Your business is all about your audience learn about them and see your business succeed. This is one of the things my mentor told me when I started my business. The advice was simple and quite predictable, so execution was expected to be simple as well.
However, it took me sleepless nights, countless coffee cups, and endless attempts to fully understand my audience. Do not blame me, my audience was diverse. As I stepped into the business, I wanted my business to become a sought-after brand. I wanted people to know my brand; I mean a business owner can dream right?
However, my dream became my biggest nightmare when I started targeting my worldwide audience. With each marketing campaign, I was getting more angry reviews, complains, and some ugly comments. My brand was offending people at the speed of light and I was helpless. That is when I started observing inclusive big brands. I learned what they were using; implementing and then I mimicked everything within my budget.
If you are a small business struggling with your diverse audience, here are some tried and tested tricks straight out of an inclusive big brand book.
Top 5 Tips for Creating an Inclusive Brand
1. Offer Inclusive Customer Service
Never underestimate the power of inclusive customer service. When you have solid customer service that can talk to customers in their language, you are keeping this reliable. In such a fast-paced world, reliability is one of the most crucial factors and it will help you earn a good reputation.
For instance, ISPs like Optimum cater to a wider audience that mainly includes English speakers. However, to ensure that they include their Spanish audience, they are also offering Optimum en español which is a dedicated line for their Spanish customers. Thanks to their inclusive customer service efforts, they have now become a household name among Spanish audiences in the USA.
2. Hire Diversity
To learn about the culture, values, norms, and pain points, you need to acquire information directly from the population you are targeting. While seeking active feedback is becoming increasingly popular, you also need to understand that the demand of customers and what you can offer as a brand is polar opposites. To understand these needs and then address them as your customers expect from your brand, you need a voice directly from the audience.
This is where your diversity hire comes in. Let your diversity hire tell you about their community and then let them guide you toward a solid marketing plan and product. Try to categorize your audience and then delegate the work to your diversity hire. Since they have better insight, you will get better results as well.
3. Value Diverse Input
Brainstorming sessions sit at the core of a solid marketing campaign. When you let the ideas flow, you will get more organic and simple ideas that have a good potential to work. On the contrary, if you delegate the idea planning to just one team, you will deprive yourself of a solid and more innovative idea.
Big brands especially focus on getting input from a diverse population. From rolling out staff emails for all to offering positive enforcement to a good idea, these big brands do it all. This is the reason they are able to get much better input from their employees and they have good marketing campaigns as well.
4. Get the Bigger Picture
Trending topics are good and they will earn you a lot of attention but when you are running a business with a diverse targeted audience, you need to look beyond simple pictures. Analyzing each trend, hashtag and even the words used in the post are very important.
If you lack attention to detail, prepare to be disappointed. Most of the brands have faced backlash and even cancellation threats just because they offended a huge part of the population.
When you are running a business, you need to be politically correct. In an attempt to appear quirky or trying to impress a certain audience, do not end up offending the rest of the population. Make sure you run everything through a group of diverse people so you can avoid this issue completely.
5. Read the Brands of Your Audience
Your audience holds the ultimate power. They know what they are looking for, so do not try to impress them too much. Instead, learn about the favorite brand of your audience. A good case study will help you avoid a lot of problems.
Before you start planning to impress your diverse audience, look for different case studies available in the market and then go through their marketing process. Most of the seasoned brands with solid audiences can offer you a lot of insight that can help you avoid all mistakes.
Wrap Up
To sum it all up, when your audience is diverse, you need a lot of planning and solid strategy to keep them happy. The above-mentioned tips are a great way to help you build your successful inclusive brand.