With family and friends celebrating major holidays this time of year, we all want to make the season extra special for our loved ones. The holidays are a time for fun with family and friends, but it is also an important time of year for your business. The holidays are a perfect opportunity to show employees how much they are valued, build strong relationships with customers, and increase customer loyalty. Relatively, it is also the time to build an inclusive holiday marketing campaign. It’s no secret that diversity has taken the forefront. It’s evident everywhere, from the faces on our movie screens to our TV shows. As an entrepreneur, diversity can be vital to your success.
Diversity in thought is what will appeal to your customers, and if you have a diverse workforce, it will inspire your creative efforts in a unique way that will resonate with your target market—especially during the holiday season. Your company should be portrayed in a manner that shows you value all employees, their families, and customers—and the ways in which they prefer to celebrate. In order to create an inclusive marketing campaign, consider what is important to them and what they want out of their holiday experience. Here are some tips for how you can create an inclusive holiday marketing campaign.
- Make sure that you are using neutral messaging.
Bells will be ringing, songs will be sung, and Santa Claus will travel around the world in a single night – all on Christmas Eve. For many millennials, Christmas is more than just a religious holiday, but a time to spend with friends and family and give thanks for what they have. Others celebrate Christmas as a chance to get in the festive spirit and deck the halls. Regardless of how you view Christmas, it is important to remember that not everyone shares your view. Many have other beliefs that are just as important to them. So how do you market to everyone? It’s best to focus on sharing common values rather than focusing on your own beliefs, and to treat it like a normal time of year by avoiding religious messaging.
Executives at America's top retailers, including Amazon, Target, and Walmart, are increasingly adopting the same strategy for their holiday marketing campaigns. This allows you to focus the season on themes of community, family, and giving back without the use of religious rhetoric or symbols. You will want to choose relevant holiday symbolism that can be implemented into the holidays—symbolism that your audience will likely draw connections to, even if they are not familiar with an old tradition. For instance, incorporating Christmas trees, Santa Claus, Christmas stockings, etc. are symbols that are easily understood by most so it’s no surprise some advertisers tend to use them. By understanding the market landscape and pinpointing what resonates most with your target audience, you can position your campaign successfully.
- Diversity your content without tokenism.
Tokenization is the practice of representing a group as one representative individual--in this case, by using one model to represent diverse consumers. While this strategy may be familiar to us as marketers and advertisers, it's also something we should be conscious of when creating our content. Tokenizing models is not just offensive, it is inaccurate and unhelpful to your brand. Developing a diverse group of models is important, but it’s equally important that they play a role in helping to develop authentic content. Your community is shaped by a variety of intersections, and the experience of each person is also shaped by intersectionality. Intersectionality is a term that describes the ways in which various social categorizations such as class, age, gender, etc. interact with each other to affect people's life chances and overall status in society.
Communicating this intersectionality in your campaigns should be a goal for brands looking to go beyond tokenization. It’s imperative that you create a team that is diverse in itself and can create diverse cultural narratives. Diversity is complicated, and it’s important to realize and address how differences in race, gender, or even function can impact long term brand growth. A thorough understanding of diversity and difference goes far beyond the hiring process. It helps fuel your content calendar and informs decision-making when designing campaigns.
- Create content that is accessible.
Accessibility is all about providing everyone with the same opportunities to access your content as anyone else. Making sure your digital content is accessible can help improve engagement and gives everyone in your organization an opportunity to create more inclusive content. By creating accessible content, you are opening your audience up to a broader range of people who can benefit from your services and products. This is especially true for those with visual and hearing impairments. While it may seem like a small step, taking the time to consider your content and how it will be received by those with disabilities can strengthen your digital community and improve engagement.
When you are creating your content, think about the people who will be reading it. Do you want your campaign to reach a wide range of people or do you want to target a specific group of people? In order to create content that is accessible for inclusive marketing, you need to understand how your audience thinks, what they want from your brand and the type of language they use. Content marketing is not only about the quality of the content you create, but also how it can be shared through various channels. If you are creating content to attract your key buyers, make sure that the content is accessible for people with disabilities. It is important to create an inclusive marketing strategy for your organization by considering the different access needs of people with disabilities.