Category: Marketing

Marketing campaigns have often depicted the nuclear family of a mother, father, and children during Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. However, as society becomes more diverse, it’s essential for brands to recognize that not all families fit this mold. Diversity, equity, and inclusion in marketing campaigns are crucial to ensure that all families are represented and celebrated during these holidays. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day celebrate the significant roles that parents play in their children’s lives.

Not all families have traditional mother and father figures. Some have two mothers, two fathers, single parents, grandparents, or other caregivers. Brands should celebrate diverse family structures and avoid stereotypes that exclude certain groups. Inclusion in marketing campaigns is crucial. Companies can create diversity marketing campaigns for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Reflecting Changing Demographics

Same-sex couples with children are on the rise, as well as single parents and grandparents raising children. Brands that do not recognize these changes may lose potential customers. This is according to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau, emphasizing the importance of reflecting diversity in marketing campaigns.

Building Brand Loyalty

Brands must align with consumers’ values and beliefs. Inclusive marketing campaigns that celebrate diverse family structures build loyalty. Customers who feel seen and understood become long-term brand advocates and repeat buyers.

Fostering Inclusivity

Diversity marketing campaigns promote inclusivity and understanding of different family structures. They reflect modern family diversity and can have a positive impact on society by fostering acceptance and a more inclusive culture.

Recognizing and Celebrating Diversity

Brands must avoid promoting stereotypes and celebrate the unique qualities of all parents, regardless of gender or family structure. This can be achieved by featuring diverse families in marketing materials and messaging.

Using Gender-Neutral Language

To make marketing campaigns inclusive of all family structures, using gender-neutral language is important. Brands shouldn’t assume that all families have a mother and father figure. “Parent” or “caregiver” are good examples of gender-neutral language.

Collaborating with Diverse Influencers

Including influencers from various family backgrounds, such as single parents, same-sex parents, or grandparents, can make marketing campaigns more inclusive. This can also boost credibility and authenticity with consumers.

Highlighting Shared Experiences

Families have varying structures but encounter similar experiences and challenges. Brands can capitalize on these shared experiences in marketing campaigns to foster a sense of unity and inclusivity.

Asking for Feedback

Brands seek feedback from customers and employees for inclusive marketing campaigns. This identifies blind spots and ensures respect for all customers. Inclusivity ensures representation of diverse family structures.

Diversity in the Workplace

Diversity and inclusion in the workplace are essential for authentic marketing. Authentic campaigns rely on having a diverse range of voices to create meaningful connections with customers. Brands must have fair practices and a diverse employee base if they want their campaigns to reflect the values of the brand and the target audiences.

Businesses must update their marketing approach to reach consumers in the digital age. A company must know each generation’s values and preferences to create tailored approaches for each. Additionally, it’s important to recognize the different types of content and tactics that yield the best results on various social media platforms. This way, businesses can reach their target market and target demographic better.

Gen Z

Gen Z (1997-2012) are the world’s first digital native generation, and rely heavily on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. To engage Gen Z, companies must create authentic content which reflects their values and commitment to social causes. Influencer marketing is a key strategy as Gen Z puts more trust in influencers than traditional advertising. Brands can tap into this by sponsoring sponsored content or influencer-led campaigns.

Millennials

Millennials (born 1981-1996) are the largest generation in the workforce and have considerable buying power. Popular social media platforms amongst them are Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Millennials seek personalized experiences from brands, so companies should engage with them via comments, messages and customer service.  Using social media to highlight a company’s culture, values and employees will also resonate. Finally, a company can make cause-related marketing appeals which align to their beliefs.

Generation X

Generation X (1965-1980) were the first to embrace the personal computer and the internet. On social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, they prefer practical, informative content. Companies should create material to educate Gen X on product features while highlighting its benefits. Discounts and promotions are also of interest – utilizing social media ads and email marketing campaigns to target them.

Baby Boomers

Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) embraced televisions and have handled digital technology well, using social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. “Boomers” value product quality and customer service. To engage with this generation, companies should create professional, informative content that stresses the quality of the products and services. Content should be emotionally-driven and target Baby Boomer values like nostalgia or family-oriented messaging.

According to research, Reels on Instagram generate over 40% more engagement with users compared to regular Instagram videos and other types of in-feed posts. That means if a company is looking to promote itself on the platform, it’s time to start investing in Reels. Here, we explore a few considerations when planning your Instagram Reels marketing.

Scheduling

Like all content, factoring in the timing of the post is a crucial element of a company’s content strategy. Current best practices indicate that, in general, Monday through Thursday morning to noon, Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings are good times to post. However, these timings tend to be different for different audiences, which means companies should keep a keen eye on their own data to figure out when their followers are most active on the platform, scheduling the content to be distributed during those times.

Consistency and efficiency in content creation

Content ideas for Instagram Reels can happen at any time of day, however, that doesn’t mean the content needs to be created and published immediately. In fact, a more effective practice is to map out all their creative content ideas, and then take a day to create all their videos, essentially creating the content in batches, and scheduling it out to be published for the next few days or weeks. This is a great way for companies to be efficient in their content creation, while consistent with distribution. 

Aligning Reels content with business plans

As companies map out their sales strategy, product launches, key events and brand moments, they should align their Reels schedule to further support the broader business objectives, and create Reels in advance whenever possible. By creating content ahead of time and scheduling it to be published at a later date companies ensure consistency of content posting, and create efficiencies within their creative teams by filming content in batches throughout the year, rather than ad hoc. Consistency is important on most social media platforms as the algorithm favors accounts with consistent strong reach and engagement, meaning the more consistent your posting strategy is, the more the platform will continue to promote your content organically.

There are a few essential tips that all B2B businesses should know before investing in influencer marketing campaigns to target their audiences.

