Do you want to future-proof your marketing strategy and connect with a wider audience? Then looking at inclusive marketing and accessible marketing is the way to go. How can you grow and implement these changes today? In this article, we look at the best practices and what strategies you can already start right now.
Marketing strategies and inclusive media: how to deal with different backgrounds and stories
With inclusive and accessible marketing strategies you focus on a wide variety of people. You want to make sure to not only segment your target audience on stereotypes. With inclusive marketing, you open up to a diversity of ethnicities, genders, backgrounds, and people with disabilities. Accessible marketing means that you make your content accessible to users with different types of disabilities too, such as people with physical or cognitive disabilities.
Inclusivity and accessibility marketing is focused on both the now and the future. This is because Millennials, Gen Z, and future generations prioritize businesses that have similar values as them, such as equality and inclusion. Growing up with social media, easier access to travel, and globalisation, these generations have been exposed to people from many different backgrounds, ethnicities, beliefs, and sexual orientations. This is normal for them! They value inclusion and if you, as a business, don’t portray inclusivity, they will not find common ground within one of their core values.
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Inclusive marketing: best practices
Let’s look at 5 practices you can implement today that help to create more inclusivity and accessibility within your marketing strategy. From conducting an audit to revisiting your buyer personas to creating campaigns that speak to and include more people. Let’s dive in.
- Start with an audit
Before you can implement changes you have to know where your business is standing. How do you do this? By starting with an audit. It’s usually best to hire a company to look at this from an unbiased perspective. They bring their expertise to the table and can dive into what is already there and what is still missing.
If you want to keep the audit a bit more low-key you can also investigate yourself and carry out your own market research. Start by asking a wide range of people who don’t know your business how they perceive its content. Let them use their own words and ask for clarification. This way you can grasp their perception and learn from this information. It will help you get to know what you represent and how people perceive your brand online.
Don’t forget to ask them about accessibility. Can they access and find the content they need to learn more about your brand? How do they interpret this content? Is it understandable? Does it portray equality and inclusivity? Maybe your team has filled in gaps that other people don’t necessarily understand. Asking for clarification will give you answers you would never have gotten otherwise.
Always make sure that if you let an organization carry out an audit or if your team is doing research, to conduct the research with a variety of people. You want to interview people from different backgrounds, beliefs, and abilities. This way you can base your new strategy on insights from a realistic group of people.
2. Revisit your personas
You have probably created buyer personas when your marketing and branding strategy was created. Now you are investigating how inclusive your marketing is, you can revisit your personas. Have you considered sexuality, race, and gender? Have you looked into including people that have a disability, for example?
When it comes to marketing, try to bring bias to the table. Inclusive marketing is all about creating realistic stories, and they become realistic if people from different backgrounds are included. This diversity is what makes the world interesting and beautiful and brands that tap into celebrating unique differences have a competitive advantage It makes your content, ads, or other information more relatable. It’s an ongoing process but the focus on inclusivity within your buyer personas is a great way to start.
3. What resources do you need?
Now that you’ve conducted an audit and revisited your buyer personas, it’s time to look at what resources you need to implement changes. First of all, it is important that everyone in the company knows about inclusivity and accessibility and that everyone takes ownership to implement this. This varies from outbound marketing to internal communication to even emails sent by every single one of your employees.
You can make an inclusive copy guide that everyone can use, and create branding guidelines that everyone can access. Here you can portray words that you want to avoid and words that you want to highlight. Make sure that the focus on inclusivity is present in all your documents and briefings that you share with companies that you work with. When they know from the beginning that this is something your company values, they know that their work has to reflect this core value too.
4. Working with influencers
If your company works with influencers then you might want to consider this. Often, companies are attracted to macro-influencers; people with a lot of followers. Even though they often have a huge reach, the actual engagement of their followers can be very limited. Often micro-influencers have fewer followers and less reach, but the people they do reach are engaged and interested, which makes working together with micro-influencers beneficial.
Not only do they often have more engagement, but when it comes to including minorities, often micro-influencers reflect these target groups better. You might get a higher Return on Investment (ROI) when working with micro-influencers from marginalized backgrounds. This is because there is often a higher belief in them from their community.
5. Create inclusive and accessible campaigns
When creating campaigns, it’s easy to immediately jump to a stereotype. Even though this might seem like the best and fastest option, it can also perpetuate negative stereotypes and biases. Instead of using stereotypes, you can push the narrative in a slightly more inclusive manner, and create more authentic value for more people. For example, if the budget is there, you can create the same campaign and use the same story, whilst featuring people from different backgrounds as the lead in this story. This way you can extend your reach without having to come up with different campaigns.
Extra tip
Do you want to make your social media content easily accessible for people with visual impairments? You can create alt-texts for every post you publish; the alt-text then describes the content to these people. But there’s another perk to this; when you create alt-tags your content will show up on people’s feeds that have been looking for content similar to words used in your alt-tag.
Inclusive marketing: best diversity and inclusion campaigns
Let’s look at three case studies that portray inclusive marketing at its best. These campaigns aim to reach a target audience that is different from the expected group. By focusing on a different lead character or storyline, these companies were praised by people they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to include.
Nike’s maternity collection
Women who are pregnant are often not targeted by sports companies. The stigma around pregnancy is that you exercise or play sports less, or maybe not at all. The opposite can be true. Even though women’s workouts might change, many pregnant women choose to remain active well into their pregnancy. To celebrate women who remain active during pregnancy Nike created their first maternity collection and promoted this with a popular and appreciated campaign.
Fenty’s curvy in-store mannequins
Rihanna’s brand Fenty portrays models from different ethnic backgrounds, different genders, and different body shapes. Whilst most stores will show their clothes on thin in-store mannequins, Fenty decided to approach it differently. By showing the garments on curvy models Fenty got a lot of praise from its community and the wider media. By making the representation more attuned to reality, people can resonate with the brand image and its products more easily.
Essie’s first male ambassadorWhen you think of nail polish campaigns you probably envision a beautiful young woman holding her hands in front of her, showing the new trendy color. Essie decided it was time for a change. They asked Queer Eye star, Jonathan van Ness, to promote their new collection, he said yes and he became their first male ambassador. Not only does this portray inclusivity, but Essie also created a much bigger target audience, including people from the LGTBQ community and male buyers.
Do you want to know how to implement inclusivity?
Would you like to have an inclusivity business audit? Would you like to get more insights into how you can implement your audit? We are here to help. You can get in touch today and book a call with us. We’ll be happy to assist you in further growing your business.
