On October 29th, we hosted Francine Rodriguez of WordStream on SEO From Home — Francine shared an enlightening slide deck about the untapped potential of Spanish PPC for businesses. We had a great time chatting with Francine and you can check out here presentation below!
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Show Transcript
0:00:01.2 Ben Jacobsen: Alright, there we go. So we are live, we are gonna go ahead and take just a few moments to let people get settled in there. While you guys are kind of joining us, tell us where you're joining us, tell us how you're doing today. Alright, looks like we've got a few people joining in, so it looks like we should be good to go. I'll go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone. My name is Ben Jacobson, I am the Digital Marketing Strategist here at Page One Power, and also the host of this series, SEO from home, before we get started, I did wanna let you guys know real quick about our new week building e-book that we put together many years of combined experience putting this together, and it shows you from start to finish, basically the entirety of the process of link building, it's super helpful. It is free, so if you guys wanna check that out, I'm gonna drop that in the chat real quick, and you guys are interested in checking that out again... Go ahead and do so. So I'll go ahead and drop that. Alright, cool, there we go.
0:01:07.3 Ben Jacobsen: And so today's episode, of SEO from home, we're super excited for... We're gonna be joined by Francine Rodriguez, and we're gonna be talking about Spanish PPC. It's something that we had a chance to chat about a little bit earlier on when we got a chance to kind of do the introduction call with Francine and I'm really excited about this, and I think that you guys are gonna get a lot out of it, and I think it'll kind of open up your ideas to maybe a little bit different perspective in a little bit different way of looking at some of your advertising strategies, so if you guys haven't joined us for SEO from home before, the idea behind the series is to sit down with SEO industry leading experts and discuss a variety of topics inside of marketing today, as we're mentioned already, we're talking about PPC, it's a little bit outside of what we normally discuss, and that's actually one of the goals that we're starting to try to branch into, is bluring those lines a little bit and bringing more people into the fold so that we can understand how to integrate things like PPC and SEO, and maybe take some leafs from a book from PPC and apply it to our own work...
0:02:18.7 Ben Jacobsen: So all of that being said, we're super excited for today's episode, for today's broadcast we are gonna have a Q and A option as well, and a chat, so if you guys have questions, definitely pop those in the Q and A if you guys have feedback... Go ahead and drop those in the chat box there. Also, we're gonna be live tweeting today, so if you guys have questions or if you have follow-up, you can also engage with us there, you can tag @pageonepower, or you can also tag Francine, and be sure to use #SEOfromhome. We're super excited. Francine, thank you again for joining us, tell a little bit more about yourself and what we can expect of you talking about today...
0:03:03.8 Francine Rodriguez: Absolutely, so let me start sharing my screen before I dive too deeply, can everyone see... Okay. Looks good, I can see here.
0:03:14.3 Francine Rodriguez: Excellent. So my name is Francine, I am so excited, and I thank you guys so much for inviting me here today. I know that the world of PPC may not be something that you're always talking about it, SEO from home, but I firmly believe we’re cousins, and we can learn from each other, and today, I'll be talking to you guys about Spanish PPC and how it is the account boost that you didn't know you needed. So a little bit about myself. I'm a Manager of Customer Success at wordstream, and I am from the beautiful island in the Caribbean of Puerto Rico and you might guess at... My first language is Spanish, and that is a little bit about why I've gotten into this world. This year, I have the great honor of being selected as one of the top 50 most influential people in PPC, and another great honor that I've been able to achieve is I'm a Google first startup certified mentor, and I specifically work in Latin America. So I travel there a couple of times a year for the last couple of years, helping startups there, getting started with our digital marketing for the first time, and it's such an awesome experience, I think it's the coolest thing that this industry has ever brought to me, and certainly, I've learned a ton from those startups about why Spanish PPC is so important and they just keep invigorating me to share more about this topic to everyone, so why don't we get started with the story of how this all began? The year was 2014, and I was brand new to wordstream, I think that was maybe two weeks in, I was sitting at my desk, new you're shy, you don't speak up too much, and then I see chaos in the office and everyone was running around, I'm like, What is going on? They were all freaking out because a customer had been sold that only had Spanish campaigns and only spoke Spanish, and none of them knew what to do with it.
0:05:08.6 Francine Rodriguez: It was pretty funny to see. And one of the people was like, Wait a second. Isn't that new girl Puerto Rican. And I was like, Yes, I am here. And it was like the cool super hero a moment, I'm like, I can do this. But I had only been there two weeks and I was still pretty new to the world of PPC, so I stepped up to the plate and literally with my first customer is how I broke into the world of Spanish PPC. It was such an awesome experience. And then I remember asking everyone around me like, So what do I do? Because none of you have trained me on this, is there different strategies for other languages, like do you have an idea? And just blank faces. Not one of them knew what to do. No one had ever experienced this, and I was like, Can someone Google something very quickly before I get on the phone with this guy? Nothing. So I'm like, I have an idea. I think I've carved my niche, not only in this company, but maybe in this industry, I decided that any customer that would let me... And it was hard at the beginning, 'cause a lot of them would not let me...
0:06:20.1 Francine Rodriguez: I was gonna try and create Spanish campaigns for them, and I was just gonna see how it goes, and from there, I created my own rule set and I figured out... It's not that difficult, I don't have to reinvent the wheel here. I just use the exact same strategies I already do, and I just translate them. It was such an aha moment for me, and the most important thing about this whole world is that I'm just trying to give folks trying to search in their native language a fighting chance to get access to information. That's what it all comes down to. So that's a little bit about how I broke into this world, so I do wanna answer this question because I do get it a lot, why Spanish over the other options, other than... You speak it. Well, a totally fair question, because bilingualism is on the rise in the United States in the last 30 years, more than double, the population of bilinguals have grown in the United States, and the percentage of people speaking other languages at home has also increased quite a bit, so yes, there are tons of languages being spoken in the United States, it is not just Spanish.
