Website Marketing Analysis by Ricardo González NFLatino.com THIS SITE IS FAR AND AWAY ONE OF THE BEST EXAMPLES OF AN AMERICAN ORGANIZATION THAT UNDERSTANDS HOW TO MARKET TO LATINOS VIA THE INTERNET. SCREEN SHOTS TAKEN DEC. OF 2007.

Analysis of National Football League Spanish Language Website
by Ricardo González

Please open the screen shots here, print this out and have it there as a reference during this analysis. Let's dig in!

Overall Grade: A

The Effective: There is a lot of good to learn from this site!

1.It is actually in Spanish — all of it. In other words, they don't just put a /espanol to the end of nfl.com and say, 'ok, we did it, we now have a Spanish language site.' You know, www.markettolatinos.com/espanol

I mean, after all, it is español, not espanol. The first message many companies and organizations give is, 'we don't care about spelling the name of the language correctly?'

No, these people actually do it correctly, they actually do the site, including navigation, in Spanish.

2. If you were to look at the English nfl.com site you would quickly see that the color scheme is different. The colors in the Latino site are brighter and more appealing to Latinos. It is not just red,white and blue as in the English site which subconsciously says, "United States". No they are reaching out, and they are doing it with color. By the way, green is the predominant color on the Mexican soccer uniforms and I doubt it is by coincidence that the primary color on the nflatino.com site is green. I use green on the title of this page as a subconscious reminder that if you follow this advice you will make more money!

3. The columnists are actually Latinos. Enough said.

4. I really like how they make it personal with the diaries of the Latino players. Marketing to Latinos should be as personal as possible and they do a good job with this feature. This is down on your left hand-side where it says "Diarios de un Jugador". On the actual web site this is a Flash application that changes pictures among different players. Along with this you can see a Latino player there on a video on the top right. This is a profile of Roberto Garza of Da'Bears. Padrísimo as the Mexicans say.

5. The main advertiser on this site is Coors Lite, at least on this day. This is interesting because Coors Lite was able to capture 50% of the beer market in Puerto Rico. They figure they can use that experience and capture a significant portion of the Latino populace. That remains to be seen but the move is prudent on their part and they have a past history of success with Latinos.

6. This may get lost to most people but look for it. On the left-hand side, in the green navigation box, you will see that the last link says, NFL.com.mx. This is very smart because they are going after Mexicans. They have an official Mexican NFL site. Do you see this? They didn't just settle for NFLatino.com, they went a tier deeper and created a site just for Mexicans. Given that Latinos are from so many different countries and have different cultural orientations this is an outstanding move on their part.

7. You can't see this on the web but the NFL also is providing a weekly NFL Spanish-language supplement in the Sports section of many Spanish-language newspapers. Of course, a link to their NFLatino.com website is included.

The Ineffective:

1. This is a follow up to my last point. When you go to the 'Mexico' version of their site it is basically the same site as NFLatino.com. I would take that site and make it a bit more 'Mexican'. If you are going to create the site in the first place then I think you have to put some unique content there that is specifically for Mexicans.

The On-The Border

1. I think the NFL could focus in a bit more on high Latino population areas. They would have to be careful about this but everyone knows that there are more Latinos in Los Angeles than say, Buffalo. I might make a 'subconscious' effort to feature those teams like Dallas, Houston, San Diego, New York (both), Miami, etc.

Overall, this is an excellent site. The copy is clear and well-written. The site feels Latino. You would almost think that 'Football' was a Latino game. By the way, Latinos say, 'fútbol' for 'soccer' and 'fútbol americano' instead of 'football'. Amazingly, if you go to FIFA's web site in Spanish I think we could safely say that the NFL does a better job of marketing to Latinos on the web than FIFA!


Adelante,


Ricardo González