How Content Marketing Must Change to Include the LGBTQ+ Community
Marketing, in all its forms, including content marketing, is primarily about showcasing your product in a way that attracts your audience. However, no matter how great your content marketing is, it can’t save a bad product. The same principle applies when you try to position your brand as an inclusive one through content marketing but don’t walk the talk. Therefore, the first thing that needs to change is not content marketing per se, but organizational attitudes and practices.
People Before Promotion
The most obvious way to make your content marketing inclusive is to use gender-neutral themes and pronouns. However, your audience can easily see through the facade of a neutral tone. If you intend to include the LGBTQ+ community in your marketing communications, there’s no better place to begin than within your organization.
Have an Inclusive Workplace
Inclusivity starts with having an inclusive workplace. While the hiring manager may ensure that hiring is inclusive, that is the start of the beginning. The LGBTQ+ community, like everyone else, expects to be themselves at work and have an accepting environment. The first step towards achieving this is eliminating bias and discrimination based on o gender-identities, ethnicity, faith, and other arbitrary criteria during recruitment. It is equally important to create an atmosphere where everybody can be themselves. Only after achieving this can a brand begin to speak about inclusivity and create narratives that truly resonate with a diverse audience. All this while, it is crucial to ensure that no one is forced to come out. Taking this a step further, a brand can collaborate with like-minded people outside the organization to bring out stories that genuinely speak to the audience.
Beyond Pride Month
Inclusivity should not be limited to Pride Month but should be practiced throughout the year. Brands must collaborate with the LGBTQ+ community year-round to bring diversity in content marketing, which includes inclusive influencer-driven content marketing. While pride marches are held during Pride Month, there can be events across the year to celebrate inclusivity, such as National Coming Out Day, Lesbian Visibility Day, and International Pronoun Day.
Campaigns can be designed to pay homage to LGBTQ+ pioneers. The courage of pioneers like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Harvey Milk, who gave voice to the community in the 1960s and 1970s, must be embraced and used to show that it takes a revolutionary spirit in each generation to drive change.
Shift from Traditional Representations
Pay attention to the details. The simplest representations in content, such as colors, tone, imagery, and pronouns, can be noticed by your audience. Everything in a marketing campaign is designed to appeal to people’s conditioning. To make a campaign inclusive, move away from traditional representations and towards 21st-century representations that include all genders, faiths, races, and sexual identities. Repurpose existing content to ensure it is inclusive and caters to a broader audience.
Creating a Safe Space
Marketing creates an online presence for the brand, leading to people exploring the brand, sharing their views on the product, and giving their input. The marketing team must ensure they create a safe space for their audience to speak and explore. Passively, the marketing team must deal with shaming, bullying, and trolling across all platforms based on a person’s identity. An internal policy can be designed to handle this. Actively, events can be organized within the organization to share stories, experiences, and opinions, while the organization’s social media can be used to voice the same.
Learning to Embrace Inclusivity
Many people may not know how to embrace inclusivity. Marketers can use their content to educate people within and outside the organization to treat inclusivity as the new normal. The LGBTQ+ community should not be a separate category of audience for the content marketing team where they design special content strategies to make them feel included. Instead, the brand should ensure that all its marketing strategies are inclusive. The spectrum of audiences should inherently include everyone.
Measuring the Impact of Inclusivity
Evaluating any campaign’s results is essential to direct the next steps. Similarly, measuring the impact of your LGBTQ+ inclusive content marketing will ensure that your way forward is based on empirical evidence. Actively seeking advice and feedback from the community will ensure that the campaign is truly inclusive. The organization must not only tap into the LGBTQ+ audience but also positively contribute to the community.
LGBTQ+ inclusive content marketing is not just about changing the way you market but about changing the core values and practices of your organization. By fostering an inclusive workplace, moving beyond token gestures during Pride Month, shifting from traditional representations, creating a safe space for dialogue, and continuously measuring the impact of your efforts, you can ensure that your content marketing strategies are genuinely inclusive. Embrace the diversity of your audience and make inclusivity an integral part of your brand’s identity.