0:07:37.6 Francine Rodriguez: So why Spanish, again? I wanna answer one more thing before we get to that, it's a myth-busting moment that I wanna have is that a lot of people think bilinguals... They're only in major cities. You think about New York, you think about LA, but the reality is that there are bilingual people living in every area, and every city of the United States is not just those Metropolitan series. So if you think that this strategy is only for those folks in those areas, you are wrong, this can work for anywhere in the United States, to... Back to answering my question, I think this map will very easily solve as to why Spanish is the most important language in the United States because it is the most commonly spoken language other than English. And this doesn't mean that I'm saying, Hey, don't try French in Maine, because clearly that's the most important language there, I'm all for a test it and go, I've actually tried to do campaigns in French and Italian and other languages, not a successful Spanish, I will admit, but I'm all for experimenting.
0:08:46.9 Ben Jacobsen: Maybe I can try to try to help out North Dakota, somehow I speak a little bit of German.
0:09:06.0 Francine Rodriguez: You can do it, man, I believe in you. I'm gonna teach you how... And if you wanna try other languages fair, I'll also give you a little hint, I'm gonna remove English and Spanish, and here is the map of the United States with the most spoken languages other than Spanish, so I know Ben you are located in Idaho, you're still good in German, there's gonna be someone searching...
0:09:32.1 Ben Jacobsen: Good, alright, maybe I'm probably a good portion of that subset of data that they're getting is...
0:09:39.1 Francine Rodriguez: You were the one guy do... Awesome. You are representative on that.
0:09:49.5 Ben Jacobsen: Sorry, I didn't mean to cut in, but it's very telling of how dominant Spanish is though, like when you look at it, and then the next level. It gets that diverse. Absolutely, and when you look at something like German is the next most common spoken language in Idaho, and anyone that's been to Idaho or anyone that's even familiar, even heard jokes about Idaho, can definitely understand why that seems so bizarre. There's a lot of farmland out here, there's a lot of just rural areas, so the idea of just a huge amount of people speaking in German doesn't really make sense, so it's just super telling of how important that secondary language Spanish can be to... So many different places all across the entire country as Texas and New Mexico and Arizona, so many people tend to think...
0:10:48.3 Francine Rodriguez: It's just a blanket everywhere, and I also know a little bit about Idaho, I have lived there as well, my parents live there now, so it's my second home, so I totally understand. I never thought that German would be so spoken there, but apparently it is that we just have to find that pocket of where... So moving on. Now we know why Spanish is, what we're talking about today. Let's learn a little bit about who the Hispanic population is in the United States and why they are important in the world of marketing. So first of all, they are 6.5 million people, that represents almost 20% of the population of the United States, that's a big chunk of consumers, and my favorite fun fact that I learned is that the US has the second largest Hispanic population in any country in the world only behind Mexico, that's just outstanding. Think about all the Latin American countries, we are a bigger population than all of them, and some of them combined, it’s just huge. And we are the fastest growing segment of the population in the United States. One out of two people added to the population is Hispanic, and one out of four people younger than the age of 18 are Hispanic.
0:12:09.3 Francine Rodriguez: Another fact is that the average age of Hispanics in the United States is 28, so this is prime consumer, very, very young, where the average age for all other ethnicities usually tends to be older, so the Hispanic people are definitely the future of this country and going to be a large segment of the consumers coming up and growing up... Absolutely. And Hispanic come from tons of places, many places of origin, obviously, the number one is going to be Mexican or Mexican-American, and number two is Puerto Rican like me, but we definitely come from tons of other places, but if you are creating campaigns, you definitely wanna keep the Mexican population and the Puerto Rican in mind, depending on where you're located, and we'll talk about that later as to why that's important. Now, a little bit about the Hispanic consumer is that they control 1.5 trillion in buying power in this country, but more important than that is that this is up 212% from the last decade, so incredible growth and for product and service conception has increased by 42% in the last decade for Hispanics buying, there's just a lot of purchasing going on, and very important is that they're brand loyal, so we wanna make sure that we become the brand that they love, because they will continue coming back and back and back to us.
0:13:44.6 Francine Rodriguez: Now, when it comes to ads, this is my favorite part, this is for my PPC people, Hispanics pay attention to ads 66% more than all the other populations, and as a paid search person, this is like music to my ears, 'cause we know people are not paying attention to ads. That's just a fact.
0:14:04.7 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah, absolutely. That's crazy, 66%. Wow.
0:14:10.7 Francine Rodriguez: Well, hold your horses 'cause I'm about to blow your mind even more, 93% of people of Hispanic people who recall actually take action on those ads, that's a huge percent.
0:14:24.6 Ben Jacobsen: That doesn't even seem like a real number… I know, but it comes from Google, so I trust them. That is a crazy amount of people paying attention and actually buying... And I'll say, I work in PPC and I'm a Hispanic person, I should know the tricks, and yet I fall for them every time I think it's like that nature in me, I can't stop myself from clicking on an ad and buying...
0:14:52.8 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah, it's crazy. I feel like you just maybe boosted the downloads of Duolingo of anyone that possibly was to like how much... What percentage... That's so crazy. And fascinating. Absolutely, and someone says they would love to access the PDF of this afterwards, so...
0:15:11.2 Francine Rodriguez: Absolutely. Yes, we'll be sharing it. Yeah, so we can definitely get that shared out for you. Thank you.
