“Too often, marketers start to view their audience as a reflection of themselves and create content for them. They end up thinking that all the people consuming their content have the same background and challenges as themselves. They then cannot connect with all the other folks who can find that content to be useful if only it speaks to them as well and doesn’t make them feel excluded.” – Erika Heald
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika joins Michelle Ngome (@MichelleNgome), inclusive marketing consultant and creator of the Be Inclusive card game, to discuss how to build an inclusive content marketing strategy.
Read through a few highlights from the conversation below, and listen to the full audio recording here.
Q1: How do you define inclusive content?
“Inclusive content is about creating content—web copy, social media [posts], etc.—that reaches not only your target audience, but subgroups within your target audience. I use the example of if your target audience is a 35-year-old white woman married with two kids, what about the Black woman who’s the same age and also married with two kids? What is she doing, where is she going, and what is she reading? [It’s about] really trying to find a way to go deep with your content before you go wide.” – Michelle Ngome
“[Marketers must consider] how to avoid saying, doing, or presenting things in a way that is a real turn off or causes a disconnect [for specific audiences]. I think that can happen a lot, because you get into your own kind of organizational silos and have those blinders on of ‘this is how we’ve always done and this is who we’ve always talked to,’ but there is so much more out there.” – Erika Heald
