Many companies are becoming aware of how painfully little internal diversity they have within their walls. That is why it’s more important than ever for businesses that exemplify diversity to reflect it in their online communications.
We’ll show you five ways to signal to your customers that you value different cultures and backgrounds.
Remember that Diversity Starts Internally
If you’re going to run advertisements featuring Black or Latinx people, you should have them behind the camera, too. That means you should have people of color (POC) in your company or at least in the capacity of consultants when designing advertisements emphasizing diversity.
You will want to gain POC input so your brand’s diverse commercial efforts will be authentic and come across as such. Another benefit of having a diverse group behind the scenes is that your company could avoid pitfalls by accidentally putting out an ad that is tone-deaf or outright offensive.
Use Diverse Individuals in Advertisements
Your advertisements should have people from different cultures, ages, and backgrounds. However, it would help if you considered how your company uses diversity and inclusion.
Are you demonstrating diversity in advertisements to pander to a crowd? Are you signaling your business’s desire to recruit diverse individuals? The latter is far more acceptable than the former. Keep in mind your motivations and your advertisements’ impact on the viewer, or you may appear as just another business using diversity as a sales tool.
Acknowledge Others’ Holidays
Even if nobody on your team celebrates Kwanzaa or Hanukkah, it won’t hurt to send well-wishes to those who do.
You can send holiday greetings directly to your clients or create advertisements that show people during various celebrations to show that your company acknowledges and welcomes people from all cultures.
Show That Your Business is Taking Steps to Learn about Others
Having a diversity specialist visit your business and walk your workers through implicit bias training is not something to be ashamed of; it’s something to celebrate! When going through such an activity, make sure you post it on social media or create a blog post.
This will signal to potential recruits that your business values diversity and unique thoughts while also eschewing the notion that businesses need to hide that they are making efforts in this area.
Show How Your Business Supports Diversity and Inclusion
It would help if you considered being more transparent about your efforts to promote diversity and inclusion within your company. Celebrate hiring and enabling people from diverse backgrounds in your business, using data to show how you have more female engineers or POC now than in years past.
You can do this overtly with data on your team’s diverse composition or by simply adding blog posts on the site that recognize people moving into new positions, showing that your team has many different people working together.
Showing your business’s diversity online might sometimes feel a little ham-handed, but if you do it right, it’ll be a truthful reflection of your company’s nature.
Using the internet to show off diverse hires, advertisements, promotions, or holiday celebrations will demonstrate that your company is dedicated to working with and serving people of all backgrounds.