0:15:16.1 Francine Rodriguez: I'm glad you're excited. Already we're not even half way through. Alright, so the main question remains, Why is no one talking to us?... I just gave you some crazy amount of facts, there are a ton of Hispanic people in the United States, that's 20% of the population. Just proven to you, we got money and we love spending it, love spending it, so again, Why is no one talking to us, why is this such an untapped market and just digital marketing. Any marketing really, but digital marketing specifically, it's just crazy. Let's talk about... Espanol, I could call this just Espanol in the search engine. So the first thing is, why we should be doing this is that there is a lot less competition, so on the left is what we typically see when we search for plumber, open 24 hours, everything above the fold is an ad... It's a map, and this is what we're used to seeing now on the right, is the same search in Spanish, zero ads. That's crazy. When have you seen a plumber with no ads and Google... That's just almost impossible. And if you think about it, who doesn't wanna be the only ad at the top of Google, and for a lot of people, you think that's just a dream that will never, ever happen, but it is actually a reality, you could be that person right now.
0:16:51.9 Francine Rodriguez: Being the 24-hour plumber for this search today, and for those of you thinking about this, and maybe it's like an old screenshot, this session last night, out of whim, I'm gonna check this and it was the first thing I checked, immediately got my screen shot. Wow. So this is fresh data.
0:17:09.9 Ben Jacobsen: You're printing your own money at that point, if you can capitalize on those ads properly... Yeah.
0:17:15.8 Francine Rodriguez: Well, I'm so glad you mentioned money, because that's the next thing we're gonna talk about.
0:17:23.8 Ben Jacobsen: I didn’t see the slide deck ahead of time… I’m like tell us more about what we're gonna learn next. Yeah.
0:17:34.3 Francine Rodriguez: Was so funny. I was like, How did you know? Well, I think it's an obvious question because people think, Okay, fine, there's no competition, him, but show me the money. How much am I gonna spend on this? So you have a very natural reaction. So what I've done is I said, Okay, how do I prove this? I'm gonna go all the way to the top. My company publishes this list every year, the top 25 most expensive keywords in Google, and I said, Okay, I'm gonna take those keywords and I'm gonna investigate... I'm gonna search what are the Spanish CPCs? So to everyone listening, Take a moment, write it in chat, if you can. What do you think? Is it gonna be about the same? Is it gonna be higher? Is it gonna be lower? Any guesses?
0:18:20.2 Ben Jacobsen: My mind is so blown at this point that I feel like I need to guess a negative number, Google is gonna pay you to put your ads on.
0:18:27.8 Francine Rodriguez: That would be awesome, but I don't think that's gonna be the reality quite yet...
0:18:32.6 Ben Jacobsen: I'm gonna guess half. Now, I'm gonna guess... No, that's too much, I'm gonna guess. It's 75% of the cost of what the English CPC would be.
0:18:42.6 Francine Rodriguez: Okay, that's a good guess. Well, everyone at home, hopefully
0:18:46.7 Ben Jacobsen: We got a yes or you're... Through the chat, if you guys got one to share, just because it seems like... Again, all of this is so crazy to me, someone saying they're guessing 50%, another person saying they're guessing a third of the cost for lawyers.
0:19:08.4 Francine Rodriguez: Alright, you guys ready?
0:19:10.3 Ben Jacobsen: 75%, 50%. Like we got the board cover.
0:19:16.3 Francine Rodriguez: Well, let's see. What do you guys think?
0:19:22.3 Ben Jacobsen: Geez, so it's basically like a quarter in some cases...
0:19:26.3 Francine Rodriguez: Yeah, we'll look at the loans. Geez, imagine if your CPC's 40 a click. How do you compete with that? If you're a small person, you can only compete if you're a big name brand...
0:19:43.1 Ben Jacobsen: Right on... I got my secret sauce. That's crazy. That's such a difference.
0:19:49.0 Francine Rodriguez: It is such a difference, it's a fraction of the cost and sometimes an extreme fraction of the cost, and I could keep searching for keywords all day, usually this is what you'll see, it will always be less. And yes. Well, one question I get asked a ton, it's like the volume the same... No, not always, but think about the fraction of the cost that you're spending... I have tons of customers that I only work with small businesses, and they get out bid every time and they have a really hard time competing, when I introduce Spanish CPC to them, they finally had a fighting chance on the search, which is awesome for a small business who are trying to compete against these... Goliaths. So I'm glad you guys like this slide moving on, and I think this is a great reason and it may not affect the bottom line of your business, but I think it's equally important. Imagine if you're trying to search for information online and you cannot find quality information in a language you can understand... That's really difficult. That sucks. Well, as a digital marketer, we can help people get access to quality information, and this right here is one of the few things that we can do to make sure that our online world is more inclusive, and I'm gonna repeat this over and over throughout this presentation representation matters.
0:21:16.1 Francine Rodriguez: And it's not just about our physical world, we're doing a great job there, but no one's talking about the digital world.
0:21:23.0 Ben Jacobsen: 100% agreed. That was the part that I alluded earlier. I can't remember if it was before we started this show or not, but I was talking to my fiance this morning about how excited I was for this episode, and it's really interesting because it strikes pretty good for both of us. My fiance actually works in a medical clinic here in Boise that serves a community that is almost exclusively like new arrivals to the country, people that are in low-income communities, people that are just needing extra help, and so often that she's talking with people from Somalia people from all over the world. And the thing that she talks about almost every day is just the language barrier, and it's like... She said it's so difficult for so many people to get acclimated because they can't find what they're looking for, and when she's talked about that, and we've talked about this before, when I mentioned when we first had our introduction call, it's like... That's crazy to me. I never really fully resonated, I knew it in my mind, but it never fully resonated, there's not search results for things that are in other languages, specifically if you're in a region that doesn't have that as a primary language, it's bizarre, but at the same time, it opens up this opportunity to actually speak to people that are trying to understand what it is to hear what you're trying to say.
