Attracting a strong customer base is essential for the success of a business. Garnering this audience begins by developing a target audience — an audience whose niche aligns with the products, services, messaging, and content produced by your company. But what happens when your target audience becomes too narrow or they begin to fall out of the marketplace?
In the case of Old Spice, the company was not as popular as it is now. Going back to the 2000s, the company was struggling, as their demographic had aged dramatically and its products weren’t selling like they once were. Was the branding too old? Yes. The company needed a revitalization — one that would keep its trusted customers but would be able to capture a younger audience of men.
The rest is history as we know it: The Old Spice Swagger campaign was launched, bringing in new scents, a new brand design, and a whole new marketing approach — including the meme-worthy The Man Your Man Could Smell Like video.
By shifting its approach, Old Spice was able to capture a new, younger audience, all by creating a campaign focused on humor and design which spoke to both men and the women in their lives. Why is this important for your brand? Not only is it important to capture audiences of varying ages, ensuring your brand has longevity, but it’s essential that you speak to different demographics. You want a brand that is inclusive — one that recognizes the needs of various people and serves the exact purpose they are looking for.
Diversify your audience.
How do you begin diversifying your audience and why is it important? Social activism has become more important in recent years, with many people beginning to use social media apps as a way of promoting historically disenfranchised and repressed voices. Brands have started becoming involved in the process, not only to stay up-to-date with the times but to be representative of the world around them.
We’ve seen companies like Patagonia unapologetically supporting environmental rights and many others openly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. In other cases, businesses are working to promote internal diversity or update messaging to create a more inclusive atmosphere — one free of racial, sexist, ableist, and bigoted implicit biases.
This diversity can be seen as a form of modernization: People are becoming increasingly aware of the systemic issues inherent to our world and are actively working to dismantle them, piece by piece. Your company can become part of the solution by working to diversify your audience.
How does this relate to Old Spice’s campaign? There’s a similarity between the two. While the decision Old Spice made back in 2008 wasn’t a political one, it is an example that brands can effectively shift their perspective without driving people away; they can actually garner more public support, increasing their audience by widening their view and speaking to more people. For your company, this approach to diversity can be included in your language, representation on your board of shareholders, workplace demographics, marketing outreach, choice of affiliate marketers, and more. It’s about creating a space that is welcoming to anyone, where someone who is a minority will not feel tokenized, belittled, or pandered to.
So, how can you implement this? Part of this involves broadening your core values and reshaping your company from the inside out—evolving your ethos to make your marketing more inclusive. But what are some ways it can be done from a content perspective?
Diversify your content to reach more people.
Beyond changing the internal perspective of your brand to reach a more diverse audience, you can also consider crafting different types of content to achieve similar goals. What will this look like? Simply put, it’s creating a more diverse content strategy, one implemented through various avenues and across different platforms to promote engagement from a larger, more diverse audience.
This works by producing a larger swath of content that can feel more inclusive: Rather than sticking to a single medium, you can work to broaden your outreach to bring in people from various backgrounds, differing interests, and more. Here are just a few avenues you can consider exploring, whether you’re an affiliate marketing professional, a social media manager, or a web content specialist:
Get back to old-school blogging.
It might feel like a thing of the past, especially as online usage causes attention spans to shorten, but long-form blogs are a great way to boost your business. Whether you’re talking about social issues or something related to a brand topic, you can openly discuss issues that are relevant to the audience you are trying to gain favor with.
Start an internal podcast.
Podcasting has become the hip thing to do in recent years, and it appears as if it isn’t going to change. For affiliate influencers and small media companies, podcasting has become an easy way to diversify the content they produce. In many cases, it’s a marketing tool within itself.
The benefit to podcasting, and the diversity it allows, is that it’s made for people on the go. People will often stumble onto podcasts either by word of mouth or while looking for a new one to listen to during their daily commutes to work. By offering an alternative form of content, you can lasso new customers who otherwise might not have heard of your brand, thus spreading your reach to a greater audience. But if you’re going to start a podcast, you need to make sure it’s good!
Research the community you want to include.
Diversifying your audience will require research. This doesn’t mean studying them like an anthropologist; it means taking the time to understand who your target audience is, what they need, and what they want to hear. This is the most important aspect of diversifying your audience, as you need to understand the reasons why they would want to become a part of your community. Once you’ve learned that, you can begin working to gain their trust.
Support a Diverse Audience
Diversifying your audience is an essential, easy way to spread awareness for your brand, both what you’re doing and what you stand for. While there are many ways you can achieve this, such as spreading your digital marketing bandwidth or simply focusing on internal diversity initiatives, you should be working toward modernizing your company. Supporting the communities around us is something we need now more than ever.
