Hernan Vazquez explains why translating marketing copy for Hispanic audiences fails. Spanish-speaking copywriters understand emotional nuance that machines miss, and the Hispanic market's rapid growth makes hiring native speakers a strong investment.
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Hispanic Marketing Radio. I'm your host, Hernan, and on this episode I wanted to talk a little bit about copywriting, specifically when it comes to content and specifically when it comes to targeting those Hispanic communities in the US where the content that you produce is online. One of the things that comes up when you're producing content, whether it is for your website, your emails, your sales letters, your social media profiles for your company and whatnot, is the fact that you want to target the right people at the right time, specifically when you're trying to target these Hispanic communities. Now, something that a lot of companies will do is the fact that they will translate their content and that's basically their content for their entire Hispanic market. And the problem with that is that copywriting, specifically direct response copywriting, which is the type of content that you put out there to create a response in your audience, to create— to get them to take action into something, needs to connect emotionally with the audience. So for instance, I've always been— I've been studying the English language since I'm really young, and then I worked, you know, with the English communities and, you know, and a lot of people from the US. And one of the things that comes up is that the emotional connection that you could potentially have with the language, and it's really, really different from a native speaker than a non-native speaker. What do I mean with that? I basically mean that when you're learning a language, right? You're a little kid, you're learning a language. There's a lot of emotional cues and emotional connection that goes towards learning that language. So for instance, you will learn it from your mother, from your father, and whatnot. And that emotional connection is not there, that emotional attachment, if you would, to the language. It's not there when you're learning a second language. Like for instance, my case would be English, but somebody, you know, speaking English would be Spanish, right? Or whatever other language. So what happens on that term is that you don't have that much of an emotional connection with the language. This is, you know, psychology 101, and I'm not a psychologist, by the way. But what I'm trying to say here is that when you're trying to convince or to persuade somebody to do something and you're trying to do it on their mother language, you need to understand the little the little nuances that the language might have. So that means that if you want to really be effective with your persuasion in your copywriting, specifically if you're an English speaker or your company mostly conducts business in English, then you want to hire somebody preferably that will speak the language as a mother tongue. That you're trying to sell them. So you will hire somebody, maybe a marketing firm or a marketing consultant that will speak the language natively and the reason why is because again, this is really hard to emulate with machines like for instance, if you're trying to use Google Translate to translate your content to actually go after that Hispanic communities. Now when it comes to hiring somebody that will translate your content and not only translate it but actually make it better and make it sound good and make it connect emotionally with the audience, there's a huge ROI that you could possibly have by hiring these people. And the reason why is because, again, Hispanic communities are getting bigger and bigger, specifically in the US, and they're consuming more and more products from companies. So there's a really, really big ROI that you could have when going after these communities if you decide to go ahead and connect with them on an emotional level with your content. Again, that is pretty much only achieved if you have been exposed to the content or to the language since you were a little kid. That's why I'm so adamant about companies that want to, you know, go into the Hispanic communities actually hiring Spanish or Hispanic-speaking or Latin-owned marketing agencies because again, those people have grown with the language, they understand the nuances, they understand the little connections between the words from a deep emotional level, and that is basically what you need to do if you want to really connect with the audience and really sell your products and services from an effective perspective. If you want me and my team to go ahead and help you getting this done, if you want me and my team to help you translate your content and also develop some specific marketing strategies for this demographic, go to hernanvasquez.com/apply. That is H-E-R-N-A-N-V-A-Z.com/apply. Q-U-E-Z, that's my name, Hernan Vazquez, forward slash apply, and complete the little form in there. And then somebody of my team will reach out and we can talk about how we can help you. Um, in the meantime, have an amazing, amazing week. I'll see you guys soon. Bye-bye.