0:23:00.5 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah. Everyone needs goods and services. Everyone... And you are going to get chosen, if you can speak to me or... try. I've experienced it in such a smaller capacity, I've traveled to Asia and I spent a few months in Europe and stuff like that, and specifically I was in Thailand, I didn't speak Thai, and I was super fortunate that a lot of people there have some English, but there's a lot of areas that I was traveling to, so I was just kind of backpacking around there, it's like they don't speak any English, and my really, really poor broken tourist Thai, was not very good, but I can tell you they were so welcoming and willing to try to understand what was going on that... It was super eye-opening and I was like, Man, this is what it'd be like to be someone who's new in America, and I know that it seems like such a strange... like global duh, you actually experience that. Like it is, it really does resonate, if that makes sense, after a certain period of time, but you're like, Oh, okay, and then it kinda clicks a little bit, but this is one of the things that when we first started talking about this, I was like, This is what I wanna do. I think this is such an important point to bring up to...
0:24:27.5 Francine Rodriguez: Absolutely, and I will keep repeating it many, many times today, so I think we've convinced all of you, you're here with me, maybe not PPC, but you guys in the SEO world here, are like we should try this. So for a brief moment, I will be talking about How To Start Your PPC campaigns, and I'll say this, it's not anything ground-breaking, you know the strategy, you know your structure, you already know what you're doing, there's just a few nuances that I wanna review when doing things with multiple languages. So the first thing is, each language that you wanna test should have its own separate campaign, they should be obvious, we wanna follow the scientific method, you don't wanna touch what's working, we just wanna try and experiment, see what this new variable is going to do for us in its own separate world, the next thing a lot of people ask us is, What should be my starting budget? I believe that 20% to 30% of what you regularly spend on our campaign is a really great budget to start with, 'cause that gives you enough of a pool to see... Is this gonna be a good strategy for me? You can scale up and scale down.
0:25:40.6 Francine Rodriguez: And as we know, the CPCs are cheaper, so we don't need as big of a budget to do a similar impact... Yeah.
0:25:47.7 Ben Jacobsen: You might even end up getting more reach for less money, so... Absolutely, a quarter or a fraction of your budget, so... Yeah, that's it. That's awesome.
0:25:59.6 Francine Rodriguez: And when you are creating your campaign in the settings, a lot of people ignore the language settings, but I like to make sure and make the point to put in my main language and my test language in those campaign settings. The reason for that is, if you are targeting the United States, the main language is English, we don't know what the browser settings for each people person is going to be, and in a Hispanic family, let's say, with kids and adults, the kids most likely might wanna have their devices set up in English, the adults might wanna have their devices sit up in Spanish, but everyone uses each other's devices, so we just wanna make sure we're covering our bases here by putting on both, and this is more for those folks who are in this presentation 'cause they're considering going international, remember that if you are setting up an ad schedule, you have to consider the time zones, and each network works differently, so Google, when you set up an ad schedule is basing the time of where your account is located or being... When you set up an ad schedule is based off where the user is located, and remember that 9:00 am in Spain is not gonna be 9:00 am in Boise, ID. This is something a lot of people forget when setting up there at schedule.
0:27:12.4 Ben Jacobsen: I had a question for you, just don't know that last slide, so you're saying when you set up your campaign... So just to clarify, this is for setting up your Spanish test campaign... Right, but you're setting English as the primary and then Spanish as a second, or was that just because it was alphabetical order? It's just alphabetical order. There's no primary or second here. Okay, cool, I just wanted to confirm that and make sure that there wasn't...
0:27:35.9 Francine Rodriguez: Absolutely. Cool. Yeah. And so the next thing that we do is our key or research, but you guys get good news, it's already done, you did it, you already know what your top performing keywords are, and you already know your structure, as I said, so what you're gonna do is just pick your top 30, 50 keywords, the ones that you wanna experiment with, and then you're going to translate them, but you're gonna keep everything the same, so now we're gonna talk about the hardest part of Spanish PPC, which is universal for whatever sort of marketing you do, is the translation, this is where the hard work begins, 'cause everything else, you already know how to do. Alright, there are three options with translating, one, you get a professional to do it, that's awesome, that costs a lot of money, and if you're constantly doing different campaigns, it's gonna add up, it's not gonna be a reality usually for most of us, then they're... The two do-it-yourself options, so there's a do-it-yourself, like truly do it yourself or have a Francine in your business because I have become the unofficial translator for any customer in wordstream, and I don't mind it because it doesn't take me a ton of time to do that, usually a keyword lists will take about 10 minutes, it's not even that, and then it's the DIY with help, which is what I'm gonna concentrate on, 'cause even me as a Spanish speaker, a native Spanish speaker, I like to use the tools to make it faster...
0:29:01.6 Francine Rodriguez: Make sure that I'm doing the right job. So the main tool that I use, believe it or not, is Google Translate. It does a great job. It's really easy, it's free. I only use Google translate, the actual translate website or whatever it is, when I'm doing a few keywords like tour free or where I'm checking something really quickly. If I have a large data set, I actually use Google Sheets, and this is a little hack that I learned on Twitter that changed my life. So thank you to Jake Miller Tech where you are, you're a God sent in Google Sheets, there is this translate function where you can take an origin language and then the language that you wanna change it to, and it'll automatically translate any data set that you have. So you can see all your keywords, you're adding a minute.
0:29:56.5 Ben Jacobsen: That's super cool, and that utilizes the same... I'm assuming the same, the same engine that Google Translate is using, so... Exactly. Wow, that's so... That's so cool.
