Inclusive Branding Tips With a Full Service Digital Marketing Agency

Last updated on January 9th, 2023

Written by Mark Salvania

“Do you feel recognized and valued?” sounds like a personal question, but this is a significant point that will help a brand gain a strong competitive advantage in marketing. 

The winds are changing. Some marketing strategies that worked for the past decades have come to an end, and brands are beginning to realize the need to exert a lot of effort in digital marketing to keep a profitable business. One of these realizations is the demand for diverse marketing, which means people expect brands to cater to various audiences. 

They want a brand to take a significant role beyond selling products— to treat customers as humans, understand their culture and perspective, and create a sense of belonging. This article discusses what inclusion is in e-commerce and how you can start inclusive branding with the help of a full service digital marketing agency.

Inclusion in the E-Commerce Industry

E-commerce inclusion is an authentic marketing strategy in which a brand recognizes and supports a diverse target audience. From team structure to user experience, you let your target audiences know that you see them, value their opinions, and aim to offer the best products and services for their needs. 

Why Does It Matter?

Here are some statistics on how inclusion helps e-Commerce brands get closer to their audiences:

• An Invitation to Ad Engagement: A study revealed how respondents took action after seeing a diverse or inclusive ad, and showed 64% interacts on said inclusive ad. In particular, it showed that 69% of black customers highly consider purchasing from a brand with a positive racial or ethnic reflection on their ads, while 71% of the LGBTQ community prefer to interact with an ad that showcases sexual orientation authentically.
• Inclusion for Brand Reputation: A Shutterstock study revealed that Millennials and Generation X consider diversity a good brand reputation trait. Images that show diverse ages, races, sexual orientations, religions, cultures, and social statuses contribute to a positive impression.

Overall, these statistics show that when customers feel respectfully represented and valued, they are more likely to engage in your marketing content.

Inclusion as a Tool to Identify Your Target Audience

If inclusion involves diverse groups, what is the point of finding the target market, then? For a moment, you’re probably wondering about this, thinking that inclusion has a contradicting concept with target marketing. 

However, inclusive marketing doesn’t significantly mean catering to every single group out there. Instead, it means finding relevant people interested and drawn to your brand and ensuring they are properly included in your digital marketing campaign. 

Therefore, inclusive marketing helps you to:

• Specify your target audience
• Reach more people
• Build a respectful brand reputation
• Enhance your marketing efforts further

Build an Inclusive Culture: Digital Marketing for Amazon Sellers

Now that you understand the primary benefits of inclusive marketing, are you ready to use it in building a diverse and equitable culture for your Amazon brand? Here’s where you can leverage your inclusive marketing strategy:

An Inclusive, Multi-Demographic Approach

The strategies that make groundbreaking impacts in marketing today go beyond demographic stereotypes and inaccuracies on physical appearance, gender, culture, mental health, and lifestyle preference. For example, some people don’t feel a sense of belonging for how they look, their sexual orientation, or their particular tastes in fashion.

As an inclusive brand, you need to consider these things in creating your marketing plan and find a way to make these people feel included and valued. Below are some helpful tips to get you started.

Inclusive Imagery

One image can be as powerful as a thousand words. But, at the same time, it can be easily misunderstood with the lack of wording. Therefore, it is extremely important to think about the visuals you use to express inclusive intentions. Below are some examples of inclusive imagery you can learn from:

• Use images that show real people with diverse nationalities, diverse body sizes, or people with disabilities. An example would be search platforms like Shutterstock or Adobe that offer inclusivity in one image. 
• Break the stereotypes to support and help solve long-term social issues. One example is Essie’s innovative decision of using a male ambassador for their nail polish Pride campaign. 
• Eliminate the unrealistic, unhealthy ideas of physical appearance and stick to authentic realities. If you’ve seen the Savage x Fenty show, they showcased racial and body inclusion through models of different skin colors and body sizes and in-store mannequins to reach out to an alienated audience.

Inclusive Storytelling

A truly inclusive content does more than just images— it should be evident in the stories you incorporate in your PPC campaign and other projects, too. People can get tired of the same stories. Even if these stories speak the truth, they don’t necessarily apply and relate to everyone— and that’s when you’re unintentionally excluding some groups from your target audience.

Take a courageous step and look at the different sides of the world. There are as many untold stories out there as the ones being told too many times. Therefore, allow your brand to take an important role in delivering a meaningful message the world needs to hear. Whether it’s a happy or tragic story, it has the potential to become a vital eye-opener to the community. 

Workplace Inclusion

If you apply an inclusive digital marketing strategy for your brand, it should be the same way in the workplace. An inclusive work culture helps you find innovative opportunities to serve your employees and customers better. Each individual has a different background, which also means one operates differently. You must understand these things to be of better service to your team. 

As a result, inclusion encourages high revenue, better decision-making, great employee equity, and increased job acceptance rates. For example, Amazon incorporates diversity, equity, and inclusion through affinity groups:

1. They actively recruit people with different backgrounds and ensure their value in the community.
2. They have partnerships with institutions centered around Black, Hispanic, women, and veteran groups.
3. Amazon participates in events that discuss and build customer and employee inclusion.

Inclusive Keywords

Conduct an in-depth analysis of the customer journey when you’re doing keyword research. Keep in mind that how people use words may differ based on a couple of factors: age, gender, and social status. You must tap on the unique keywords these groups might be using to look for your product or service on a search engine. 

For example, a man and a woman can search for the same product but may use different keywords to look for it. With your perspective, use customer analytics to collect these keywords and incorporate them into your product listings, website content creation, video marketing, paid ads, and social media marketing. 

Work With Amazon Advertising Agencies for Inclusive Content

Amazon’s Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) feature allows a brand to customize and implement rich content, which helps increase customer engagement and conversion rates. With the help of an Amazon full service agency, you can make inclusive product listings, ad campaigns, and inclusive-based strategies. 

• Implementing profitable and inclusive keywords that give you a greater advantage in the marketplace
• Optimizing product listings to ensure they reach the right categories and target audiences
• Optimizing product images that perfectly complement the descriptions and target the right audience
• A successful product launch that is free from hijackers or counterfeiters

Key Takeaway

People won’t forget how you made them feel, and that is true with brand-customer relationships. Emotion is one of the most important factors influencing brand outcomes today. People look for a sense of belonging in a product or service to see if they can be a part of the catered audience. If successful, they will most likely turn into loyal customers, which also helps your business grow further. 

Building a brand inclusion strategy for Amazon online marketing can be overwhelming at first. However, with the help of marketing professionals from Seller Interactive, you can take advertising to another level! If you need some help with an amazon ad agency, you may give us a call at 1-800-820-3746 or send us an email at [email protected].