Let Your Audience In With Inclusive Marketing

Author: Kamil Ahmed

Marketers are at the forefront of your brand like never before.

Content marketing is how you communicate, interact and develop relations with your active and prospective customers. This presents a critical question though: who is your target audience and are your communications inclusive of them? 

While content has always been key to marketing, you may have heard an uptake in the use of the term ‘content is king’ this year. In 1996, Bill Gates published an article titled Content Is King in which he forecasted that content is where, “much of the real money will be made on the internet.” It’s 24 years later and the words continue to witness validation. 

But to us, it’s not just about sheer quantity of content. It’s about how inclusive each piece of content and its delivery is, or in other words — it’s about inclusive marketing. 

What is Inclusive Marketing?

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as a phrase captures an employer’s commitment to promoting an inclusive workplace and employee engagements with that commitment. 

At Lunaria, we understand inclusive marketing as marketing that strives to do three things:

1. Resonate with people and make them feel seen, heard, acknowledged and accurately understood and represented. 
2. Actively increase the number of entry points into content.
3. Elevate diverse voices as experts with various lived and professional experiences. 

Inclusive marketing has the power to do more than just resonate with audiences. It can place a megaphone in front of typically marginalized or underrepresented people, foster meaningful connections with customers and in some cases even affect positive change. 

Why is inclusive marketing important?

The spaces we inhabit and navigate are becoming more diverse and interconnected. Now more than ever, companies should be mindful of the messages and values they articulate through facets of language like tone, imagery and voices — the things that represent your brand.

The thread that ties our three-fold objective of inclusive marketing together is impact. Whether the aim is to facilitate social change, or just as importantly, to reflect or embrace lived experiences, impact is the goal. In fact, according to research from Salesforce, 93% of consumers say companies have a responsibility to look beyond profit and create a positive impact on society.

To explore diversity of people, here are some numbers to get you thinking about how we engage products and services with the people they should serve. 

• Globally, 26% of millennials identify as LGBTQIA and the buying power of all LGBTQIA folks is $3.6 trillion.
• Only 10% of people with disabilities around the world have access to products and services they need while there are 1 billion people living with disabilities.
• When you include family and close friends of people with disabilities, the market reaches an additional 2.3 billion people who collectively control an incremental $6.9 trillion in annual disposable income.
• On average, 89% of women across the world report making daily buying decisions compared to 41% of men with female buying power at $40 trillion.
• The world’s 65-plus population is at a historical high of over 600 million people projected to hit a full billion by 2030. 
• In the U.S. alone, Americans aged 50 and up accounted for nearly $8 trillion worth of economic activity in 2015. 
• Black Americans spend $1.2 trillion annually and in some cases, BIPOC consumers represent more than 50% of overall spending in key product categories.

Get the full Inclusive Marketing Guide with next steps.