0:30:08.0 Francine Rodriguez: I know it's like the coolest thing, and it does it so quickly, it just really saves a ton of time, so I use it myself when someone gives it to me, or what I've been doing at wordstream is when someone need to translate, I say, throw it into Google Translate, I taught everyone how to use this little... She gave it to me and then I'll give it like a second view 'cause that will take me... One minute.
0:30:30.9 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah, and if you are doing the option where you're doing professional help, that can be one way to try to cost, save a little bit, you can at least maybe get the bulk of the work out of the way and then maybe offload that to someone who maybe is a little bit more proficient... That's all. I expected some sort of Google Chrome widget add on that slows everything down, and there's a paid version and all that stuff, so that's super cool. It's built-in like that.
0:30:58.5 Francine Rodriguez: This is all free stuff. Fantastic, this is... If I teach you one thing today, this is it, pretty much. It’s not that hard.
0:31:15.3 Francine Rodriguez: You can translate to all these languages and there are more options in the one on this orange box, you can just... If you Google, there's a list of every language available. Cool, alright, so I do have to take a moment because I said the translations were hard, and I just showed you two very easy things... Well, there's a trick to this. It's not always one-to-one. So to use a very controversial word in the Spanish language, I'm going to use this example of the word bus and... Yes, ‘bus’ is controversial. The reason why bus is controversial is, depending on where you're from, the word bus is totally different, so Google Translate will usually go with what the official word would be, which would be Spain, they created the language. Fine, they can get the official word... Bus is autobús, but if I'm someone from Argentina and I'm Googling to rent a bus, I'm gonna probably put colectivo, or if I'm from Mexico, I'm gonna put camion, there’s so many different ways to say this, and it's not just the word bus. And it's not just even amongst countries, I'm from Puerto Rico, it's an island that is 100 miles wide with 35 miles, that's teeny tiny, and depending if you're from the north or the south, we fight over words, even in a tiny, small space.
0:32:41.7 Francine Rodriguez: It doesn't mean that I don't understand what the word autobus means, I get it, I know what it means. But when we search in Google, we search how we talk, we use our natural language, not the official word for things, maybe in the second try when we can't find the information, we'll try a fancy version, right. But we usually just put questions or phrases, but that's how we're searching.
0:33:08.0 Ben Jacobsen: So real quick, just to jump in, and I've been also admittedly trying to brush up on my Spanish ahead of this, but just thinking about it like... For example, like Duolingo, they have Spanish in there and it teaches autobus, with that. You mentioned, do you understand what that means in Spanish, but how much of the crossover is acceptable versus how much of it is like, you might be completely... Excuse the pun, but speaking a different language, how much of it was... There's a disconnect there, and is there a really solid way to double-check that based on region, or how does that... How can you kinda combat that?
0:33:57.4 Francine Rodriguez: Absolutely, I actually have an example thinking about this, so let's say you are a bus rental in Florida, you're trying to hit Spanish speakers in Florida in Orlando. You're going to the theme park. Orlando is basically mini Puerto Rico. It is very obvious within the regions, what is the biggest national origin... We kind of talked about that at the beginning of the presentation, Here's where it comes into play, you should be aware about who is around you, because it's not just Spanish people or Spanish-speaking people is gonna be in Orlando, it's gonna be Puerto Ricans in Miami is gonna be Cubans in Texas is gonna be Mexican most likely, right? Yeah, so yes, you should put the official word that Google Translate gives you, but you should... if you have the knowledge that in Orlando, everyone's Puerto Rican. We can try the keyword guagua, which is how I search on how I speak, the word autobus will never be the first thing that comes into my brain, ever. So it is a little bit of an art and a science of knowing who's around you, and that's why I always... My next piece of advice is, if you can, have a native speaker help you out, someone around you who can give you a little bit of that advice, but if you don't have someone to give you that advice, there are some unusual places to ask for help, so the first one would be Twitter.
0:35:24.5 Francine Rodriguez: So this is an example from this week, this woman, Christina Constantine, he's a documentary filmmaker, and she was just asking on her Twitter, look, I'm a second generation Spanish speaker, I don't know how to say, tag us in your post, who can correct this and I very kindly wrote to her and like, Hey, you, This was correct, but you made a tiny mistake, and in that thread, tons of people responded, and it was an actually really awesome thread about how in the community... We love to help each other. So that's the first place you can go to, the second place is just reddit, reddit a translator community from people from all over the world. So if you don't know the nuances of a language, and if you're concerned that you can check in some of these unusual places as well. If you don't have a friend who can help you out,
0:36:10.4 Ben Jacobsen: Reddit is a savior. There are so many things on there that are so fantastic, and it's such a broad piece of valuable asset, there's so much there that you can drive as far as just really good resources like that.
0:36:28.2 Francine Rodriguez: Yeah, so one of my friends from high school is... She's a linguist professor in the University of Puerto Rico. And I asked her, How do you do this? How do you get information? And she's like, Reddit. I'm like, genius, thank you. So there you have it. Some unusual places. So now I'm gonna talk to you about two examples of when you don't have a friend, and maybe you should have had one, so... One more question before we get there, I forgot about this is I do get this question a lot. What about my landing page? Should I translate that as well? Well, I'm of the... You don't have to, first of all, because only one in five Spanish speakers will actually leave the page if they didn't find it in the language that they were looking for, and two is that if you've never searched online in different language of websites, a Google Chrome has this awesome little plugging that comes in automatically, that it'll say, Hey, do you wanna translate this page, they will automatically translate it completely for you. So I don't think it's necessary. I think if you try this out, it does really well for you down the line, in an ideal world…
0:37:42.7 Francine Rodriguez: Yeah, have a translated landing page. That's awesome, but if you can't get to that, don't let it stop you from trying this at all... Right, so time to write the ads, so I know that translating some keywords can be... It's not super difficult, but when you get to the ads, you're like, How do I do sentiment? This is just a little bit harder and I'm really scared 'cause what if... I don't know, Spanish, this is a very scary thing.
