Inclusive Marketing

Inclusive marketing isn’t just about targeting a singular demographic just for the sake of it. Rather, it’s a proactive response to traditional stereotypes. As a marketer, your aim here is to tell people that your brand is built for customers of all demographics. At the same time, you must also acknowledge the fact that everyone is different — and your marketing message must embrace those differences.

Inclusivity is a good thing for businesses and customers, here’s why:

For businesses, inclusive marketing creates valuable opportunities. A marketing campaign that celebrates diversity allows businesses to reach a wider audience.

For customers, inclusive marketing campaigns make them feel like they are fairly represented and valued because they can see themselves reflected in the message.

Adding diversity to your marketing strategy isn’t easy. It also takes time. That said, here are 4 tips to gently nudge you on the right path:

1. Hire a diverse team

Executing an inclusive marketing strategy involves ensuring there’s actual diversity within the team. However, it is important to make sure that this isn’t just a box-ticking exercise. Define your business’ cultural fit, then ensure that your recruitment strategy allows for a diverse range of candidates from a variety of different backgrounds.

There’s nothing worse than having a marketing team full of people who think and behave the same way as everyone else. Having a diverse team means that you’re more likely to obtain new insights or opinions that your current team may not have considered before.

2. Show empathy

To engage and connect with your audience, your message must be relatable. For this to happen, you must develop empathy and a deep understanding of your customers; essentially, you are putting yourself in their shoes. The worst thing you can ever do in this situation is to employ stereotypes (for example, women promoting cleaning products in the kitchen); doing this will only cause your audience to react angrily and ignite flames on social media!

3. Think about your content carefully

Your marketing copy shouldn’t just be an afterthought in your inclusive marketing strategy. It’s best to keep your language neutral, avoiding gender pronouns like the plague.

It’s also important to exercise extreme caution when using cultural references to market to an ethnic audience. In the 1970s, American Motors released a new model called “the Matador” to the Puerto Rican market; the name of the car was meant to convey courage and strength. The problem was that the American marketing team did not realize that the word “matador” is often translated to “killer” in Spanish. This certainly didn’t instill much confidence in Puerto Rico where hazardous roads and car accidents were common!

4. Measure your results

Finally, it’s important to implement the tools and processes to monitor the results of your inclusive marketing strategy. Marketing automation software like Autopilot is a great place to start; Autopilot offers the tools to segment your audience, view campaign insights, and track campaign CTRs and website hits, allowing you to make concrete and quantifiable progress against set goals.

Inclusive marketing and creating high performing teams is something we care about here at Autopilot. We are actually the first software that brings together teams around the world to build, measure and create an inclusive strategy, learn more by watching this video: