Wicked Bionic: Cross-cultural Marketing and Advertising

How a Marketing Agency Connects You to Hispanic Audiences in Los Angeles

If your business has decided to start attracting Hispanic customers in Los Angeles, then you probably already know the benefits of Hispanic marketing. What you may not know is how to create a Los Angeles-focused Hispanic marketing strategy that works. Finding a Hispanic marketing agency can help.

Understanding Cultural Relevance

A majority of first-, second-, and third-generation Hispanics say they respond more positively to content that reflects their culture, especially the Hispanic millennial market. If you deliver advertising or marketing content that does not connect with Hispanic culture, then Hispanics likely won’t engage with it. A Hispanic marketing agency that has gathered data and insights on Hispanic media consumption habits can help you understand what’s culturally relevant and integrate it into your campaigns.

Creating a Regionally Effective Strategy

If your organization wants to connect with Hispanic audiences in Los Angeles, then you need a Hispanic marketing agency that understands this area. Second- and third-generation Hispanics under age 30 who live in L.A. won’t have the same interests or concerns as a middle-aged, first-generation Cuban American living in Miami. Find a Hispanic marketing agency based in L.A. or one that has extensive research on the Hispanic consumer market in L.A.

Focusing on Channels Popular with Hispanics

A Hispanic marketing agency will know which channels make the greatest impact on Hispanic consumers. Examples are mobile or online shopping and streaming media. Hispanic consumers are a mobile-first community, using their phones or mobile devices to send texts and e-mails, to check news and weather, to pay bills, to play games, to stream music, and more. A Hispanic marketing agency can help you develop impactful marketing campaigns for the channels where you’re most likely to find your Hispanic customers.

Narrowing Your Messaging

In multicultural marketing, a “one-size-fits-all” approach is never the answer. It’s no different with Hispanic marketing, where mistargeted messaging can cost you customers. With the help of a Los Angeles Hispanic ad agency, you’ll understand your target group’s wants and needs, so your messaging will always be precise. A good marketing agency will also show you the differences within the Hispanic community, specifically between age groups and regions.

Could you use the help of a qualified Hispanic marketing agency in Los Angeles to refine your strategy? Wicked Bionic specializes in multicultural marketing, using a data-driven approach to uncover integral insights into the Hispanic market. Contact us here so we can start discussing your new Hispanic marketing strategy.

3 Tips for Marketing in 2021

There’s a saying that sounds confusing but is true nonetheless: “We don’t know what we don’t know.” If the previous year has taught us anything, sometimes things happen that we couldn’t have predicted, let alone know how to prepare for it. The global pandemic was an “unknown unknown” for hundreds of thousands of business owners who suddenly found themselves trying to adapt to impossible situations “on the fly.”

That being said, while we can’t be entirely prepared for what we don’t know, we can still learn from past experiences by being more agile in our thinking and more adaptable in our execution. Let’s give a few examples of what we might see as “unknowns” in 2021 —and how we can adapt from a marketing perspective.

Unknown: Another Event Rocks the World

Whether it’s variations of the pandemic affecting the global economy, or a significant new issue affecting local communities and regional areas, disruptions will make us more cautious in our businesses.

How to prepare:

Pay close attention to your numbers, and be aware of even slight changes that could point to changes in response.
Keep your finger on the pulse of your target market; be mindful of your customers’ state of mind so you can adapt to their changing needs and support them with your product or service.

Unknown: A New Competitor Emerges and Affects Your Market Share

The concept of “disruption” is the mantra of startups everywhere—and even startups built around disrupting their respective market can themselves be disrupted by someone else. What happens if a surprise competitor starts eating away quickly at your market share?

How to prepare:

Start and maintain a competitive intelligence program that monitors your marketplace for signs of new activity.
Work on building a “moat” of sorts around your business by improving on the things you already do exceptionally well so you can solidify customer loyalty.
Think about how you can specialize further and develop a niche, as niche markets are more difficult to disrupt.

Lastly, what do you offer that your current customers may not know about? Upselling them with additional products and services may help their business while growing yours.

Unknown: You Discover a New Target Market Serendipitously

Not every “unknown unknown” is a bad thing. Sometimes unknowns come in the form of untapped possibilities, like finding an unexpected new market. The danger of these kinds of unknowns is in failing to seize the opportunity before the window closes.

How to prepare:

Test and re-test your marketing efforts, even when things seem to be going well.
Try bullet-testing small marketing projects to see what emerges, and be prepared to invest more if they produce successful results.
Use analytics to track your responses, click-throughs, and conversions religiously to notice shifting patterns in the early stages.

One key to not being broadsided by “unknown unknowns” is to have the most current marketplace intel possible. Wicked Bionic lives on the cutting edge of marketing trends and demographics to help clients anticipate and pivot quickly for maximum results.

Is Your Marketing Reaching Millennials?

Has your business been spending money on marketing and advertising to reach younger audiences but coming up short? One significant factor may be that you’re not clear on millennials and digital media.

DIGITAL MARKETING IS WHERE IT’S AT

Digital marketing to millennials (ages 24-39) requires an understanding that general marketing (marketing to the masses) and traditional marketing (newspapers, magazines, flyers) are not the right way to reach this highly-valued audience.

Millennials are the first generation to grow up with the Internet and mobile devices. They may have seen their parents reading the Sunday newspaper or flipping through a magazine but this generation gets their content from their mobile devices. Millennial’s media consumption happens via the Internet and use it for everything from social interactions to researching facts for themselves. As a business, you want to be in front of them where and how they consume this content. Digital marketing is where to invest your time and money.

The best way to advertise to millennials is to look to social media platforms. As Smart Insights states, “Millennials are a particularly important group since their age coincides with peak usage of many social media platforms by age and in particular two of the most popular social networks: Facebook and Instagram. Plus, they are predicted to be the largest target group for ‘generational marketing’ in the future.” This generation can also be found predominately Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. Look for millennial consumer trends that show where and how they are spending money.

Learn more about how to reach millennials with a FREE copy of The Practical Guide to Multicultural Marketing

SOCIAL CAUSES BRING MEANING

Over 60% of millennials prefer to purchase from a brand dedicated to supporting a cause. If your business supports a cause like protecting the environment, they are more than likely to be loyal to your brand. Other social causes that are important when marketing to millennials are animal rights, anti-racism, and sustainability.

Top Los Angeles millennial advertising agency, Wicked Bionic knows about crafting brand messages that appeal to millennial audiences and delivering them on social platforms to grow your business. If your business isn’t reaching the right audiences, reach out to Wicked Bionic here.

Millennials Media Consumption

To reach Millennials, you want to create content that not only speaks to their priorities and thought processes, but you must also understand Millennials’ media consumption. Let’s explore some of the most common ways Millennials consume content—and the type of content they’re most attracted to—to help identify the best channels for getting your message to them.

ONLINE SOURCES

As the first generation to grow up with the Internet and mobile devices, it naturally follows that Millennials preferred method of content access is online. Some statistics:

Nearly 50 percent of Millennials spend a minimum of 10 hours per week online. Twenty percent spend more than 20 hours per week.
Nearly 60 percent of Millennials use the Internet as a primary source for news.
Nearly 60 percent of Millennials use their smartphones for shopping.
The most visited websites among Millennials include YouTube, Facebook, BuzzFeed, Spotify, and Amazon.

This information means that an effective marketing campaign geared toward millennials will need to include a large percentage of the budget put toward millennial consumer trends.

TRADITIONAL IS OUT

Millennials are turned off by mass marketing and the mass marketing of their parent’s generation; in fact, 57 percent of Millennials block ad content whenever possible. Instead, millennials prefer media consumption via the Internet to research facts for themselves. This is why millennials are 247% more likely to be influenced by a blog post than a traditional ad. Blogging and guest blogging are great ways to reach this generation and promote your business.

BRAND LOYALTY

Over 60 percent of them are on Instagram. There are 87 million Millennials on LinkedIn. 5 million Millennials are on TikTok. Thus, social media plays a critical role in how this demographic consumes and processes content. Building a solid social media presence with authentic content is crucial for reaching them. This means engaging a millennial audience with regular interactions on social media and advertising to millennials. Yes, it’s an opportunity to educate them about your brand, but if you want to build loyalty around your brand, invest time and money to engage, ask questions, and talk about issues and causes they care about today.

A top Millennial and Hispanic ad agency in Los Angeles, Wicked Bionic, has done extensive research on different cultures in the Millennial market and how they respond. If your business isn’t reaching the right audiences and your brand needs help understanding millennials and digital media for business growth, reach out here.

Business Growth: Connect with Diverse Audiences

The diversity of our population presents a unique set of opportunities for businesses when it comes to marketing. Chances are the need for your product or service cuts across many demographics and cultural lines. Still, the idea of crafting multiple messages to reach a multicultural audience can be highly intimidating—especially if you are relatively unfamiliar with some of them. How can you possibly become an expert on multiple cultures to the point of marketing effectively to all of them?

