[Trend Report] Marketing Your Minority Owned Business.

Report date: 9/25/22

Terms: For this report we will be looking at the terms around “Black Owned”, however much of the information in this report will still pertain to other minority focused terms such as “Asian Owned” , “Lantinx Owned”, ect.

Notes: If you are unfamiliar with Google Trend reports, please not that the graphs do not represent search volume but show a visual representation of interest over time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term over the period selected. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

You may see the word “Note” annotated on the reports. Google did an update to their system January ‘22 that affects data collected after this point. Data before this period is still relatively comparable to before the update.

Background

According to the US Census there are over 9.8 million minority owned business in operation. Many minority owned business have trouble breaking into the main stream of their industry. Entrepreneurs marketing minority lead business often time lean towards focusing and broadcasting the minority parts of their business to stand out and attract customers. This is especially true for business that service a minority audience.

Unfortunately many entrepreneurs and marketers have learned that this approach may be counter-productive to hitting your main KPIs . For many minority owned businesses, making minority-focused keywords the primary targets could be hindering your marketing efforts.

Let’s take a look.

Overview

For this report I pulled out the search term “Black Owned’ as this will encompass all search phrases including search terms like “Black owned businesses near me”, “Black owned clothing store”, and “Best black owned restaurants”.

When we look at this chart we see falling interesting over the last three years with the peak interest being the end of May 2020. Today, interest is less than 90% of what it was at its peak during this time period. After the peak period, we can see a 3%-9% uplift in interest the beginning of February and the week of June 13 in both years following.

When we isolate the peaks in this chart can clearly attribute the peaks in interest. The highest interest period was during the height of the BLM protest and news cycle that affected the entire country. During this time many people we putting a positive spotlight on Black Owned Business and there were many programs advertised to help boost visibility. After that, we see boost in interest at the beginning of Black History Month and the Juneteenth holiday.

This is a trend that we will see when looking at any minority-targeted keyword. They are highly affected by social factors and seasonal trends that do not follow the same buying pattern of your business or audience. For instance, a Black owned restaurant may have peak seasons during the winter holidays and around their local area Restaurant Week, not February and June. If they only focus on marketing “black owned restaurant”, the uplift in interest in February and June may not place them in front of their audience at important times.

Another troubling signal in this chart is the steep drop after the summer of 2020. Although the chart holds a relatively steady rate after, having fast and heavy jump in interest can misinform brand marketers about the longevity of a trend.

Many Black entrepreneurs may remember how “easy” it was to run brand awareness campaigns when this chart was at its peak. Simply having a sticker on your content that said “black owned” or listing in a black owned directory was usually enough to get attention from an engaged audience. Due to the heavy seach volume, SEO was also easier to achieve on black-owned keywords.

However, if you try that same strategy on the same business today you will get poor results.

The steep in drop public interest can leave many brand owners chasing results and setting improper baselines for future campaigns. After all, how can you not believe results you just obtained and every marketer knows to rerun successful campaigns.

It is important that minority-led businesses begin to focus on marketing their industry and products so that they can match the buying patterns of their audience and not the uncontrollable interest surrounding their culture.

Comparison

The unique trends of your brand’s industry are much more important that than the social trends of your minorty-focused keyword targets. If we look at some popular industries and their trends we will discover some reasons why.

Real Estate

Real Estate is a growing industry among many minority groups. When we compare the search terms of “Black Owned” and “real estate agent” , they might look similar, but we see there is 20% more interest in the industry specific term. In fact, interest in real estate agents does not seem to be affected by seasonal trends or trending news cycles the same way that minority terms are.

The high interest and consistency of the real estate search terms is what you want to look for when researching keywords to use in your marketing campaigns.

The terms for real estate agent are also not sharing interest amongst unrelated industries. This means that minority owned businesses in real estate would have a better chance of finding their desired audience by targeting keywords like “real estate agent near me” over “Black-owned real estate ” and may have more consistent results across their marketing efforts.

Restaurants

Restaurants are one of the number one minority businesses in the US. In fact, 24% of restaurants are owned by Asian-Americans.

