It was Sunday, Father’s Day. I woke up in my comfortable home, my kids and wife treated me to breakfast in bed (a tradition in our house). And then I did what I needed to do, but did not want to. At twelve noon, I left for the airport (I gave myself the bad dad award.). It was painful to leave the house where I am spoiled by my family.
But, I had to get to Miami to make it to the SES Latino Conference which started early Monday morning. The flight started out easy enough. We left on time and appeared to be moving at a good clip. Then the captain came on… we were diverted, but are now on our way back to Miami.
When we landed I said, “Not too late.”
Stupid… never say anything like that while your still on the plane.
Weather messed things up pretty badly. We sat just off the gates for about 2 hours. Things did not go so smoothly.
I arrive at the hotel late. Ordered some late night room service, popped open the computer and started to review emails, work on some database stuff and review some blogs. Eventually, I went to sleep.
When I woke up a few hours later the next morning, I looked out my window. Visible from my room, there were 11 skyscrapers under construction. The steel and concrete all looked virtually the same. Sure, there were some slight differences in shape to accommodate the façade or esthetics, but they were essentially similar. Once they are complete, I am sure they will be very distinct from each other. But, at their hearts, they all follow the same rules of architecture.
Well, as I was sitting in the sessions today, I realized that my trip here was very analogous to the road we travel when advertising to the Latino market place.
We know we have a comfortable market that treats us well and stepping away from it (leaving others to tend it), is hard. But, we’re going to do it because it is necessary.
We then start kidding ourselves into thinking maybe it’s not so difficult. Just take what I do, changed the language and I’m golden.
Then, the SNAFU fears come on. We don’t get the clicks, we don’t get the conversions, or worse, we forgot to have someone check the literal meaning in the native language of our product and blame that for our woes. We’ve all heard various versions of the same theme, a car named “Nova” (by the way, this one was an urban legend). Anyway, there are going to be some bumps. We may end up with different routes, getting there later or finding something we did not expect.
But, lest we forget, most of us went through bumps when launching in our own country or our own language. We were just less frightened by it because we could understand, and therefore adjust to the reasons. It is marketing 101. Learn and adapt to the markets.
This leads to the buildings I saws. At its core, marketing is marketing. All the strategies that were discussed were core and classic marketing. Just like every building has to follow similar architectural rules around the laws of physics, all marketing has to follow the same basic rules around the laws of communication. Then, when we get into market, the individual locale dictates the target action, words and esthetics of our campaigns, but core marketing practices don’t change.
There will be others covering the details of the presentations. The bottom line is that good search marketing is good search marketing anywhere in the world. The same core practices you use to create programs in English in the States need to set the framework for any other programs you run. .
Just for fun, I am going to poke at Gord Hotchkiss. Last week he went off on his fellow Canadians. The essential message: The Canadian people are online in droves and well adept at using search. Why aren’t the marketers well adept at search marketing?
Well, it appears the Latin American marketers have set the groundwork for developing well managed SEM. While content is still lacking, there is a VERY firm grasp of ROI measurement; SEM practices and the proper development of well structured content. I was hearing things from Latin American search marketers that I did not hear from many American SEMs until just this past year. The Latin American market is going to grow phenomenally and the marketers are well positioned to leverage that growth with well thought out metrics and measurement practices.
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