Six tips for mastering multicultural marketing at your dealership

Today’s consumer looks much different than they did two decades or even ten years ago. According to Deloitte, millennials are the most diverse generational cohort in the history of the United States. Roughly 44% of this group consists of racial or ethnic minorities.

This evolution of demographics has made the need for multicultural marketing strategies no longer optional. Creating messaging that resonates with multicultural groups is not only the right thing to do to garner trust, but it also makes good business sense.

Additionally, the cultural consumer shifts go beyond race and ethnicity. Recent data has revealed that today’s millennial consumer is more likely to be college-educated and live near a city center. However, they are less likely to be homeowners than their more seasoned counterparts. These changes create a new cultural context that your dealership marketing team needs to be aware of when creating brand messaging to reach out to these individuals.

How do you ensure you are optimizing your multicultural marketing efforts? Check out these best practices and tips:

Understand The Meaning of Multicultural Marketing

Multicultural marketing isn’t just about creating diversity initiatives. The composition of this strategy is much more dynamic and complex. These strategies aim to create new paths for customers who are not within your current audience base.

The ultimate objective is to reach out to consumer segments based on their ethnic or socio-cultural background, which could be outside of the majority of your current consumers. You would then create consumer personas and targeted marketing messaging that address these groups’ motivations and preferences.

Ensure That You Have Different Voices Involved with Marketing

There has been a string of tone-deaf marketing campaigns in recent years. Examples from this round-up by Edology reveal the importance of doing your multicultural due diligence. These likely could have been avoided if someone from the demographic groups the campaigns were targeting was involved in the decision-making process. Additionally, groups can be left out of messaging if marketing professionals from these groups are not at the table.

Therefore, you should seek to include as many voices from various ethnic, age, gender, and racial groups as possible in your dealership marketing plans. You can gain significant cultural insights that can help you create responsible messaging that resonates with multicultural groups.

See If These Groups Are Already Interacting with You

This step is where CRM and consumer data will come in handy. The groups that you are seeking to reach out to may already be interacting with your brand. Therefore, start looking at your CRM and data management platforms.

If they are engaging with your dealership, you can begin directing some branded multicultural messaging to these groups. Additionally—depending on the relationship you have cultivated with them—you can even involve them in focus groups or survey them directly.

Make A/B Testing a Regular Part of Your Strategy

A/B testing enables you to try out everything from landing page color schemes to email marketing prose. Use this tool to your advantage when creating marketing messaging for multicultural groups. For example, you may be wondering if email newsletter phrasing works better for a specific demographic group in one town versus another location. A/B testing will give you the insights you need to know if one of the campaigns was more successful than the other.

Don’t Make Assumptions

One of the worst things you can do in a marketing strategy is to make assumptions about a particular group—even if those assumptions may seem innocent. One common way that this can happen is by treating a minority group like they are a monolith.

Even within a racial or ethnic group, various identities change based on location, gender, religion, income, education, and sexual orientation. Therefore it is essential to split these groups within the larger segment to ensure your messaging truly resonates.

Always Measure

Like you would with a campaign that includes a majority audience, it’s important that you always make an effort to measure a multicultural campaign’s effectiveness. You want to know if you are attracting the target audience that you seek.

Therefore, you will need to put a system in place to see if individuals from a specific demographic group are converting. This can be in the form of page views, joining your email list, or clicking through a link to head to your inventory page. You want to know if these individuals are now engaging with you so that you can build a long-last relationship with them and convert them into a customer.

Multicultural Marketing is Essential in 2021 and Beyond

Again, 40% of millennials come from a racial or ethnic minority. Additionally, the numbers from Generation Z will likely be even higher. Consequently, it is important to put systems in place to adequately gain the trust of consumers belonging to these groups.

However, each of these efforts should start with diversifying the team members who help to craft these strategies, whether this is through working with a third-party that can accomplish this or hiring professionals yourself. The more you make multicultural marketing a priority, the easier it will be to motivate multicultural groups to become a part of your customer base.

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