LAT’s Marketing Team hosted our first Multicultural Marketing Breakfast Seminar in Vancouver on May 20th, 2014. Our speakers talked about the importance of adapting your company’s marketing message to the diverse communities in your local markets.

We met with local professionals bright and early at the HiVE Vancouver to talk cultural marketing over breakfast.

Sonia Lotay, consulting for LAT, opened the seminar by discussing language demographics in British Columbia and Metro Vancouver. Canada’s immigrant population is growing, and soon visible “minorities” will in fact become the majority.

Amber Liu, a Multicultural Marketing Consultant from Amber & Co., discussed how to reach Chinese customers with traditional marketing. Radio, newspaper, and television advertising are still an important part of a cultural marketing strategy.

Lesley Ning, a Cultural Marketing Specialist from LAT, explained the importance of using Chinese social media platforms to engage Chinese communities. Many local businesses, from Science World to Porsche Vancouver, are building a strong following on the popular platform Sina Weibo.

Lise Alain, the President of LAT, showed the demographics of Québec’s 7 million inhabitants. The key take-away: Adapting marketing content for French Canadian language and culture is essential.

Damien Morvan, a Digital Marketing Specialist from LAT, discussed the importance of a strong SEO strategy – in all languages. He looked at the case study of the University of Victoria’s Programme Dire, which now has a first-place ranking on Google in French for its selected keywords.

We wrapped up the seminar with a Q&A period in which the audience shared their thoughts on cultural marketing. Have any questions or comments of your own? Leave a comment below.
Check out the full presentation on SlideShare here. What do you think? Will you be adopting a multicultural marketing strategy for your business?