0:38:14.3 Ben Jacobsen: Yeah, that was my first thought is I... I don't understand the nuances enough to feel really confident, like spending money and putting our companies and email, they're tied to this. I don't wanna have be in a JFK moment where it's like, you don't wanna sound like a fool, no you don't want to sound like a fool. So I have some good news for you. Representation is actually more important than translation.
0:38:45.6 Francine Rodriguez: 88% of Hispanic people will pay attention to the ads that they're already paying attention to more than anyone when the ad includes an aspect of their culture, so it does not have to be translated, you just have to want to try to... Yes, in an ideal world, you want that ad to be 100% Spanish, that's great, because then I can get fully the information I need right from the start, but it's also okay to do something like this where I lovingly call it Spanglish, where you do 50-50, a little bit of the ad in English, a little bit of the ad in Spanish. That's okay too. I'm so comfortable working with you, I'm still getting the information that I need, and I know that you are willing to work with a Spanish speaker on
0:39:33.2 Ben Jacobsen: That, as you mentioned, it's pretty rare for people to leave if it isn’t entirely in Spanish. So going back to that, one of the very early sides on, what percentage would you say of this audience is only Spanish speaking on this note, if you mix in Spanglish and show that, you're trying to give them at least context of what's going on there and point them in the right direction. How does that fare in comparison to something where maybe just the headlines in Spanish and duress in English?
0:40:05.7 Francine Rodriguez: I got that answer for you in just a second. 'cause I swear I didn't see the slide deck before so I have all the perfectly natural questions that I'm just like I'm trying to wrap my head around... Cool.
0:40:18.3 Francine Rodriguez: Yeah, so stay tuned for one moment, please. So to finish this thought, as I said, it's a deal, 100% translated. Okay, 50% translated. But I'm gonna go further. I think it's fine to have it all in English actually, and these three examples I just shared with you, all came up to me when I was searching in Spanish online. So again, think about it, even if you're the only ad and it's in English, but I was searching for it, you're still at the top, you still number one, people will more likely want to click on you, even if it's all in English, because they know you know, fine, I can't get all my information in the language I want... So to answer your question, literally right here, here is how people are using Spanish language at home versus how they're using it online, so as you can see at home, the majority of people are speaking exclusively in Spanish or in Spanglish bilingually, but online, they have to shift their habits, they have learned time and time again, I'm not gonna find the info I want, so I need to search a little bit more in English, but there are still people trying...
0:41:40.3 Francine Rodriguez: There are still people who are searching first in Spanish and then switching over to English or still trying to search in Spanish, 16% are you're like, No, I'm still gonna search for this and I'm gonna try my best to get that information, and so the main point here is two things online, what we wanna do is we wanna try to close that gap, right? There is a big difference and we just wanna make sure that we are reaching those folks who are still trying, and again, it's just catching the eye of those who are bilingual and saying, Okay, you're trying and I'm here and I'm trying too... And I do see a question.
0:42:21.4 Ben Jacobsen: I was actually gonna bring that up and that was actually a fantastic question, Courtney, I actually had this written down for myself here, and I'm assuming that you were gonna address this in some capacity at some point, but very similar to the question I had. Do you have bilingual employees or representatives to do the Spanish ads, and what if all the employees only speak Spanish... I'm thinking you're meaning they only speak English, then it does not make sense to do a Spanish ad. So for example, Page One Power, let's say, for example, no one in our company spoke Spanish, that's not the case, but if that were the case, and we're advertising and bringing in leads that are in Spanish, and maybe those people... This example here kinda shows that there's still a fair amount of people that are bilingual or at least still be able to communicate with you, but their search intent starts and begins in Spanish in a lot of cases, so how would you... Does it make sense to be advertising if you don't have a built-out functioning Spanish sales team or something along those lines, and importantly... Definitely correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm misrepresenting your question, but I think that's kind of what you're trying to get out there.
0:43:39.3 Francine Rodriguez: Yeah, super fair question. She says, You're right. I firmly believe that even if you don't have anyone in the company who can speak Spanish, you can still gather these leads, because going to the very first example my day one, that person who only spoke Spanish... Got sold in English and got to me... the person searching knows, look, I’m in the United States, I'm working with American companies, I understand that the business language is English, but I am still gonna try to find this information first in Spanish, and that's what we're trying to do, we're just gonna try to provide the information and say, Look, I want your business, I'm here willing to work with you, I can't speak Spanish, but I'll try my best to get you some quality information so that you trust my brand and use my service. Use my product.
0:44:45.0 Ben Jacobsen: I think it kind of relates back to something that we even touched on briefly before, and it's the idea of you're making an effort, like you're trying... The idea... You've mentioned a bunch of times, or honestly, but the idea of Spanglish even is like another example of you're at least trying... Even if you use autobus instead of a different translation, you're still trying... I think so much of everything about marketing is about intent, what is the intent here? And the intent is that you're trying to help people find what they're looking for in whatever capacity or whatever industry that is... The other thing too, I think is something that, again, just talking about this, and she said another thing that so many people are expressing to her is alienation, they don't necessarily feel super warm and welcoming. I don't know if you guys know this, but our country is the most welcoming place sometimes, so in that capacity, I... She's like, I just want to do what I can to make them feel like, Hey, you're welcome here. I'm willing to try to help you. And so I think that same sentiment can be very quickly applied to something like this where it's like...