Audience

Companies won’t be able to influence their audiences without knowing who comprises their target audiences in the first place. That means before companies can begin investing in influencer marketing campaigns, they have to conduct audience research and create buyer personas for each segment of the audience they’re looking to target. A buyer persona is a portrayal of the company’s ideal customer that’s based on research and data on the potential customers. To get a better understanding of who the target audience is, the company needs to know how it could characterize its audience, whether there are any websites or platforms that the audience frequently uses, their demographic and psychographic information, their needs and pain points, the amount of research they do before making a purchase, and more. Once the company has gathered all this information, it’s time to define each buyer persona the company is looking to target with an influencer marketing campaign.

Expertise

Most companies, before they even decide to invest in various types of marketing efforts, including influencer marketing campaigns, tend to have a thorough understanding of their industry and market. They can further build on that knowledge and their expertise by trying to engage with other members of their industry such as through leaders to create a more valuable resource of information for potential consumers that will help those consumers make purchasing decisions faster and easier. By presenting potential consumers with a big resource filled with valuable information that demonstrates the company’s knowledge and expertise, businesses can make the buying journey a lot faster for their audiences.

Performance

Finally, as with any other sort of promotional effort that a company conducts, it’s important to keep track of the performance of the influencer marketing efforts and overall campaign to understand whether they are all working and achieving the expected results. The best way for companies to do that is by setting measurable benchmarks that the company can keep track of before the campaign even starts, to get proof of the performance of the campaign. This can be in the form of social shares, click-through rates, or any other valuable metrics that can help the business track its success. There are plenty of other non-tangible metrics that companies can keep track of for this goal, such as the number of views or media coverage and even public sentiment. In fact, it’s important for companies to keep track of what others are saying about them throughout promotional efforts on both social media and traditional media platforms to figure out whether the company is doing the right thing and adjust accordingly to impact the results of the campaign in a positive way. Finally, the company can use all of this information to improve and adjust all influencer marketing campaigns and overall promotional efforts.

Companies in the B2B industry are missing out on a lot of revenue and resources if they haven’t started investing in influencer marketing yet because most of the consumers in the market tend to look for solution recommendations and suggestions from other people in the industry that know more than they do. If a company decides to promote itself and its solutions on its own, a lot of these consumers are going to overlook the business and its solutions because it’s not being recommended by anyone else, or at the very least, the company will have to invest a lot more efforts in persuading these potential consumers to make a purchase. However, when a company in the B2B industry starts to invest in influencer marketing, it can improve its reach and credibility, which automatically generates more leads and consumers.

Influencer

According to many studies thus far, consumers these days tend to put a lot of trust and faith into earned media, which includes recommendations and suggestions for solutions from people they know or are familiar with, compared to any other marketing effort a company can pursue. That means companies will have to choose an influencer that the target audience is already familiar with and even trusts that person. There are many different types of influencers that companies can decide to work with, from influencers that are popular in specific and niche markets, to celebrities that have millions of followers. However, the best choices for a company in the B2B industry would be people that already operate within the market or the industry as the business, customers or employees that use the solutions from the company already, industry thought leaders or bloggers, as well as anyone that works in a field that complements the company’s own.

Communication

Most of the time, when companies invest in influencer marketing, especially companies in the B2B industry, they tend to want to use the influencers they’re working with as something of a company representative in terms of their performance. However, that’s not the main or the best way that companies should be pursuing working with influencers on marketing campaigns. The goal of working with an influencer on a marketing campaign is for the company to gain more credibility with the target audience with the influencer working as a third-party validator of the business and its solutions. That means companies shouldn’t be persuading any of the influencers they’re working with to stick to a specific script or only state previously approved comments to their followers. Instead of doing that, companies should communicate with the influencer about the company’s goals and how the influencer can help the business achieve those goals. Then, the influencer might have their own ideas on the best way to engage the target audience and get them interested in the business and its solutions, because, at the end of the day, they’re also a specialist in a particular field.

Put simply, sales pages are quite similar to landing pages, and many companies consider them to be a subset of landing pages. However, on most types of landing pages, the main goal that companies have is to generate more leads, while on sales pages, it’s to get potential consumers to make a purchasing decision. With a landing page, companies make the first impression on potential consumers and start developing a trusting relationship while educating those customers, and the company should be directing those same customers when they’re ready to make a purchase to the sales page. Companies that want to create more effective sales pages need to know all of the different elements that go into creating such a page.

Title

The first step that companies need to take when creating an effective sales page is to create a title that’s going to be catchy. That means making the titles longer compared to regular landing page titles to hook the readers in and keep their attention. To do that, the title should be a short statement or a single sentence that consumers will read and immediately understand what they can get from the offer that the company is presenting them with. The best way to create this type of title is for companies to figure out the biggest change or benefit that consumers can get when they purchase the solution and put the answer as the title.

Benefits

Most companies tend to focus on the features that their solutions have on a sales page, instead of focusing on the benefits that the consumers can get. However, it’s important for companies to distinguish between the fact that their solutions provide their customers with features, and the reason why consumers make purchases is because of the benefits that they will get from those features. All this means that the benefits are going to be a lot more interesting to consumers compared to the features, which is why companies should be focusing on them instead of the features. Then, if a company wants to include the features as well, it should turn each one of the features of the solution into an advantage for the consumers.

Reviews

One of the best ways for companies to get more people to convert with a sales page is by including social proof on those sales pages, in the form of customer reviews and testimonials.  In fact, according to research, nearly 90% of consumers tend to trust other people’s reviews online in a similar way that they trust the recommendations that they get from friends and family. Showing potential consumers that other people have trusted the business, made a purchase, and were satisfied with their purchases is simply showing that the company can be trusted, while also showcasing to the potential consumers all of the benefits and advantages that they can get from the perspective of another customer.