It isn’t enough for brands just to talk about diversity and inclusion. They have to take concrete action as well.
In fact, the most successful brands understand the value of inclusion and diversity when it comes to creating effective marketing messages for their target audience. In fact, more businesses are placing greater focus on diversity in their promotional efforts to appeal to an increasingly diverse consumer market.
Here are three (3) ways to ensure your brand is creating inclusive marketing messages that resonate with each of your target audience. It is a challenge, but can be accomplished as follows.
1. Assemble creative teams that reflect your target audience.
If you want to effectively promote your products or services to a diverse target market, then your creative teams need to reflect that diversity. It doesn’t matter how open-minded and empathetic your marketing team perceives themselves to be, almost everyone has some level of bias based on their own personal experiences and life (even if it’s unintentional). Therefore, whenever you are building a creative team for an advertising campaign, make sure the team’s diversity reflects that of your target audience.
For example, let’s say that your company wants to target millennial women in a new promotional campaign. Then, you should build a creative team led by millennial women. Furthermore, given the fact that your audience of millennial women will likely come from diverse backgrounds, your team of millennial women should come from diverse backgrounds as well.
Doing so will give your business a much better chance of creating inclusive messages that your target market will find engaging and relatable.
2. Share diverse stories.
When it comes to creating promotional messages, it’s hard to create one that everyone in your audience will relate to. Alternatively, you can tell several different stories to offer something for everyone in your target market. Unfortunately, creating that many different promotional messages is costly and time-consuming for creative teams. Therefore, you should instead be focusing on sharing diverse stories.
For instance, let’s say that you are putting together a television commercial to advertise a product or service from your brand. You should make sure that the characters in your commercial don’t all look the same. That’s because they need to reflect the diversity of your audience to make the ad’s message more inclusive. Back to the point about emphasizing diversity in your creative teams: The more diverse your marketing team is, the more inclusive its messages will be.
3. Share stories about diversity.
A growing number of consumers want and expect the brands they do business with to support social causes that are important to them. That’s especially the case when it comes to promoting diversity and inclusion as part of a brand’s core mission. Therefore, you should reach out to employees and other stakeholders who come from diverse backgrounds to see if they would like to share personal stories about their experience with your brand.
Consumers really enjoy stories about those who have had to overcome obstacles to achieve success in life. By highlighting some good examples of your mission to support diversity, you can show your audience that your brand truly values inclusion and creating greater opportunities for everyone.
In short, inclusion is about truly welcoming diversity of background, thought, and experiences. By channeling true diversity into your marketing messages, you can build an inclusive brand with a much larger target audience. However, to be successful, you must put actions behind your words or else your stakeholders will see through your shallow rhetoric. Make sure that you assemble creative teams that reflect your target market. Furthermore, your brand’s advertising efforts should focus on telling diverse stories, as well as stories about diversity.