When we compare phrase search terms including “restaurant” to phrase search terms including “black owned” you can see the interest does not even compare. If you think about it you can understand the reason why. Everybody needs to eat, but usually only the specific demographic of your unique audience is interested in the minorty-owned aspect of your business.

In fact, many minority owned food businesses will tell you that a large portion of their guest are outside of the food demographic. For instance, I LOVE Mexican food but as a Black-American I have never searched for “latin owned Mexican food”. I have however searched for “best tacos in LA”.

For minority owned restaurants, its important to market your food and high satisfaction of your customers. This will grant you much more visibility and place your brand in the right places. Interest around food is always at a high.

Marketing

As we move more into a digital age, many people are opening and expanding businesses around marketing. While I do believe that a marketer will have more success if they understand the culture surrounding the brands they serve, if you are primarily advertising yourself as a minority marketer you may be limiting who will find you, even other minorities.

Public interest in topics surrounding marketing like email, SMS, and social media marketing all greatly outperform interest in general black owned business. Even with “Social Media Marketing” being a niche term, it would still has more interest than the combined Black industry term.

Minority marketing businesses and freelancers would do better to focus on keywords surrounding the services that they offer.

Fashion

Fashion business are not only popular amongst minorities but are popular start ups in general. With technology making it easier to find and source vendors, many people are moving or expanding into the industry.

Many minority owned fashion brands service their unique audience either by design or location. This should not stop these brands from focusing on the products they sell as many users search for fashion based products by type, size, or color.

A “black owned clothing brand” does not service all black people, especially if they sell gender specific or size limited designs. So, when building brand awareness to attract customers, focus first on who the brand will serve and then highlight any standouts in your design.

Suggestions

After looking through this report it can seem like I do not want you market the minority aspect of your brand at all, that is far from the truth. ALL unique aspects of your business should be displayed and if you service a mostly minority audience, it is still a necessity.

The takeaway here is to focus on brand specific keyword targets as your main objectives and use other tactics to reinforce the awareness of your minority ownership.

Here are some things you can do to reinforce your minority ownership or focus without changing your industry and product specific keywords:

Use minorities in your pictures and advertisements

One of the quickest ways to showcase your minority focus is to use people who match your intended audience in your branding. In a visual age users will be able to quickly know if they relate to your brand or if it’s “for them”.

Use cultural product descriptors that your minority audience will recognize

Instead of marketing your “black owned hair company” try marketing your “natural hair products developed for women with 4c hair”. Black women will still find your company and the online search algorithms will have an easier time placing your brand in front of the right people.

Use region filters when advertising

A lot of neighborhood are segregated culturally and even racially, in other context this would not be a good thing, but can be useful when marketing minority owned and targeted businesses. Instead of advertising “Black owned restaurant” try running ads focused on “Soul Food” and target the areas in your city that have a large Black population. This works well as it might also save you a little money on your advertising budget.

Put a face to your brand

When you show the brand owner, you are saying you are minority-owned without even saying a word. Look for opportunities to go on other platforms and talk about your brand. Tell your story as a business owner as much as you can without distracting from the business’s nature. If you create this lane for yourself you will rarely have to reinforce it in your marketing.

Have a robust about page

Your about page on your website is the perfect place to talk about everything that makes up your brand, including the brand owner. Use this as an opportunity to talk about the importance of your minority ownership and what that means to your brand. About pages have high search ranking so putting this content here will serve as evergreen marketing.

Conclusion

When looking at the interest reports in minority owned businesses one thing to remember is the interest in non-industry specific. This means that the interest is in supporting a culture and not always in buying a products or actually needing a service. What you will find if you are targeting minorty-focused keywords is that your brand will be put alongside other minority business that are not your competitors.

Although both useful to a restaurant, a list of “the top black owned business in Los Angeles” is not as strong of a lead generator as “The top 10 Restaurants in Los Angeles”.

Your main keyword targets and marketing focus should be on your brand’s products and services. Use other contextual tactics to reinforce your minority ownership.

---

Other Articles You May Like: