Marketing With Inclusive Design to Bolster Customer Attention 

Many businesses don’t get to experience authentic connections with the majority of their audience. Why? There’s a good chance their marketing and design aren’t inclusive. 

Inclusive design and marketing can have an incredible effect on your marketing success and overall operation. This article will offer four inclusive marketing and design tips to help you genuinely connect with your audience and reach more potential buyers. But first, let’s start with the benefits of inclusive marketing and design.

The Benefits of Inclusive Marketing and Design

To get positive marketing results, your strategies and tactics must resonate with as many people in your target audience as possible. Each person should feel welcome when you market to them. Your design practices should ignite a similar feeling. All your products, services, and platforms should be accessible and used by visitors, regardless of their background, ability, or experience. 

When your marketing and design make people feel like they belong with your business, they’re more likely to become loyal customers and brand advocates. You’ll also get a lot more attention and engagement from communities often neglected by other businesses, like those living with disabilities. 

Ultimately, inclusive marketing and design help you nurture authentic connections with more people in your audience, prompting more conversions and better business. Your commitment to serving all people in your community betters your brand reputation too. 

More importantly, inclusive design and marketing help people love themselves more. Even if it’s just when they interact with your business, you ensure their differences don’t limit them or their experience.

Inclusive Marketing and Design Tips 

Putting diversity, equity, and inclusion at the forefront of your marketing and design strategies, techniques, and technologies isn’t too complex. Inclusive marketing and design are achievable with some intent, accessibility education, and creativity. 

Use these four tips to make your brand and online experience more inclusive. 

1. Get to know people

As we have more conversations about and make deeper commitments to diversity and inclusion, inclusive marketing and design will be critical in future-proofing your business during the digital age. A deep understanding of cultural awareness, inclusivity, and empathy is the key to marketing and design that welcome everyone. The first step in getting there? Getting to know people. 

Listen to and learn from your employees and customers. Be genuinely interested in each person’s experience, ability, and background. Take a little extra time to understand individuals with disabilities, what their day-to-day life looks like, and how to support them better. Have specific conversations about how to make marketing and design more inclusive too. 

This will help you grow an appreciation and respect for your brand, as well as increase diversity integral to marketing. Target your audience inclusively and design for all kinds of people. 

2. Create inclusive ads

As important as it is to talk about diversity and inclusion in your marketing, it’s also essential to give your audience visual representations of it. That’s where creating inclusive ads comes in. 

It’s one thing to tell a story about an underrepresented community. It’s another to let that community speak for and represent itself. The latter is much more powerful in marketing. 

So, create ads that have various people in them. Showcasing people of various races and cultures is just the beginning. Include individuals:

• Living with varying disabilities 
• Of different economic statuses
• Of different ages 
• That have various jobs and careers 
• That are neurodivergent 
• That communicate in different ways 
• With distinct family structures and educational backgrounds 

When you represent a range of people in your ads, more of your audience can relate to them, and more will be drawn to your brand. 

3. Diversify the rest of your marketing content

Your ads aren’t the only thing that you should be mindful of. Consider the rest of your marketing content too. Think about how you can touch as many people as possible with all the content that you have.

Use diverse images and other visuals to accompany your written content. Implement various mediums, like video, audio, email, text messages, and social media, to connect with more people in their preferred medium. You could also show your internal operation’s diversity and inclusion in behind-the-scenes marketing content. 

Be creative in figuring out how to market your content best to various individuals in your target audience.

4. Focus on accessible design features 

As you focus on diverse and inclusive marketing, do the same with your design practices. Focus on implementing multiple accessible design features in your products, services, and digital platforms. 

Ensuring that your website, social media posts, email messages and ads follow web accessibility guidelines is crucial to inclusive design. They should be compatible with assistive technology. Navigation should be seamless. Color schemes, fonts, and typography should be adapted to those living with neurological and cognitive disabilities. Enable keyboard navigation and voice search. 

The list of accessible design features goes on. So, keep familiarizing yourself with them. Always include specific features that promote inclusivity, and you will go a long way to bolster customer attention.

Conclusion 

Make inclusive marketing and design your standard, not an exception. If you want to make genuine connections with more of your audience, serve them better, and create a superior customer experience for everyone, regardless of the differences they possess. Good luck with implementing the tips above.

Author bio

Charlie Fletcher is a freelance writer passionate about workplace equity, and whose published works cover sociology, politics, business, education, health, and more. Check out the full portfolio on https://charliefletcher.contently.com/.