Your marketing success is in large part dependent on your tools. If you’re using bad ad tech, you’re going to get subpar results, regardless of how good your product is or how much you know about your audience.
For multicultural marketers, being able to rely on high quality ad tech that can help you identify and target your chosen audience is a must. This means looking for partners that not only have firsthand experience and expertise working with the audiences you’re trying to attract but also have a sophisticated platform that will enable you to reach them at scale.
To advertise effectively, marketers first need to understand the preferences and habits of their audiences. This requires data, and lots of it. When targeting a specific demographic, marketers need to make sure they have a strong grasp of the nuances within the audience, especially with regard to cultural values, language preferences, level of assimilation, age and location, to name a few.
As a result, when looking for an ad tech partner, you should be looking for companies that have significant amounts of first-party data available that will not only provide insights but also enable you to better identify which individuals you should be targeting, as well as the best way of reaching them.
Of course, effective multicultural marketing is not just about identifying which people you should be targeting—it’s also about putting those insights into practice. Consequently, you should be looking for media partners who can provide both those cultural insights as well as the scale and access to inventory needed in order to produce results. You’ll need these partners to direct you to the places where these audiences are really spending time, not just where you think they’re likely to be found.
It’s also important to keep in mind that just because a company is billed as multiculturally focused doesn’t mean that the people who work there are equally diverse. In my experience, it’s uncommon to find Hispanic-focused ad-tech companies that are actually majority Latino. Having authenticity in the back end is something that all multicultural audiences crave, and they can tell the difference between marketers who put the effort in and those who are doing the bare minimum.
One way to evaluate a multicultural tech company would be to see the number of products they offer and how often they launch new ones. Are they offering marketers the tools they need to succeed in platforms like CTV and across multiple generations? Is there innovation happening behind the scenes? How quickly are they able to respond to industry trends? Do they have a proven track record? The answers to all these questions will give you more insight into both the way the tech is developed and the company behind it.
It can be difficult for marketers without a strong tech basis to properly evaluate the tools they use on the back end. At the same time, it’s difficult for marketers without a strong knowledge of multicultural audiences to properly create and implement a successful marketing strategy. That’s why it’s so important to do your due diligence when looking for a multicultural ad-tech partner.