0:46:02.5 Ben Jacobsen: Sure, I don't speak fluent Spanish, but I'm willing to try to help you guys. I think that my business or the service that I'm providing is the best, and so I want you to use my service because I'm the best, but I wanna make it accessible to you, not just because you happen to speak a different language that's no longer accessible to you... And so I think just trying to open that door and allow people to see what's best inside of the SEO space, we constantly champion the idea of the best content will rise to the top, What's answering the best questions, what's making the most sense, what's answering the intent for what that searcher is looking for will rise at the top, but if the person is searching for something in a different language that you're not paying attention to, then you're not gonna be able to rise to the top because again, you're not making that door open to maybe answer my own question there, I guess, but I think that's really important, and it's something that I even... We talked about, I think, briefly, when we were talking earlier, is just kind of the idea of just because you can do 100% doesn't mean that 5% isn't super telling of where your direction is going.
0:47:16.6 Francine Rodriguez: Yeah, and what you're saying coming to the United States is very intimidating, you guys... You're hearing me right now. I came here the first time when I was 16, and then the second time when I was 24, my English is what I would consider perfect, and I was still scared, and I was still overwhelmed and just seeing my native language anywhere gave me a sense of ease, like oh okay, I feel a little bit... A tiny... The door is slightly open for me to go through, it's just a tiny thing, even if everything else is in English, but you could talk to someone in Spanish, that's just the tiniest thing to make us feel welcome. If you can't do it...
0:48:04.3 Ben Jacobsen: Courtney, I'm not sure if maybe it's the instance where your company doesn't have someone there that speaks Spanish, I think that's probably... I'm sure it happens pretty regularly, they're smaller companies that maybe doesn't have someone... There are so many options too, available if you end up... You end up finding a lead and they speak Spanish and maybe they have some English, but maybe they are just more comfortable, there's options, there's a language line, which is like... I think you might have to pay for it, but it's like a tele interpreter service. You can use Google Translate, like Google Translate itself has an app on your phone where you can push a button and you can talk, just set it down on the table and you can literally talk to IT and in real time without touching any more buttons to just automatically translates it as if there's a person translating for you real time, it's not perfect yet, give me wrong, but I will definitely... Again, it shows that effort that you're making is like, Oh, this person actually wants to talk with you...
0:49:05.4 Francine Rodriguez: Yeah, and we're not looking for perfection. We're looking for effort, and I'll go for... I've seen a sales guy at wordstream sell through email, through Google Translate, I've seen him do it, because I got his customers for a long time before we put some rules, that was in the start-up days, but effort, the tiny effort. You got it. You got my business.
0:49:29.3 Francine Rodriguez: Thank you so much. Alright, so I promise you some examples of a little bit of a disaster when you don't check your work, and I just think these are fun to share always. So something you should know to Hispanic people is that we take no prisoners and we love to roast a good mistake. So this is McDonald's. I'm sure you see this, they've been creating these meals with celebrities where the celebrity creates like their combo, the favorite stuff that they have at the restaurant, and so jBavin is like an artist, and they wrote, Oh, the jBalvin meal has arrived, which is llego, two Ls but this one was spelled lego, and so my friend from college were having focus when you just put this on Facebook and the whole comment section is just fully roasting them, which is a little fun for us, but... You don't wanna be that person on the other side. I made a mistake. And further than that, you don't wanna insult your customers... So in this example, this is from Kmart, they were doing a Mother's Day Sale, I think they were playing with the word Namaste, and now they were not trying to reach the Hispanic audience per se, but the kmarts are mainly...
0:50:51.3 Francine Rodriguez: One of their main target audience is Hispanic women, so much so that in 2011, they actually created a Telenovela on YouTube about Kmart to try to attract more of this audience because it's so valuable to them, No way, which is really weird, bWeird, but cool, I guess... And going back to this example, their main audience is Hispanic women, and this word here in Spanish, I will not translate it for you, but let's say the eggplant emoji is involved and it was a huge mistake on their part, huge. And we are me too. Again, we love to roast them endlessly for putting this... Hispanic influencers, for young people. Yeah, you don't wanna be this person either. Take a lesson from them...
0:51:57.8 Francine Rodriguez: Yes, So kinda moving town to other strategies are very important. I'm gonna tell you the story about a typical Hispanic family, which is mine, this is my family, and this is how we like to post our family on social media, but this is actually what our family gatherings look like, everyone is on their phone the whole time from the youngest person in my family to the oldest person in my family, and this is very typical of a Hispanic family because we spend two more hours per week on smartphones than all other demographics. So what does this mean for our world, we need to make sure we have our mobile strategy set up, so this means make sure that website is optimized for that mobile traffic, review your bid adjustments, and make sure that you're up a little bit more on mobile because that's where you're gonna capture this audience, use all those extensions so that you can push your competitors down, especially those mobile-specific ones, and if you have Spanish speakers who can talk to folks, definitely consider call only ads. That would be a great strategy. And another great strategy... Oh, sorry. And one thing that's great for mobile is that Hispanics use it as their second eyes while shopping, 83% of Hispanic people on their phones are on the store, making sure that they're getting the best price and that that is the best product that they want, so we're shopping while we are shopping, so make sure that you are a very mobile optimized.
0:53:31.6 Francine Rodriguez: Now, our next strategy here is video, so TouTube, as I said, is very important. So much so that kmart aren't created a Telenovela just to get more people to... Hispanics watch YouTube more than any other cable network in the United States. That's huge. Which isn’t very surprising 'cause those are on my house all day, like more than any other network... I think about that, that's a lot. So how they watch is also very interesting, and I'll use my family here as an example, the majority is watching content in English most of the time. So if you are interested in getting into more YouTube, creating the content in English is perfectly fine. 'cause 60% of hispanics are watching it in English, and that would be someone like my cousin and he grew up in the United States, so most of his digital content, he does it in English, but I would say in the last couple of years, he's kind of switched over more to where I am because he had kids and he really wants to include his culture for his kids, so now he's on YouTube kids and watching Spanish videos all the time for his children.
