During the last few years, more and more brands have been implementing inclusive marketing. This form of marketing goes beyond merely featuring diverse individuals in advertising. It involves a deep understanding and representation of various perspectives, experiences, and identities in brand messaging. Inclusive marketing includes both campaigns that highlight diversity by showcasing people from various backgrounds and sharing stories that resonate with different audiences, and practical actions to make content more accessible.
The goal of inclusive marketing is to create meaningful connections with a wide range of people, far beyond just increasing sales. Some brands may even adopt linguistic variants like the use of “e”, “x”, and “@” in Spanish. While these linguistic decisions may seem a risk due to their controversial nature, it isn’t necessary to apply them to your brand communication to make a message inclusive. In this article, you will learn how to make your digital marketing strategy more inclusive and accessible, and make the most out of it.
Why is inclusive marketing important?
In marketing, language is a powerful tool and now, more than ever, people are fighting for inclusion. The words we choose can either draw people in or push them away. Inclusive marketing is crucial because it directly impacts how your audience perceives your brand. By using it, you can create content that resonates with a broader range of people, fostering a sense of belonging and acceptance.
Reaching diverse audiences through inclusive marketing has multiple benefits: It helps expand your market reach, enhances your brand’s reputation, increases customer loyalty, and contributes positively to society. Additionally, it can improve your SEO positioning, making your content more accessible and discoverable online.
Strategies before implementing inclusive marketing
1. Conducting an audience research
To effectively use inclusive marketing, it’s essential to understand the diverse demographics of your current audience and how they perceive your brand, and research your target audience as well. Conduct surveys, focus groups, and other research methods to gather insights into their identities, preferences, and needs. Collecting this data will enable you to make informed communication choices, and ensure that your message resonates with all segments of your audience. What is more, you can early detect any ongoing changes in their linguistic preferences and make the necessary adjustments in advance.
2. SEO positioning
Inclusive language can also enhance SEO performance. You can even start positioning the keywords discovered in your target audience’s research and get ahead of your competitors. By using common gender nouns, collective nouns, and other linguistic strategies (more about that later in this article), you can improve your search engine rankings. Dove’s inclusive campaigns, for instance, have consistently ranked high in search results due to their broad appeal and relevant, inclusive content, added to many sites that were writing about their campaigns. SEO strategies aren’t only used to rank websites, keep reading to know how to put them into practice in your social media.
5 Key practices of inclusive marketing
1. Choose gender marked terms wisely
We’ve just said it, by using inclusive marketing, you can appeal to a wider audience. However, that’s not all that matters, you have to pay special attention to the implications of each option. Sometimes, brands will use gender-neutral terms just for the sake of following the last linguistic trend, without thinking twice about the meaning and the accessibility behind these words. Especially in Spanish, it has become quite popular the use of “e”, “x”, and “@” to create non-binary nouns, adjectives, and participles. Putting aside the ideology associated with them, from a marketing perspective, these characters aren’t accessible, and consequently, aren’t inclusive.
According to the WHO, more than 5% of the world’s population (466 million people) experience disabling hearing loss (432 million adults and 34 million children) and they often rely on text-to-speech converters to interact on social media and surf on the net. These converters can’t process characters like “x” and “@” within a word, which makes it impossible for people with hearing loss to understand the message, excluding them from that piece of content.
Not only would brands be excluding people with disabilities, but they also wouldn’t get as much traffic as other content-optimized websites. More and more people with or without disabilities increasingly use voice search. Statistics speak for themselves: About 90% of people think voice search is easier and faster than traditional search; in 2023, the number of voice assistant users reached 125.2 million, and experts predict that the number of voice assistants worldwide will reach over 8.4 billion in 2024 (Tech Report 2023).
2. Add subtitles to your audiovisual content
Social media studies from 2023 and 2024 have shown that short video content went, and still goes, on the rise. They include Meta reels, YouTube shorts, and TikToks, but there’s one more key format: stories. What is more, 69% of consumers prefer to watch videos without sound when in public, and 25% prefer to do so in private. At the same time, 80% of these consumers prefer videos with subtitles (Localization Lab).
Let’s talk about the benefits of subtitling your content:
- People find it easy to follow: 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. And surely this doesn’t happen only on that platform. Since people often watch reels, shorts, TikToks, stories, etc. muted, what do you think will happen if they can’t “read” your video? They keep scrolling, and you lose views, in other words, your content becomes irrelevant.
- It’s more accessible: As was said before, people with disabilities also have social media. Make sure you add accurate and proofread subtitles before hitting the “post” button. Usually, automatically generated subtitles have mistakes which not only affects these people, but also your reach, since they don’t appear in search engines.
- It helps your SEO: By writing good subtitles, you make your content more searchable. Creating a text element for your video means that search engines can find your content. That is to say that it will appear in more searches, and higher up in both search pages and feeds.
3. Write alternative texts to every picture
Introducing one of inclusive digital marketing’s cornerstones: alternative texts, often shortened to Alt texts, are pieces of image descriptions for accessibility purposes. They serve as an equivalent to the picture so that visually impaired people can know what the image is about through screen readers. They are excellent for SEO strategies since these texts appear in search engines, either on the web or on social media.
It’s crucial to know how to properly write accessible Alt texts to avoid what happened on Instagram some time ago. One day, I woke up, and the app was flooded by “Instagram experts” encouraging the use of plain and simple keywords in alternative texts. That may be good for reach, but it’s terrible for accessibility and inclusion. Imagine being scrolling through your social media feed and only hearing keywords instead of real valuable content.
Only in the UK, there are 2 million blind and partially sighted people. Let’s put ourselves in their shoes for a minute and write actual picture descriptions.
4. Adapt your texts’ vocabulary in inclusive marketing
It’s well known that, in order to encourage inclusion, we have to start by changing the words we use. This isn’t limited to respecting people’s chosen pronouns and choosing gender-neutral terms over gender-specific ones. You can start by implementing plain language, among many other linguistic aspects to take into consideration:
- Specific or technical vocabulary: The type of vocabulary you use in your inclusive marketing strategy will depend entirely on your target audience. However, it should keep a very surface of specificity or else, hardly any people will be able to understand it, leading to low reaching and unsuccessful content.
- Length of sentencies: Nobody likes coming across very long and overwhelming sentences. If people have to go over the same sentence one more time to grasp what it’s trying to say, they will keep scrolling and never go back.
- Organization: Similarly to the length, when writing, you should state clear ideas in a logical and easy-to-follow order. Many people make the mistake of going back and forth, interrupting concepts in the middle and starting a new one, etc. Marketing is all about communication, if the message isn’t crystal clear, you just lose.
- Words with negative connotations: In social media, you never know who is consuming your content on the other side of the screen. Using phrases like “as you can see in this graphic,” “run and listen to our podcast,” “those who suffer from…,” etc. can exclude more people than you know, and guess what? It also affects your brand perception, not to mention the risk of “cancel culture”.
5. Choose inclusive imagery
In social media, pictures are a great part of the content, hence the importance of learning how to choose your visuals. You’d be shocked to know how many brands just download and use whatever photos they can find from stock websites without thinking twice. Your inclusive marketing strategy can’t lack images that represent a broader society, so, when you are in the process of selecting pictures for your posts, ask yourself these questions:
- Does it represent different groups of people? Obviously, it will be impossible to fit all the existing ones in a single picture, but we’re trying to include people here, so think about culture, age, body type, ethnic groups, LGBT+ community, people with physical or cognitive impairment, etc.
- Can you identify any discriminatory or stereotyped behaviour or symbols among its components?
- What can you tell about the colours and composition? Is anything “cancellable”?
Tools and resources related to inclusive marketing
1. Language checkers and inclusive language guides
- Microsoft’s Inclusive Language Checker (integrated into their Office suite)
- Inclusion Hub
- Diversity Style Guide
2. Workshops and training programs
It’s not necessary to make a huge investment in workshops and training programs to educate yourself on inclusive marketing and how to implement it. There are plenty of free resources out there to get you started, and, once you gain expertise, you can invest in more complex and advanced material.
All in all…
Inclusive marketing is crucial in today’s society. It involves understanding diverse audiences, adopting integral respectful and neutral communication, and being mindful of the impact your content has on audience perception. The benefits of inclusive marketing are vast, including broader audience reach, enhanced brand reputation, increased customer loyalty, positive social impact, and improved SEO positioning.
Adopting inclusive digital marketing practices isn’t just an ethical choice, but a strategic one. It allows you to connect with a more diverse audience and demonstrates your brand’s commitment to equality, inclusion, and respect. We should ensure our messaging reflects the diverse world we live in. By committing to inclusivity, we can create a more united and understanding society.
If you still aren’t sure about how well inclusive marketing performs, you can start reconsidering after reading Google’s experience.