The good news is that you don’t have to. Although it’s important to segment your messaging for multicultural marketing (and an agency like Wicked Bionic can help with that), you can still make meaningful connections cross-culturally without earning a degree in anthropology or diversity studies. Let’s talk about how to do that.

Make It Personal

One of our mentors used to tell us, “What’s most personal is also most general.” That statement seems like a paradox, but it simply means that personal feelings are universally felt. Pain, joy, success, failure, hope, fear—these are all part of our shared human experience, regardless of cultural background or even language barriers. So don’t be afraid to get personal. Speak from the heart. Draw from your pain points, problems, and successes to interweave your story into your marketing. You’ll find in doing so that your message will resonate with people from all walks of life.

Speak with Your Audience’s Best Interests in Mind

If what’s personal is also most general, others also feel the joy and pain you feel. Use this truth to take an empathetic approach in your marketing. Instead of focusing on why your product or service is the best, focus on what your audience needs most, and craft your messaging with their best interests in mind. Imagine that you specifically created your product or service to solve the pain point of someone you love. How would you educate that loved one about the solution you’ve created? Speaking directly to your audience’s pain points is a great way to cross-cultural barriers without having to become an expert.

While taking this intuitive approach to your marketing will help you connect with a more diverse audience, fine-tuning that message toward specific audiences will make your marketing efforts more effective. Fortunately, that’s where we come in. Wicked Bionic specializes in making your messaging culturally appropriate across a wide range of demographic markets. Reach out to us to learn more.

The Difference Between Marketing and Sales

A widespread confusion among business owners and entrepreneurs is understanding the difference between two essential concepts: marketing and sales. When someone is confused about these terms, the way we know is when they use them interchangeably—and this happens a lot. The truth is that marketing and sales are two similar functions that complement each other to help you earn revenue, but each is distinctly different. To grow your business, you want to have both, but first, it’s essential to understand the difference between them.

What Is Marketing?

The goal of any business is to increase revenue, and that happens by attracting customers. But no one becomes your customer without first knowing who you are and how you can help them. Knowing these personas is the function of marketing. Marketing is essentially any action or messaging that introduces your business to prospective customers and educates them about what you do to make them desire your product or service. Hubspot puts it succinctly: “Marketing encompasses all activities that help spark interest in your business.”

It’s important to understand that marketing isn’t a one-and-done deal. For marketing to work, as marketing expert Carlos Sapene says, “your marketing must have cohesive, consistent and most importantly, persistent messaging.” That way, people become familiar with your brand name and what you offer when looking for something the product or service you may be selling. Marketing expert Dr. Jeffrey Lant talks about the “Rule of Seven,” which suggests you need to make at least seven “touchpoints” with a person before they buy from you. Other researchers say it can take as many as 20 touchpoints!

What Is Sales?

If marketing aims to generate interest in your company, the goal of sales is to get people to buy from your company. Sales is the process of creating specific offers to exchange value—namely, the value of your product/service for the money you’re asking the customer to pay. For sales to be successful, you need three things to happen:

The potential customer must already have an interest in your product/service (which is accomplished through marketing);
They must believe what you’re offering will meet their need and solve their problem; and
They must accept that the solution you’re providing is worth the money you’re asking.

How Marketing and Sales Work Together

One of the best ways to understand the difference between marketing and sales is to see how they function together to produce results for your business. Now that we’ve defined these terms separately, here are some easy ways to remember how they relate to each other:

Marketing is about generating leads; sales is about converting those leads into customers.
Marketing creates interest in your company; sales creates interest in a specific product or service your company offers.
Marketing is about getting people interested; sales is about getting them to commit.

To gain an even deeper understanding of the differences between marketing and sales, be sure to check out the Wicked Marketing podcast on “Why Marketing Is Confused with Sales.” To learn more about how to increase revenue through marketing, reach out to Wicked Bionic today.

The Power and Promise of Micro Apps

At the intersection of business and technology, there’s lots of talk about “micro apps” and how they can be used to make humans more productive. While it might seem intimidating to have to learn another aspect of the Internet, the truth is, you’re probably using micro apps on a daily basis without realizing what they are.

For example:

Do you click the small icon on your menu bar to see how much battery power your laptop has left?
Do you use Facebook Messenger or WeChat?
Do you have a weather app on your phone?
Do you use the “level” on your smartphone to see if you hung a picture straight?

