Another flight, another blog post. This time, I wanted to focus on strategy and new avenues to promote your services and / or products. Plus, since we are approaching the New Year, this piece may pose some food for thought for 2016.

I want to start with a small exercise – Over the next minute or two, I want you to have a quick look at the people around you. Who are these people that surround you? What nationality are they? Do they come from an ethnic minority? Are they represented as an individual target audience in your marketing?

Regarding my final question, my guess is that your answer will probably be – No. In fact, 80% of companies do not target ethnic minorities in the UK, with research showing that only 1 in 5 companies utilises ethnic marketing. 

What is ethnic marketing?

Ethnic marketing (which can also be termed multicultural marketing) is a marketing method that directly targets ethnic minorities with your company’s messages, values and mission statements. This can either be done in the native tongue of your target audience, or by representing your target audience in your marketing communications, or by combining both.

The Stats 

Over the past 18 months, my company – GottaBe! Ethnic, which is a sister brand of GottaBe!, has undertaken mass research to map out the size of ethnic markets in the UK, with the results quite frankly, staggering!

There are currently 9.1 million people living in the UK from an ethnic minority, that’s 1 in 6 – however this is set to double by 2045. What’s more, 80% of population growth is now through ethnic minorities in the UK – both new and existing.

However, within all the statistics surrounding ethnic minorities in the UK, the most unrecognised, yet potentially highly profitable statistic is that UK ethnic consumers have a spending power of over £300 billion. What’s more, only 1 out of 5 UK companies reach out to ethnic minorities as consumers, which unsurprisingly is complimented by the fact that 69% of key ethnic groups feel that mainstream marketing by UK brands, has little or no relevance to them. Furthermore, 48% of all ethnic groups would take more notice of advertising if it includes someone from their own ethnic group.

So is your company missing a trick? Would you benefit from extra customers, more sales and ultimately higher profits? I think I can once again guess the answer to those questions – Yes!

Where to start…?

I suppose, by now, you’re questioning where you would need to start when tapping into this newfound lucrative market? As with anything from market research – once you get your head around it, you could either do it yourself or outsource to an agency.

Once you have decided, you will need to acknowledge your target audience. Will you be sending out a generic message to all ethnic minorities (which can be tricky), or will you play it carefully and selectively start with particular groups first – i.e. Indian, African, Polish, Romanian and etc – before scaling up after ironing out the creases?

After selecting your customer – think about the language – are you going to keep it in English or translate it into the local language of your target audience? On this note – be careful and invest in proper translation, avoid Google Translate and any other FREE translation tools as they notoriously muddle up the ordering of your sentences. 

By now, you may also want to think of the channels that you’re going to utilise for this campaign. You may be surprised to know that there are more then 50 ethnic TV stations in the UK, 24 ethnic radio channels, 180 editorial titles published in foreign languages, more than 3,000 ethnic focused events and over 20,000 stores selling international foods! Individually and combined, they offer huge potential for your brand to get noticed.

Where to finish…?

At the start of this blog, I said that I wanted to give you some food for thought – I believe I have achieved this. Now I would like to encourage you to some further reading, including taking a look at the market research we undertook to provide the statistics above, which you can find in our lovely Infographic titled: ‘Why ethnic…?’. 

Finally, if you’re considering targeting ethnic minorities in the UK and need some help or would like to have a chat on the topic – feel free to drop me a line or give me a call – I will be more then happy to chat to you over a nice cuppa (Earl Grey or if its English Breakfast then without milk for me, please!). At the end of the day, I am your potential customer too – so best to start from the source!

Thanks, 

T