Jose Villa has a secret: Non-English-language advertising on the Internet is a bargain and it can be highly effective, too.
As chief executive of multicultural online agency Sensis, Villa works mostly in Spanish, Korean and Chinese. But his expertise has attracted local clients such as Walt Disney Co. and Southern California Edison. Even the U.S. Army.
Villa sells services for paid search marketing, charging companies for ads that appear when Web users look for a certain word on Google and other common search engines.
In paid search, a company buys a keyword, meaning that every time someone types a search with that word, the company’s ad will appear along with unpaid search results. When someone clicks on the ad, the company pays the search engine.
The cost at a major search engine for use of a big-money word such as “mortgage” can run as high as $100. In contrast, “hipoteca,” the Spanish word for mortgage, might cost $25 to $80. Also, “in Spanish, you can usually see results faster,” Villa said.
Russell Bennett, vice president at United Healthcare, has contracted with Sensis to build and manage two Spanish-English sites. The agency also designs online campaigns to drive employers and policyholders to the sites.
United Healthcare’s cost per click ranges between 40 cents and 60 cents at the two sites. Typical costs in the health sector for English-language searches are nearly $6 per click, about 10 times what the Spanish-language campaign costs, according to Bennett.
“We’re showing strong traffic growth, month to month, mostly as a result of the online advertising we did through Sensis,” he said.
Given U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and other Mideast countries, Sensis conducts recruitment campaigns for a special U.S. Army program seeking fluent speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish and Pashto. Although the military has stepped up its search for recruits conversant in such languages since 9/11, it used print media until only recently.
But when the Army first went online, recruiters received hundreds of resumes from people who couldn’t speak the required language. Sensis changed the campaign, putting the ads on regular job sites such as Monster and CareerBuilder. But job seekers weren’t able to respond until they first answered a series of questions about the foreign language.
“We’ve increased the quality of submissions significantly,” said Villa. “The Army is happy enough to expand the contract to other languages including Chinese, Tagalog and Spanish.”
Armando Azarloza, president of the Axis Agency in L.A., strongly agrees that companies should adopt a multicultural stance online, but he warns that if they advertise in a certain language, they should be ready to conduct business in that language.
“Your operations have to match your marketing,” Azarloza said. “If you’re lucky enough to have people who speak a language, you still have to train them how to sell with appropriate cultural clues.”