If you said yes to any of these, congratulations—you are using micro apps!

What Is a Micro App?

In simplest terms, a micro app is a small program (usually HTML-based) that focuses on doing one task well and doing it quickly. Developers started creating micro apps in response to complaints that desktop applications (and even several mobile apps) were becoming too slow, clunky, and complicated by trying to pack too many functions into one app. Micro apps can be standalone apps (e.g., your smartphone weather app) or embedded within a larger app or software suite (e.g., the spell checker or instant thesaurus on your word processor).

Why Micro Apps Are Popular

It’s been discovered that apps that do fewer things quicker tend to be used more often. (Most new mobile apps lose 80 percent of their daily users within the first three days of use, mainly because people don’t want to take the time to figure them out.) In the business world, people have discovered that they can be more productive by using a set of micro apps that perform a few functions they repeatedly use instead of trying to learn a larger software platform that supposedly does everything.

Larger companies are also learning this lesson. Many mid-sized businesses have fallen into the snare of hiring their own programmers to create bespoke platforms to keep their employees on the same page (i.e., scheduling, task management, payroll, etc.), only to discover it made the workplace more complicated, not less. As an alternative, many of these companies have now turned to the micro app concept, creating smaller apps that help their employees do only specific things and making them more productive as a result.

How Can Micro Apps Help Your Business?

Generally speaking, the value of micro apps is measured only in their usefulness to you. If you perform a specific task frequently and you find a micro app to help you and your team do it faster and more efficiently, then that app has value to your business. If you can’t find an app that does exactly what you need it to do, platforms like Progress and Citrix enable the building of micro apps with limited coding knowledge. In certain instances, you might even want to develop a micro app to enhance your customers’ experience with you—for example, a quick re-order app.

Micro apps help increase productivity, and for that reason, we’re likely to see many more of them in the years to come. That being said, functionality is still the ultimate measure of whether a particular app is for you. Like anything else, micro apps are tools. If it makes you work better, pick it up and use it. Learn more about tools that improve productivity on your website at Wicked Bionic.

Tech Tools to Communicate with and Track Your Remote Team

From all indicators, it appears that working from home is set to become a semi-permanent or hybrid version of how we do business. Many small to mid-size companies have at least some of their team working remotely (some are fully remote). For many companies, it’s actually proven to be workable and cost-effective. A recent survey showed nearly half of all companies plan to allow their employees to work full-time from home for the foreseeable future. Almost 80 percent of CEOs believe remote collaborations are here to stay.

That being said, remote teams come with their own set of challenges, not the least of how to collaborate online, track hours and progress, etc. Fortunately, technology has provided us with many useful platforms and apps that seamlessly help us meet these challenges. Let’s look at some popular tech tools that can make it easier to maintain open communication and collaborations when working remotely.

Teamwork

This popular project management software offers excellent functionality for setting up projects, assigning tasks to team members, tracking their progress, and tracking their work hours. It also affords easy messaging within the app so team members can ask and answer questions, collaborates on problem-solving, etc.

Slack

Slack is one of the top communication platforms of choice for businesses. In one interface, team members can communicate via instant messaging, share files, follow specific project threads via hashtags, and much more. Slack also enables voice and video calls, and it even allows your team to collaborate with other remote teams when you’re cooperating on projects involving other businesses.

Zoom

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t either used or heard of Zoom over the past year. The reason? It’s easy to use, easy to manage, and easy to get others to join. Zoom has become the video conferencing platform of choice for businesses of all sizes, and many companies have begun having daily team meetings using it. For remote teams, it’s the next best thing to being in the room together.

Time Doctor

One of the best tools for measuring the productivity of remote teams, Time Doctor does more than just log work hours—it tells you what your team members are working on, how much time they’re spending on certain projects, and even what websites they are visiting while logged in. The software even includes tools to help employees manage their time better, such as sending friendly reminders when they visit non-productive websites and automatically logging them out for breaks when they become inactive online.

For many businesses and employees, working remotely will never be quite the same as face-to-face collaboration. However, with tech tools like these and others, you can help your remote teams be just as productive as they were in the office—and often even more so. The team at Los Angeles Marketing and Advertising Agency Wicked Bionic uses these and other tools to make their work more efficient.

Internet of Things (IoT) Technology—Where It’s Headed, and How It Can Make Life Easier

The Internet of Things (IoT) is nothing new—and in fact, we utilize this technology more and more daily without even realizing it. From our smart TVs and vehicles to a surprising number of household appliances, more and more of our devices transmit and receive data via the Internet. And it’s only expanding. Some reports predict the market share of IoT will more than double in 2021. But where is IoT technology going, exactly? What trends should we be aware of in the years ahead, and how can they make our lives better?

