How to Promote Diversity and Inclusivity in Your Marketing Strategy
In the real world, you have people of all colors, all genders, all races, all ages, coming from all walks of life. Shouldn’t marketing campaigns reflect that? While it sounds straightforward, there are several things you need to take note of when creating your marketing strategy.
4 Ways to Have Diversity and Inclusivity in Your Marketing Campaigns
According to ADP chief diversity and social responsibility officer Rita Mitjan explains that diversity is the “what” while inclusion is the how. It is one way to have a group of diverse people in your marketing strategies, it’s another to be truly inclusive. By being mindful of how you implement the two, you will be able to create effective and impactful campaigns.
1. Have Your Teams Reflect Your Audience
Identify who your audience is. While it is true that you may not necessarily market to everybody, like how a dairy company does not have vegans as their primary audience, you still want to dive deep into who your audience is.
Take a look at the available data to understand the representation in your given market, Content Marketing Institute suggests. You may start with the basics such as gender, income level, age, geography, race, and the like. Once you have those established, go ahead and do some more research. Have your team reach out to your target audience to better observe and understand any characteristics about the audience that is not easily quantifiable by data, like physical abilities or sentiments. Have your audience personas be reflective of the diverse characteristics found in your real-life audience.
To best give your diverse audience a proper voice, have them well represented in your teams. Some certain experiences and characteristics can only truly be understood by people who belong to that group of people and those voices are vital to developing a genuinely inclusive campaign.
An inclusive workplace is paramount to creating an impactful campaign where your message is effectively communicated. Your teams will flourish creativity naturally, as a byproduct of the diverse environment you cultivate.
2. Mindful Use of Language
As the marketer, your voice has an impact. The company you are marketing for has influence and their words have weight. This “power” should be treated with the utmost respect.
This voice first starts off as a whisper while your team brainstorms ideas to bring your marketing strategy to life. As your strategy stands on a solid foundation and picks up momentum, that whisper gains more strength until it finally becomes a resounding verbalization of the message you want to convey.
To make sure your message has the impact you want it to have, you have to go back to your audience. Talk to your audience, pick their brains. Give them a platform to express their opinions and ideas. Give your diverse and inclusive team the freedom to work with what your audience gave you. Everyone has a seat at the table to pitch ideas and be heard.
While you’re working on your messaging, be critical about the language you use as you work on conveying your message. When in doubt, ask the community you are marketing to. Inform and educate yourself and your team to make sure you are using respectful and inclusive language.
You can also take this moment to think of other inclusive strategies for the other communities in your audience that you serve. Integrating accessibility strategies such as alt-texts for your digital images and captions for your videos goes a long way to reach your audience so everyone can experience the impact of your campaigns.
3. Do Not Do It For The Sake of Doing It
“Diversity” and “inclusivity” are big buzzwords in this day and age. While the movement to be more diverse and inclusive is a great campaign, there are so many ways to get it wrong as well and it all boils down to how it is executed.
When creating a marketing strategy that promotes diversity and inclusivity, you have to be mindful and you have to be intentional. Do not go into the planning process thinking having a few people of color in one shot is enough. Do not think highlighting a certain cultural reference without much thought about it passes as diversity already.
There is so much nuance to diversity and inclusivity. While not all-inclusive campaigns can be perfect, when it comes from a place of authenticity, where the desire to create a respectfully inclusive campaign is what propelled the whole campaign, your audience can sense it and appreciate it.
4. The Importance of Influencers
With the rise of social media, influencers became a new opportunity for marketers to better reach their audience. Influencers become the bridge companies need to connect with new groups outside of their usual reach, according to Maryville University. An amazing marketing campaign with a genuine commitment to diversity and inclusivity still needs to be seen by its audience and influencers can magnify the company’s voice so it extends to a more varied range of people.
When looking for influencers to work with, work with a variety of influencers who share the same passion for your campaign. There are black influencers, influencers with disabilities, LGBTQ+ influencers, and influencers from different races, pretty much every community has an influencer that can help you spread your message across, and working with them makes the campaign all the more impactful.
The Importance of Having Diversity and Inclusivity in Your Marketing Strategy
People want to see themselves being represented in media and the internet, they gravitate towards people who share the same experiences as them or have the same interests. By being intentional about your inclusivity as you’re coming from a place of genuine purpose to have them feel seen and heard, your message creates an incredible impact.