Incorporate Inclusive Marketing Into Your Strategy

Inclusive Marketing

Inclusive marketing acts as a blanket term for the kind of marketing tactics that display diversity, prioritize accessibility, and ultimately make your company stand out from the rest. Consumers prioritize working with companies whose core values align with their own. In fact, according to a 2018 Accenture study, 70 percent of millennials were more likely to choose one company over another if they demonstrated inclusion in their advertising.

Diversity and inclusion go hand in hand, but they aren’t synonymous. You can go out of your way to feature images of people of color, people with disabilities, and people of all ages in the images you choose, but that does not mean you’re implementing inclusive practices. Effect real change by using people-first language, ensuring your business accommodates people with disabilities, and hiring a diverse staff.

Principles of Inclusive Marketing:

Ensuring Representational Skills

In a storyline, photograph, video, or other medium, representation is the visual presence of a diversity of personalities. The importance of representation is enormous. People would like to see themselves mirrored in the media because it makes us feel more powerful, motivated, and heard. We are aware that we are surrounded with outstanding and diverse talent. It is our responsibility to ensure that they are connected to our platforms and that all are given opportunities.

Begin with the Tone

A chunk of content’s tone is its aesthetic, characteristic, or feeling. Tone is often at the core of when individuals feel offended or turned off by a work but can’t quite put their finger on why.

To attain the proper and polite tone, we recommend examining the desired theme, topic, digital message, and overall effect of a post throughout the preparation stages.

Use Vocabulary with purpose

The words, concepts, symbols, and metaphors used to describe anything are referred to as language. Language has enormous power; it may either increase understanding and enhance relationships, or it can misunderstand or even injure others.

For these reasons, it’s crucial to think about each word, symbol, or sentence thoughtfully — not only what they say, and how and where they’re put.

Counter-Stereotype

Going against a stereotyped picture that expresses an oversimplified perspective, biased attitude, or unthinking judgment is known as counter-stereotyping.

Many of us have seen advertisements that reinforce negative prejudices, but envision a world where marketing imagery destroys rather than reinforced stereotypes. That’s where we, as marketing, have the ability to influence culture.

Abstain from appropriation

Appropriation is typically characterized as adopting or employing a feature of a minority culture without understanding or respecting its significance. It might be opinionated and sensitive to draw on races and cultures, customs, and personal observations.

Ways to Create an Inclusive Marketing Strategy:

Take a look at your customers

Your customers will tell you a lot about how you’re currently marketing your product or digital service. Check out their demographics: are there segments of the population that could very well benefit from your offering, but you’re just not targeting them?

It’s also wise to look at your leads that didn’t pan out, and the reasons why.

Celebrate more than the “major” holidays

It’s common to create social media content and marketing promotions around major holidays, seasons, and other events. But why stop at just the usual suspects, like Valentine’s Day, summer, and New Year’s Eve?

Highlight your brand’s inclusive mindset by celebrating or acknowledging holidays focused on marginalized people, the LGBTQ community, and other diverse groups as well.

Be thoughtful about visuals

No surprise here: Visuals are one of the most important factors when it comes to digital marketing advertising.

Photos, graphics, and videos are a way to instantly hook the viewer and make them want to know more. But if your ad, blog, or website imagery isn’t inclusive, you could be inspiring people to bounce instead of buy.