In Europe, ethnic markets are 42 million strong and growing

In the US, ethnic marketing has been a major marketing topic for years. In Europe, only few companies run ethnic campaigns. How come?

That’s a very good question. In the US, there are big homogeneous ethnic markets like the Latin Americans with significant spending potential, and companies have noticed this. For example, migrants make up on third of of the market for fixed telephony, or an estimated 86 billion US dollars.

In Europe, there are 42 million migrants, but the market is fractured, with migrants of many nationalities in a lot of different countries. Many companies simply do not know how to target this group, and if they do, they tend to use local offline media rather than online.

Many marketers might simply think that ethnic markets are not yet online …

The digital divide between migrants and the local population is a myth. Research shows that ethnic communities are very much online, sometimes more than the local population. They use the internet to stay in touch with their family at home, for example.

Our most popular customer groups are Polish, Arabic, Spanish and Turkish, in that order. Of course, you can then break this down into more specific groups.

To target these groups you can go as advanced on the targeting as you like. We get data from partner sites, and we also use technical parameters such as browser language, geo-location and others. With the surge of social networks, we can also target by demographic data like age, gender and the like.

Facebook is by far the most important network, but for targeting migrants you should consider other networks as well.

We also use a variety of ethnic dating sites. In some countries, you also have specific ethnic social networks, for example for the Polish in the UK. Unfortunately, most of these these are usually local only, so they don’t generate enough reach on their own.

Mostly companies with specific products for migrants, such as calling card providers or international money transfer services like Western Union. We also see increasing demand from airlines, telco companies and some consumer product providers starting to provide special ethnic product lines, like Nestlé with their Halal products for Muslims.