Users: HispanicMPR content unique, useful

Posted by Elena del Valle on June 25, 2009

By Vanessa Bravo
Intern, HispanicMPR.com

The three sections users prefer are guest articles, articles authored by Elena del Valle and podcasts

Happy birthday! Hispanic Marketing and Public Relations (HispanicMPR.com) is reaching its fourth anniversary and is growing fast. What started four years ago as a small forum to share ideas about the book Hispanic Marketing & Public Relations (Poyeen Publishing, $49.95) has grown into a fully developed website with a wealth of information about business topics in general and the Hispanic market in particular.

Today, HispanicMPR.com offers visitors dozens of guest articles, podcasts, articles authored by Elena del Valle (host and editor of the website), presentations, videos, and job ads. The website has become a useful tool for business people and entrepreneurs interested in topics like marketing, public relations and business development. It has grown a loyal pool of users: just the e-mail newsletter is received by more than 3,500 subscribers.

To see what visitors’ favorite content is, what new things they would they like to see in the website and what reasons they have to keep coming to HispanicMPR.com week after week, we sent a short survey to our newsletter subscribers. From the 13 answers received, we found the following:

About 60 percent of our users first discovered HispanicMPR.com through a web search, followed by a recommendation of a friend (25 percent); and respondents favorite content is the guest articles (75 percent), followed by the articles authored by Elena del Valle (42 percent) and the podcast interviews (33 percent).

In terms of the suggestions respondents have for the website, we received a diverse list of 15 ideas: from specific topics survey takers want to read in our pages to suggestions like including the contact information of our sources at the end of our articles.

But, what is it that they like so much about HispanicMPR.com that makes them come back to the site regularly? To discover this, I spoke on the phone with some willing survey respondents.

For example, Dawn Randall finds HispanicMPR.com content very useful for her professional environment. She is classified advertising manager at the Osceola News Gazette and at Hola Osceola, both in Florida. She says that she visits the website almost daily for professional reasons.

“We have a local community Spanish language website for our newspaper. We started a Hispanic print product and a user-generated content website. Some of the things you post, as far as topics related to the Hispanic heritage, are useful for us. I get information from those articles, I give the proper credit to your website and I use the information in our website. It helps me get content, besides the one generated by our writers and bloggers, and I like your website also because it is very informative about the whole process of the Hispanic community,” she said.

Although there are other sources of information about the Hispanic community, Dawn Randall keeps on coming to HispanicMPR.com because of “the professional and proper writing style” of the articles.

Gary Wang is senior vice president of new product development at a company called PSDT in Syracuse, New York. He finds the email newsletter useful because it gives up-to-date information about the Hispanic market. He visits HispanicMPR.com about once a week.

“It gives me good information on the trends and what not on the Hispanic market. Our company is not targeted to the Hispanic demographic specifically, but it is a market we wish to expand to,” Wang said.

Another user who heavily benefits from Hispanic Marketing and Public Relations in his professional setting is Nelson Merchan, president of Clicroi, in Danbury, Connecticut, a company in the business of Hispanic online advertising.

Merchan, who comes to HispanicMPR.com about twice a week, says that ours is a very specialized website. “I do marketing with Hispanics, online advertising with Hispanics, and this website has important content for people interested in Hispanic marketing. It is a place where you find very valuable content for persons interested in this industry. I have not found another place –neither had I searched for it—where to find this type of information. Elena publishes very interesting information.”

Finally, Hector Galvan added one more element: the fact that the information he finds at HispanicMPR.com is unique. Galvan is in charge of Hispanic media relations and public relations at Boost Mobile in Irvine, California. He visits HispanicMPR.com at least once a week because he needs to “get ideas, tactics, and strategies to penetrate the Hispanic market, in a different way, through the use of public relations.”

Although the Internet offers many sources of information, he keeps coming to HispanicMPR.com because of one main reason: “In this website, I can find topics, ideas or articles that can benefit me personally, because I am in charge of public relations for the Hispanic market for the company I work for. Then, at HispanicMPR.com, I learn a lot. In other websites, the articles and topics are not so well elaborated. In this website, there are professionals with more experience than me that help me with topics, and to detect strategies and ideas that maybe I can implement in my job.”

After four years, HispanicMPR.com keeps attracting and retaining visitors thanks to its professionally written articles, its focus on the Hispanic market, its interesting podcasts and its tips and advice for business people interested in marketing and public relations. Thank you, visitors of HispanicMPR.com, for being part of this journey.