How to Get Started in Diversity Marketing Right Away
Across the globe, protests, marches, and walks have been organized in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The widespread recognition of the systemic racism that is apparent in our country has prompted many brands and individuals to assess their unintentional oppressive behaviors and vow to make changes.
One of the industries hit the hardest by recent scrutinization is marketing and advertising, as consumers are demanding to see more than the occasional person of color in campaigns.
In the past, the overwhelming majority of brand marketing efforts were aimed at older white males. More recently, the focus of campaigns has shifted to a more specialized approach as target markets are critically evaluated and brand personas (link to brand personas blog post) are created and brought to life. Moving forward, we believe our industry should dive deeper to break down those personas further, bringing more focus to the diversity and experiences of all consumers.
While older white males used to hold significant purchasing power, millennials are now reaching their prime spending years. As a whole, millennials are the most diverse generation in history, and studies have shown that 70% of millennials will choose to purchase from a brand who displays diversity in their promotions over a brand that does not. For this reason and many others, our team is committed to ensuring our clients understand this shift and that we create marketing messages that keep real customers’ wants and needs in mind. This approach is called diversity marketing.
Though there are strategic and important reasons that your company should be actively engaged in diversity marketing, we firmly believe that all companies should be actively mindful of their diversity practices simply because it is the moral and ethical thing to do. For many of us, including our team at Free State Marketing, we will need to come to the table willing to get it right instead of be right. We encourage your team to spend time with experts and ask the tough questions to ensure that your internal team truly values and respects all individuals regardless of their race, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, etc. Diversity marketing can only be practiced and implemented successfully by a team that has done the hard work of defining their values on this issue.
Diversity Marketing
According to G2, diversity marketing is “any marketing strategy that recognizes the differences within the subgroups of a target market, including: age, gender, disability, religion, ethnicity, and sexual identity.” With this in mind, you can split up your brand personas into each category, and think about the unique challenges and experiences of each subpopulation.
While other types of marketing focus on the way a message is being delivered, diversity marketing refers to the type of messaging that is being shared. To be successful at diversity marketing, your strategies need to be fine tuned and culturally sensitive to different audiences, delivered to each audience in the way that its population prefers to receive it.
This might mean sending a different message via email marketing to different cultural audiences, or even targeting only customers of a certain age through email and another age via social media or text message.
Now more than ever, sharing culturally relevant and aware content is critical. The best way to do this is to use a data-driven approach to learn more about consumers of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. You will also want to learn about the language of inclusivity to ensure that messaging is crafted in a way that is specific to your ideal consumer, yet inclusive of others.
As you move towards a more inclusive marketing approach, here are a few simple things we recommend doing as soon as possible:
Include photos of people of different races, ethnicities, abilities, sexual orientation, etc. in your social media and website images
Hire with the intention of creating a diverse team
Tell stories about a diverse sampling of product users instead of focusing on one demographic
Put a diversity statement on your website to share the steps your company is taking to become more inclusive
Work with a diverse group of influencers that all of your ideal customer groups can relate to
What other steps has your company taken to be more inclusive? We’d love to hear down below!