While many firms now create products and services for all customers, their brand marketing does not necessarily reflect this. Marketers must change their creative processes now more than ever to ensure that all audiences can see themselves reflected in advertising.
The work isn’t limited to artistic depiction. Another essential component of a successful strategy is inclusive media planning and procurement, ensuring that campaigns reach a broad audience.
The media and marketing teams at Google have learned a lot from their work on these aims. The following are four helpful brand marketing techniques that every firm may use to promote inclusivity and representation for all.
1. Locate Your Audience Where They Are.
To reach people, marketers must go where they are, as the cliché goes. If the marketing team is committed to spending more on media that reaches Black and Latinx audiences in the United States, it must invest in channels that reach these audiences at scale.
For example, YouTube is an excellent place to start when increasing reach because Black and Latinx users are active. Then, broaden multicultural purchases to include other underrepresented groups’ companies and digital communities. Blavity, a digital media network founded by and for Black millennials, is one such publication. Google and Blavity collaborated to establish #InTheBlack, a campaign aimed at assisting Black-owned small businesses in the United States in surviving the pandemic. #InTheBlack featured four resilient small businesses for four weeks last fall through influencer-hosted live-stream events that were amplified across Blavity’s platform and social platforms.
2. Use Crucial Moments and Passion Points to your Advantage.
Beyond reach, matching brand campaigns with cultural occasions and events that these audiences like is another strategy that helps advertisers better engage with Black and Latinx customers. Customized media buys that ensure distribution across many channels have effectively reached people who share common interests. Sponsorships in the media have also proved successful.
Last year, Google Search’s #TheMostSearched campaign, for example, commemorated Black History Month. Because the creative was relevant to Black audiences, it was a logical fit for media events with a significant Black audience, such as BET’s NAACP Image Awards, the NBA All-Star Game, and the Grammy Awards. In addition to generating favorable social buzz, the campaign increased brand advocacy by 13 percentage points among consumers aged 35 to 49 (Dynata Brand Lift Study, U.S., adults ages 18–49, Jan. 2020–March 2020).
Entertainment and music, for example, are highly engaged passion points for Latinx audiences in the United States. — Hispanic individuals spend more time on audio and video (69%) than any other group (Nielsen 2019). Google’s continuing commitment to the Latin Grammys has successfully increased the Pixel 5 phone awareness among this critical demographic. According to a Media Predict Latin Grammys study done in the United States in 2019, the sponsored campaign boosted consideration by 14 points among Hispanic individuals aged 18 to 49. The results were in 2020, demonstrating the need for consistency in these initiatives.
3. Create a More Inclusive User Journey.
Marketers must rethink how they present themselves online for underrepresented communities as media buys become more inclusive. A poor user experience stifles media performance; the key to overcoming this difficulty is to push for more relevant experiences, especially ad creativity. Improving relevance may need localizing search advertising and campaign landing pages for specific languages in some circumstances.
For example, in a recent test of the Pixel 5 phone, the performance of user journeys was highlighted among a Spanish-language speaking audience. A select audience of users who clicked on a Spanish-language search ad were directed to an English-language landing page, while others were directed to a Spanish-language landing page. Users who experienced the Spanish-language landing page were three times more likely to add Pixel products to their shopping cart than users who clicked the ad and experienced the English landing page. Another strategy that has yielded results is the use of a language selector on websites. Websites with a language picker are more discoverable and have higher usage.
4. Pay attention to regional and local differences
Finally, marketers must acknowledge that “inclusive” implies different things in different regions and adjust their methods accordingly.
Google uses regional and local markets to pick their consumers for inclusion and create methods for reaching them to assist honor this. Reaching and engaging the Black community, for example, is critical to inclusive marketing tactics in the United Kingdom. Last November, the U.K. team collaborated with Time Out London on an all-Black digital magazine edition to commemorate and promote Black Pound Day. It was guest-edited by English writer and actress Ashley Walters and featured Black-owned businesses, restaurants, and contributors. In addition, the team contributed 80% of the magazine’s ad space to local Black businesses.
Every step forward in the quest for diversity by marketers is a tiny step in a much more incredible journey. As an industry, we can help each other evaluate any firm’s measures to make their media strategies more inclusive by sharing what we’ve learned so far.