0:54:42.9 Francine Rodriguez: And then you have someone like myself, I represent the 30% where I watch and I consume my digital media equally in both languages, 'cause I grew up there... I didn't move here till I was an adult. And so I like to make sure that I keep both languages as part of my life, and I'd like to consume content in both equally, and then you have that 12% as someone like my mom, she's lived in United States for more than 10 years, but she still only consumes everything online in Spanish, so that's a little bit about how we watch on YouTube, so what does that mean for ads... We just wanna make sure that we're on YouTube, especially because again, we love shopping with our phones, and we love shopping with YouTube, 75% of us are on YouTube first learning about a product, and we are doing that on our phones, so kind of combining the last two strategies here a little bit.
0:55:38.2 Ben Jacobsen: That's crazy, that's 75%... That number is really interesting to me, 75% want to learn about a product and they'll go to YouTube first... Correct. Crazy. That's fascinating, that gives a real boost to the idea of white product review channels and stuff like that, like how massively influential and important those are, that you're reviewing guys.
0:56:03.2 Francine Rodriguez: Get your reviews in, and as I said, you don't have to necessarily do them in Spanish, but there's not a lot of reviews in Spanish out there, so you have an opportunity... And then I wanna give an example of a good channel that's doing a great job, pero like ss a division of BuzzFeed, that creates English content, but about Hispanics. And I think it does a really great job if you want an example of how to mix both and how to mix culture with just doing everything in English, but I also wanna point out that while I was watching my YouTube videos, 'cause I love pero like, saw this ad for this movie, Ma, and it was in Spanish. I'm like, What a great job, because I'm watching this video in Boston. I'm watching a video in English, but... And I usually, I'm in ads all day, I'm the one who tries to ignore things, but they immediately capture my attention because they're trying to speak to me in my language, I'm like, Good job, and screenshot for a future presentation.
0:57:06.4 Ben Jacobsen: And do you have... What about your Chrome setting? So you're being displayed that... Do you have your Chrome settings set to Spanish or the tracking that is based off of the content that you're currently consuming.
0:57:17.5 Francine Rodriguez: Only based on the content... I have nothing set up in Spanish, everything I have is set up in English, I'm that person that confuses YouTube. So I love being the guinea pig, and whenever I find things like this, I immediately take pictures of it. Nice, awesome. And I have to take a moment, and you have to remember that the most watched video on YouTube of all times is in Spanish, and it is despacito from my fellow countrymen, Daddy Yankee with over seven billion views. So Spanish is here and it's growing, and if that's the number one video on YouTube, think about it, there's so much more growth to be had there. Absolutely, yeah, and there's so many other facts, if you look at the top 10 videos in the last decade from YouTube, a ton of them are in Spanish as well, so an opportunity for you guys... So this is it guys, this is the recap. I know that you know that I love Spanish, but I hope that you guys love it too now, and so I just wanted to review everything that we've talked about today, so the first thing is that Spanish speakers are a growing and valuable target market.
0:58:27.2 Francine Rodriguez: Please don't ignore us, and that you don't have to stress out and reinvent the wheel, use the same strategies that you're using now, just translate them, make sure we feel seen and included in that ad copy, and if you're scared to do it in Spanish, that's okay do it in English, just try to talk to us just a little bit. Open the door, don't even... You don't have to open it completely, just put it adjacent, we'll walk in, and having a mobile strategy is key because that's where we're spending most of our time online and use video, especially if you're in the e-commerce space, use those product description videos, they're gonna be very helpful for you and getting some new brand loyal users. Alright, muchas gracias. No, I'm ready for any questions that you guys have.
0:59:13.5 Ben Jacobsen: That was awesome. So much for that I... Again, just as insightful. And even more so than I expected. So thank you so much for that. You guys, I apologize, I totally was gonna post this in the very beginning at the top of the show, but this is a little bit older article that France put together, still super relevant. I know that we had some asks for the PDF, this does have some of that information in there, so this is another great resource for you guys to check out, we're also gonna put together... We'll grab... It sounds like we can grab the slide deck from you, and then we're also going to be posting the recording of this as well. I know someone was mentioning they had to step away for a little bit, so if you guys do have to step away or you wanna review some of this, I would recommend... We'll have that up, usually we try to get at about 24 to 48 hours, so we should hopefully have that up for the weekend for you guys, looks like we do have... Let's see here at Courtney And says, thank you so much.
1:00:08.5 Ben Jacobsen: Thank you, Courtney again, that was a fantastic question, it was one that I've been kind of thinking about in the back of my mind too, as far as not having someone specifically in-house, so... Again, that is awesome, it looks like we hit... Just the top of the hour. It's like You had a stopwatch or something... Perfect. It looks like we got all of our questions answered. That was incredible. Thank you so much for putting that together. Like I mentioned, I really thoroughly enjoyed that, and I think it's really insightful and I think it's cool to bring additional people into the fold to try to help include everyone and make sure that we're finding or I guess helping... Provide people are looking for and helping people find that, so... Awesome, thanks again, we look forward to having you back.
1:00:57.3 Francine Rodriguez: And thank you so much for giving me the platform to talk about this, it's something that I love speaking about and the more I share it, I think the more... This will change.
1:01:07.7 Ben Jacobsen: Agreed. Awesome, thank you guys so much, thank you guys for joining in with us, if you have any other questions or if you have anything else you'd like to talk this about, again, reach out to us, we're always available and always happy to chat with you guys. Thanks again. We'll see you guys next time. Thank you.
