By Charlie Fletcher, Freelance Writer
Successful marketing often relies on tried and true techniques, such as social media, content marketing, and SEO. Those are critical components of any campaign, but modern marketers must go beyond traditional methods to keep their efforts fresh and vital.
For example, an ideal website relies on more than just SEO to deliver user-friendly content. Marketing campaigns must be accessible and address sustainability. Additionally, acknowledge that privacy preferences are a top concern driving audiences.
However, one of the most pressing aspects of modern marketing is inclusivity.
Embracing Inclusivity
Inclusivity in marketing ensures a message that reaches and resonates with a diverse audience, making all feel seen and heard. However, its real power is establishing a reputation for social responsibility.
How can you enhance your marketing efforts with inclusivity? If you’re not serving a diverse audience, you risk losing their interest and business. To effectively market, you must address their concerns and needs, especially among traditionally marginalized groups.
One way to overcome this hurdle is to ensure your marketing team includes people of different races, ethnicities, ages, abilities, and the LGBTQ+ community. They can provide insight and advice on addressing any shortcomings in your campaigns. Establishing an inclusive brand identity can boost reviews and referrals and broaden your market.
To understand what will resonate with underserved audiences, marketers should embrace social listening to optimize the customer experience. Responding to public feedback helps brands gauge their popularity, understand their competition, and get feedback on products and services.
Social listening can also help brands to:
- Improve the customer experience by addressing criticisms on social media and in reviews;
- Develop Voice of the Customer solutions that target customer interests;
- Deliver a consistent experience to improve customer service.
All these touchpoints enhance a brand’s ability to form long-lasting relationships with customers, growing them from prospects to raving fans. This messaging, including a company’s website, is vital for content creation efforts.
Creating a Customer-Friendly Website
According to Forbes’ top website statistics, 29% of businesses won’t have a website in 2024. However, a website is necessary even for a small brick-and-mortar business because it can establish and grow a professional brand reputation.
Customers and prospects also benefit from having a place to peruse product catalogs, discover information such as hours and location, and learn about policies, values, and mission. Small business owners can share their personal journey on an About Us page. These relatable narratives build trust and likability, especially for diverse business owners. A website is also a place to showcase customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies.
For your website to reach the broadest possible audience, it must be accessible, just like all your marketing efforts.
Accessible Marketing
Accessible marketing makes content usable for all audiences, regardless of their abilities. This marketing is accessible to users with vision, speech, mobility, hearing, or cognitive impairment. To accomplish this:
- Follow accessibility standards, such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which help you design an accessible website;
- Ensure your website is usable, which makes it easy to navigate and provides tools for impaired users;
- Use accessible tools, such as the Google Marketing Platform, to continue to provide usable content;
- Add narration and subtitles to video and audio content to reach users with impaired hearing.
Marketing team members with limited abilities can spearhead these initiatives, providing valuable insight on how to proceed. Test and adjust all content to ensure you are meeting your campaign objectives. Accessibility is crucial for establishing a reputation, but consumers desire brands that care about sustainability.
Sustainable Marketing
Businesses must embrace the importance of climate resilience with sustainable marketing if they want to broaden their audiences and remain competitive. Take these steps to attract environmentally-conscious consumers:
- Ensure their operations are climate-resistant to withstand floods, hurricanes, and other climate-related disasters;
- Provide transparency about taking precautions to tackle climate risks, like protecting their supply chain;
- Streamline operations to reduce their carbon footprint with projects like digitizing documents.
Marketers must encourage clients to share these efforts with their marketing campaigns. Doing so keeps everyone on track to hitting both sustainability and marketing goals. The final overlooked marketing component deals with user privacy concerns.
Protecting Privacy While Optimizing Content
You cannot optimize or personalize marketing campaigns without collecting data. Unfortunately, cybersecurity threats abound today. Data collection efforts must protect this data.
Marketers should rethink data strategy and build value while honoring values that protect privacy needs. How can you accomplish this?
- Adopt a stance of transparency. Companies must be open about their reasons for data collection rather than burying this information in long agreement contracts.
- Give people control of how their data is used. By providing tools that let them limit or opt out of certain functions, they can prioritize what is most valuable to them.
- Enact privacy choices system-wide. Encourage business clients to integrate tools that coordinate these choices across systems for customer convenience.
Enacting customer-centric privacy controls builds trust, further improving brand reputation. These policies can attract more customers.
Marketing is not just about delivering attractive content. Marketers must adapt to current marketing trends, such as embracing inclusivity, creating a usable website, crafting accessible and sustainable marketing, and respecting the privacy of users and customers. These customer-focused concepts help marketers develop campaigns that create long-lasting customer relationships for their clients.