Increased Focus on Usefulness, not Novelty

Experts believe that we won’t see as much of a proliferation of new IoT devices in the months and years to come as we will see the technology fine-tuned to become more valuable to us. For example, a smart refrigerator that gives you the weather forecast and automatically orders replacement filters might be nice to have, but it’s not something you couldn’t do without. A refrigerator that self-diagnoses and contacts tech support for predictive maintenance in the background, so you never know it was malfunctioning—that could be a real headache-saver.

Increased Healthcare Applications

With the increased dependence on telemedicine, wearable medical devices that transmit patient data will become more prolific to make patient care more efficient and streamlined. We can also expect to see more gathering of patient health stats through mobile apps for smartphones and smartwatches. This sector of the market is expected to grow by as much as 26 percent.

More Reliance on Location Services

Marketing agencies representing brands already use location-based services to send marketing messages to people in their local area based on their mobile devices’ data. We can expect to see this technology also used to improve customer experiences in the days ahead by using location services to connect customers with employees. From shorter service windows to allowing customers to track deliveries in real-time, to activating curbside pickup as the customer approaches the store—watch for IoT location data to streamline the interactions between businesses and their customers.

If you haven’t used location-based advertising, it’s time to see how effective this type of targeted marketing can be in growing your business. Contact Los Angeles-based marketing and advertising agency Wicked Bionic here.

Smart Cities

We already see a proliferation of “smart buildings” that use IoT to automate security, energy consumption, etc. A growing number of “smart cities” are now integrating IoT tech into their infrastructure. Cashless toll booths, real-time energy redistribution, “smart trash cans” that signal when they are full, connected traffic signals regulating traffic flow in real-time are all examples of ways cities are making life more convenient for their citizens in the background.

Of course, IoT doesn’t just serve the purpose of making life easier or better; it can also help your bottom line as a brand when you know how to leverage it. Contact Wicked Bionic to discuss options for how you might use IoT technology more to your marketing advantage.

Do Smart Digital Assistants Live Up to the Hype?

For Amazon users, it’s Alexa. For Google Home, it’s “OK Google.” For people who use Apple devices, it’s Siri. These days, AI-driven “smart” digital assistants are super hot, making it easier for people to keep their shopping lists, turn on the furnace, organize playlists, pick something to watch, or get directions—all with voice command. Tech companies are in fierce competition to dominate this space by integrating their version of digital assistants into homes, televisions, cars, and all sorts of portable devices.

The question is—are these digital assistants really making life easier? And what are the tradeoffs?

Advantages of Digital Assistants

Once people get past the learning curve of how to implement, activate, and access their digital assistants, these assistants are actually pretty good at doing what they are designed to do—namely, provide information and perform certain tasks through voice command. Aside from novelty conveniences like choosing a movie or providing funny answers to menial questions (“Hey Siri, what’s the weather today?”), here are some examples of how business owners find digital assistants useful:

Enables multi-tasking. You can “jot” an idea down via a digital assistant while doing other things, so you don’t have to stop and write it down to keep from forgetting it later.
Increases productivity. Voice commands move faster than typing, so it’s easier to get access to information, order supplies, etc.
Better time management. Digital assistants can help you keep better track of your schedule, the same as a personal assistant might—without the salary.

Disadvantages of Smart Digital Assistants

This technology comes with some tradeoffs, too. For example:

Privacy concerns. Some have expressed concerns that tech companies are “listening in” on personal conversations through digital assistants, as well as mining data. There are also concerns about hacking since personal information is stored in the cloud.
Not foolproof. While the algorithms are continually improving, digital assistants still “hear” things wrong or often misunderstand a command, providing you responses you can’t use—which leads to frustration and annoyance. Who needs more of that?

A Hidden Advantage of Digital Assistants for Businesses

If you learn how to use them for the tasks you need most, smart digital assistants can be quite helpful. Once you’ve set up everything in a way that fits your needs and the needs of your business, it relatively easy to find value. This technology will only get better and entrepreneurs can use it to their advantage. By updating your local online listings and tweaking your content to be “digital assistant friendly,” you can position your business to be one of the top responses when a user asks Siri or Alexa to provide recommendations for a service or product you provide—thereby increasing your sales and revenue. To learn more about how to use this technology and position your company in the world of AI, give Wicked Bionic a call.