Guest post by Brad Meehan, Adobe AEM expert. Since 2008, he has implemented numerous large-scale Adobe AEM installations for a variety of clients and industries, such as FedEx, Ford, SAP, Kellogg, Eloqua/Oracle, MasterCard, Barclay’s Premier League, Honeywell, and Carlson Hotels. See more about him below.

One word: Spanglish

Hispanics have accounted for more than half of the nation’s growth in the past decade, yet we spend less on marketing to Hispanics than any other population. Organizations who simply translate their content — without any attention to cultural diversity —are actually providing more of a disservice to their Hispanic consumers than any true value.  

One way advertisers have worked to authentically engage with U.S. Hispanics is through using a mixture of English and Spanish in messaging (aka “Spanglish) to reflect the biculturalism that many Hispanics have grown to identify with. Having only a translated version of an English page on a website, for example, does not allow for individualized messaging to this majority audience.

Now substitute “Spanglish” with another culturally-specific dialect and you have a universal problem that can’t be solved through translations alone.

Your content should instead pay homage to culturally diverse audiences (e.g., Cuban/Mexican/Puerto Rican versus “Hispanic”) and ‘acculturated’ audiences (site visitors who may speak English at work, perhaps another language at home, and consume digital media in both).  So, not only do you need translation, you need regionalization in a single region.  How you accomplish that is through personalization, not translations alone.

Using a combination of existing customer profile data, demographic information, geolocation and behavioral data, specific audience personas can be created using marketing technologies designed to allow for content personalization. Then, targeted messaging, imagery and video content can be created and displayed to those audiences automatically when the attributes of the user match the criteria for the selected audience. This allows for the individualized messaging that these cultural groups expect.

If you target on a cultural level, you will concentrate your messaging to an audience that may actually be listening.