Creating inclusive content does not mean making an announcement or statement or taking a stand on a trending hot topic. All it requires you to do is think differently. Businesses that recognize what they don’t know and use more purposeful words in their content successfully develop an inclusive content strategy. The extra effort they put in pays off.
In this post, we will discuss the importance of inclusive content for your sales growth and give a few tips to build inclusive content for business. But first, we need to explain what precisely inclusive content is.
What does Inclusive Content Mean?
In simple terms, inclusive content resonates with the maximum number of people. It serves the vast majority of the people who fit into your buyer persona criteria. It reflects diverse thinking patterns and buying habits and elevates diverse role models for the public. The content reduces cultural bias and leads to positive social change through respective and thoughtful words.
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The purpose of creating inclusive content is to attract and retain an audience. Businesses that create inclusive content can ultimately drive their audience to take profitable actions. The more inclusive you make your content, the more you can grow your audience and generate leads. The bigger the audience for your ad campaigns, the more trusted your brand will become.
Brands that express diversity in their advertisements are perceived as more trustworthy. Their messages are taken more seriously because their ads appear more authentic. Inclusive content not only entices people to view more of your ads and drives their purchase intent that helps you grow your sales.
Content marketing is a major source of growing the audience and driving traffic to a website. If content marketing is done with inclusivity in mind, it will boost the mechanism and enable you to achieve your goals faster.
Most marketers are humble enough to realize that they don’t know everything. Hence they are not sure how to create inclusive content. But savvy marketers are those who do not give up trying. They begin with understanding that everyone has their own implicit biases. The key is to eliminate such biases to build inclusive content for business. Implicit bias includes any stereotypes or attitudes that influence how we perceive a topic, a brand, an aspect, or a decision. The more you recognize your own implicit biases, the more you’ll be able to take the necessary steps to overcome the impact they have on your content creation. If you cannot do that, it is better to outsource content creation to someone who can create inclusive content.
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Why Inclusive Content Matters?
Inclusive content can have a significant impact on your content strategy. It can even become the cause that either breaks or makes the deal. Following are a few concrete reasons why inclusive content matters.
1. It Builds a Positive Brand Image
Content that is not biased helps you build a reputation that your brand and business views everyone as equals. It eliminates any perceived bias from your marketing campaigns and gives a welcoming feeling to anyone who wants to engage with your brand.
2. It Allows You to Run Extensive Campaigns
If you create inclusive content, you have elements in it that make a diverse range of people happy. You can show your ads to people from different backgrounds and values without worrying that you will offend anyone. Your content has positivity in it to attract diverse groups of people. Thus you do not always have to restrict yourself to running very targeted ad campaigns.
3. It Does Not Get Outdated
Inclusive content is always written positively. When you create content that has a very positive and inspiring attitude towards life, it pretty much never gets outdated. This means you can recycle and repurpose the content to use it again and again for different kinds of ads.
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4. It Includes an Element of Entertainment
Since inclusive content does not offend anyone, people who are not interested in your products or services might also end up reading or watching it. This helps you grow your audience that can potentially start buying from your brand in the future. In other words, it allows you to do effective content promotion.
How to Create Inclusive Content?
Here are some ways to adapt to build inclusive content for business.
1. Understand Your Audience Better
The descriptions and personas of inclusive content creators tackle multiple characteristics. This means they can understand their audience better. If you want to create inclusive content, you also need to first get into the minds of your potential customers. Try to connect with them on a personal basis. This means conducting one-to-one interviews and focus groups and sending personalized emails to get responses. The input you get from such strategies is invaluable.
Another way of understanding your audience better is to conduct inclusive keyword research. You never know what opportunities you may find by finding out what your audience has searched for.
2. Don’t Make Assumptions
It is always better to ask people for their preferences instead of making assumptions. People who believe in too many stereotypes are often biased in the type of content they create. To create inclusive content, you need to think in an unbiased manner. This means you should not make assumptions about the preferences and opinions of people unless you ask them and confirm with them.
Relevancy also matters in inclusive content. For example, if your audience’s race, orientation, gender, ethnicity or disability is not relevant to the purpose you are creating content for, there is no need to mention these. You should only add those demographics in describing your audience that adds value to your content.
3. Think About Representation
Creating inclusive content means ensuring your content incorporates a diverse range of people from your community. For example, if you are creating content about the tech industry, your source of gathering data might be dominated by men. Instead of approaching subject matter experts, you can expand your database source by finding women who can contribute to the content with their insights. This will help you represent your content more inclusively.
4. Choose Your Words Deliberately
When you build inclusive content, you need to be very deliberate in your choice of words. You cannot just say that you create inclusive content. You have to show that through the words that you use in the content. You cannot claim that your ads are unbiased if your slogans and taglines clearly indicate stereotypes and discrimination.
Certain words signal openness, such as ‘trust’, ‘no limits’, ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘free’. The more you use these in your content, the more welcoming and inclusive your content would sound.
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5. Let Your Images Speak
Inclusivity in content should also reflect the kind of imagery you use. Photos and graphics also speak out to the audience. If you create imagery that reflects discrimination or bias, it is unlikely to attract a diverse crowd. Make sure all elements of your content structure are inclusive.
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Now that you know why inclusive content matters and how to create it, you can make sure that your marketing campaigns reflect inclusivity and openness to attract large-sized audiences.
One glitch many businesses face in creating and maintaining good quality, inclusie content is that once their website is built, they cannot edit or update it on their own. Let’s say you get a web developer to build a website for your business. Once they finish the job, they are gone.
After a while, you spot some mistakes in your website content. A few statements or phrases that you wrote on your landing page, for instance, sound a bit biased. You want to change those words before the audience perceives your brand as non-inclusive or biased. But you’re worried now you’ll have to pay another hefty amount to your developer just to get a few words changed on your web page.
A better way out of this situation is to create your website on your own on a user-friendly website building platform. These days you do not need to be a coding expert to create a website. If you register for a free account on Strikingly, you can easily build a complete website on your own to represent your business without having to write a single word of code. You can then add inclusive content to it and change it if you want, any time you like.
You wouldn’t even need to hire a web designer to create the layouts. We provide you with easy-to-use website templates to choose from. They serve as ready-made web design options for you.
With the drag-and-drop interface of the Strikingly editor, you can have a complete website up and running and showcasing your products and services in just a couple of hours. If you face any technical issues in the process, you can contact our customer support staff at any time through our live chat feature.
