3-7%. So what isrepparttar 121466 solution?

Easy. Haverepparttar 121467 consumer market torepparttar 121468 consumer. When your friend tells you ‘hey, you should buy this product, its great!’ you are highly likely to believe him and likely to consider buying it. When an advertiser tells yourepparttar 121469 same, you may not even hearrepparttar 121470 message – you have learnt to block out ads unconsciously. You probably equate them to noise.

While click-through ratios of ads are about 1% or so, friend-to-friend recommendations can have a click through as high as 64%, according to a survey I once saw some time back. And what about sales conversion ratios? Well, direct marketers have known for years that an endorsed ad can convert as much as 30% or more.

There are many ways to get people to tell their friends about your products and services. Many web sites now have recommend-to-a-friend links. These use email to get a person to sendrepparttar 121471 recommendation to a friend. That is good, but not enough. Have one of those; but also have something else. We now need a method that is novel so thatrepparttar 121472 person can feel a thrill when they send a recommendation to a friend. We also need a method that is more instantaneous than email, and one more personal than email. What is that method?

It is SMS text messages. SMS text messages are those short 160 character text messages that you can send from your mobile phone to another mobile phone. It is like email through mobile phones. You can send any text to any phone. Before we look at how to send SMS text recommendations from your web site to people’s friend’s phones, let us briefly look at how popular SMS is. Here we go: There are over 750 million mobile phone users worldwide. Contrast that with about 500 million email users only. Out ofrepparttar 121473 750 million, about 550 million can send and receive SMS text messages on their phones. That is bigger thanrepparttar 121474 email market! And it is growing faster than email orrepparttar 121475 web. There are about 18 billion SMS text messages sent per month worldwide. SMS is nowrepparttar 121476 biggest profit generator for telecom companies aroundrepparttar 121477 world and it has a higher usage rate than voice calls especially inrepparttar 121478 consumer market. SMS may not be as big inrepparttar 121479 USA as it is inrepparttar 121480 rest ofrepparttar 121481 world, but it ! is growing rapidly even there. OK, now here is where it gets real good for you: you can send an SMS text message from your web site to any phone anywhere on this good planet called earth for less than $0.05 per message! Anywhere on earth! The cost isrepparttar 121482 same whether you send one to your neighbor or to a guy in Vladivostok. And it will instantly reachrepparttar 121483 recipient wherever they are. It will not get lost in some big email inbox and probably get deleted. No, it will be read when it gets there, given full attention. At $0.05 a message, that is about $50 for a thousand messages. You can get this figure down if you send in bulk. At less than $50 CPM, it costs less than many banner ads or ezine ads, and you get to contact people in an instant, very personally!

Cont'd on page 2 ==>
 
ImproveHomeLife.com © 2005
Terms of Use