Get to Know Diversity Marketing, Boost Your Audience!

Your marketing strategy should be aimed at finding the right audience but your diversity marketing also plays a very important role. If you’re not using diversity marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy then you could be missing opportunity and at worst, you could also be harming the integrity of your brand. Nowadays, it is paramount that you focus some of your marketing efforts and tailor them to today’s diverse audience, especially as 54% of people in the world use social media (and that number will definitely grow!)

The Need for Inclusion

What’s interesting is that Millennials make up the largest living generation across the globe and they’re fast reaching their maximum spending years. For marketers, this means there are big consequences to face if marketing isn’t more specific. Campaigns must reflect the needs of Millennials and that means employing diversity marketing to your strategy. Furthermore, Millennials dictate the need for inclusion when making their purchasing decision. Did you know that 70% of Millennials will favor another brand based on their inclusion and diversity when it comes to a brand’s promotions and offers.

In this piece, we will give you an overview of diversity marketing along with some strategies that you can use to focus your marketing efforts. We will also include some examples of companies who use diversity marketing to their best advantage, this is to help you when it comes to marketing your business and using advertising too (this is a useful link about saving money on advertising costs on social media: https://www.couponxoo.com/saving-blog/save-costs-on-advertising-on-social-media-marketing-platform which could also help your business.

What Is Diversity Marketing?

Firstly, let’s discuss what diversity marketing is. The term diversity marketing relates to any marketing strategy that recognizes its target market’s subgroups. Those diversities include age, gender, disability, ethnic origin, sexual identity, and religion. Within those diversities, you can also further segment your audience, and include demographics such as marital status, education, income, job title and even weight. Diversity marketing is used to connect with the biggest variety of people in your target market. If you have a specific diverse market there are certain practices you can put into place to reach your target market. For example, you could buy Instagram followers that are specific to you.

Buying Instagram followers isn’t as taboo as you’d think especially if you choose a service that employs technology to identify the right audience that complements your diversity marketing campaign. In doing so, you get a collection of Instagram followers that fit your diversity need and should engage with your content as long as it’s enticing and interesting.

Diversity Marketing and the Differences to Other Marketing

Today, there are so many different types of marketing through a wide collection of different mediums. As examples, there’s email marketing, content marketing and affiliate marketing. There are also all of the traditional offline types of marketing such as radio and billboard marketing as well as direct mail and TV advertising. You can use all of the aforementioned as part of your diversity marketing, but diversity marketing should come under the marketing umbrella. Some businesses might treat it as a separate element to make sure they reach all audiences.

When using diversity marketing, you should embrace a selection of messaging channels, such as those mentioned above. Then, that message should be carefully tuned for your target audience and delivered using their preferred mode of communication whether that’s social media, TV, print, online or others. For best results, diversity marketing should be data-driven and culturally aware.

Diversity Marketing Strategies

In order to develop an effective diversity marketing campaign, you must fit each campaign to your specific audience. To do so, you’ll need to adopt a number of different strategies and techniques to make your diversity marketing work effectively. It’s important to point out that there’s no “right way” to develop a diversity marketing campaign. You should take each case as an individual case and create marketing activity to fit with each accordingly.

Embrace Diversity at the Office

To make sure you have the right type of messaging for each diverse market it’s a good idea to have a team that reflects or at least understands the market in question. When you hire a team, do it based on diversity, so you have access to lots of different voices. This makes it much easier when speaking to a diverse market because you already have access to the right voice! So, build your team including different backgrounds, cultures, beliefs, and sexual preferences.

Use Market Data

In order to create a quality, diverse marketing campaign, you need to really get to grips with your market and that’s why data is imperative. Use data analytics to extract meaningful insights to the market in question. There are lots of different apps and tools available online to help you gain insights, it’s useful to use at least one to back-up your marketing campaign to a diverse market. A good place to start is Google Analytics, which you can access here: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/.

Build Your Campaign Upwards

Your overall marketing message may need to change to reach the target diverse market. Find a unique message for each group so you connect with the audience, and they connect with your brand or business.

Use Inclusive Language

This runs in parallel with understanding the audience you’re communicating with. It’s also vital when it comes to creating messages that resonate with the diverse group and ensures that you don’t exclude people. To use inclusive language for your diversity marketing, you need to understand how it’s done, how to break down barriers and not create barriers or propagating biases, albeit in a subconscious way. Make sure the language you use is welcoming to your diverse market, but also to others, you don’t want to exclude anyone!

Allow Your Customers to Use Their Voice

Let your customers have their own voice in your marketing campaign. This means collecting customer feedback, listening to it, and acting on it. You can collect this type of data either during or after your marketing campaign, better still, collect it both during and after for quality analysis. By asking for feedback, you get an honest reflection, and you learn what worked, what didn’t work and where you can do better for future diversity marketing campaigns.

Good Examples of Brands Using Diversity Marketing

Here’s a selection of diversity marketing campaigns used by big brands that worked well in communicating their messages. Done well, and your marketing can be extremely powerful and stand out in a crowd. Done badly, and as mentioned, you could ruin the integrity of your brand. It’s much harder to rectify damage once it’s done.

The Coca-Cola’s “America is Beautiful” Diversity Campaign

This is possibly one of the best examples of diversity marketing done well. The campaign started in 2014 and marketing activity included using a racially diverse selection of people singing the same song, America is Beautiful, in many different languages, therefore hammering home the inclusive message. The ad reflected on how America has changed to embrace diverse markets and cultures.

The Guinness “Friendship” Diversity Campaign

Back in 2013, Guinness launched its Friendship diversity campaign with a TV ad featuring disabled men playing wheelchair basketball. At the end of the game, every person bar one stands up – showing that they played the game in the same way as their disabled player. When it aired, it gained critical acclaim for its inclusive message and targeted both a diverse group and a wider segment of the market.

The Chevrolet “The New Us” Diversity Campaign

This campaign aired in 2014 and targeted the LGBT community. By focussing on one area, you’d think that it would alienate their bigger audience but instead, it gained popularity in all demographics, for focussing on a smaller segment of the market and proved that inclusivity is so important for all big brands.

Diversity Marketing and the Future

We believe that the importance of diversity marketing will continue to grow in the future. There are more and more diverse groups appearing, so ignoring these groups means missing big, potential segments and millions of potential customers. Therefore, diversity marketing should be a part of every marketing strategy. Without it, brands won’t be able to grow as large as they’d wish, and they could even be shunned in favor of the competition that do diversity marketing so well.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes