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At nearly 4 billion users, more than half of the world’s population now uses social media to connect with not just each other but also with brands. Needless to say, your social media audience is an extremely diverse bunch of individuals with varied interests, beliefs, and abilities.

To cater to them all in the best way possible, you’ll need to consider inclusiveness in your social media marketing efforts. People expect the companies they do business with to take a stand – in fact, 70% of U.S. consumers say it’s important for brands to take a stand on social and political issues.

But inclusiveness is not just about taking a stand on global issues. It covers a diverse range of subjects, from racial justice and gender equality to content accessibility and hate speech.

In this post, let’s learn more about these inclusivity issues and how you can address them in your social media marketing strategy.

Go Beyond a Corporate Statement With a Social Strategy

A corporate statement tells your audience about your beliefs, but a long-term social media strategy shows them how your brand is taking real action.

It goes beyond announcing a charitable donation and proves that diversity, equality, and inclusion is a long-term commitment for your brand. Create a social media strategy to highlight your employees’ actions and your company’s ongoing work towards more inclusivity.

For instance, if one of your initiatives focuses on internal education and dialogue about racial justice, you can share the activities that your team is doing with your followers. If your team is doing volunteering, highlight their stories and experiences in serving the community.

To go beyond a mere corporate statement about inclusiveness and demonstrate real action, here are a few things you can have in your social media marketing strategy:

• Research how issues like racism and gender inequality impact your industry and create and promote content or resources like books, podcasts, thought leadership, etc. on how to tackle these issues.
• Get your company involved in a movement and frequent volunteering or fundraising activities, and invite your followers to do the same.
• Learn about your company’s past and existing efforts, and build a plan to convey your employees’ stories and actions on social media..

Use Gender-Neutral Language, Emojis, and Imagery

When addressing a general audience on social media, use inclusive pronouns like “they/them” rather than “he/she” and avoid language biased to one gender, such as “mankind” or “guys”.

Also, when responding to comments or posts, do not assume the person’s gender, but instead, address them by their name or username. UN Women has a comprehensive set of guidelines on writing in a gender-inclusive way.

This extends to the emojis you use, too. Avoid gendered emojis if possible and opt for the default yellow emojis when addressing a diverse audience.

Simply put, using non-gendered and default yellow emojis when engaging with a universal audience, or multiple colors of emojis when portraying a broad audience can greatly contribute to creating a strong sense of inclusiveness in your social media presence.

Furthermore, if you use stock visuals in your social media, understand that stock images are often littered with gender and racial biases, and there aren’t many options when trying to source inclusive images.

Use platforms like nappy and Canva’s Natural Women Collection the next time you need a stock image that truly embraces diversity and inclusivity. And when designing any new marketing material (flyers, banners, icons, etc.), make sure to let your graphic designer know that you’re committed to representing diversity and inclusion.

Create Content That’s Accessible to Everyone

While on the subject of designing graphics for your social media marketing, inclusiveness is also about ensuring all your content is accessible to everyone, regardless of their disabilities.

You might already know that having an accessible website is mandatory today, with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) extending to digital properties too. Essentially, an accessible website is one that accommodates all visitors on all devices irrespective of the physical or mental ability of the user.

With an estimated 26.9 million adult Americans claiming they either have trouble seeing or are unable to see at all, if you don’t prioritize accessibility, it’s likely that you’re unwittingly shunning a considerable chunk of your audience from engaging with your content on both your website and social media. Not to mention accessibility is also important to avoid ADA lawsuits, which are on the rise.

To make your website accessible, you can take many steps yourself, such as ensuring logical content hierarchy (with subheadings), adding alt text for all images, adding descriptive labels to form elements, and making your site keyboard-friendly. Making all of these adjustments basically mean to adhere to the ADA compliance guidelines.

For social media, in particular, make sure to create graphics with sufficient color contrast so that the visually impaired can also consume the content. When posting videos, always include closed captions or subtitles.

Also, when posting on Instagram, go to Advanced Settings and then Write Alt Text to add a descriptive alt text for your posts. This way, you make your content more accessible to the visually impaired audience who’re using screen readers.

Remove Offensive Comments

If you haven’t already, sooner or later you’ll receive comments on your posts that are misogynistic, racist, homophobic, or hateful in nature. Such comments that are offensive to any group of people should have no place on your brand’s social media presence.

By not engaging and instantly removing these types of comments, your followers can appreciate your company’s intolerance and firm stance against hate speech. If you are not able to remove comments on some social review platforms, develop a strategy to tactfully respond to such spiteful comments, and demonstrate your brand’s values.

Final Words

Inclusivity isn’t just an HR initiative that’s limited to your workplace — it should be built into your company culture that extends to all your brand messaging and marketing as well.

Sure, it’ll take some time and effort, but working with your marketing team to create an inclusive social media presence goes a long way in increasing your content’s value, reach, engagement, and overall brand image.

Let me be straightforward – there’s no magic list of lead generation strategies that will make you a fortune in 2021. When it comes to generating leads, we don’t get a magic button to push. Still, there are certain things that you can try and do, many of them regularly, that will boost your odds at bigger success by the end of this year.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation comprises marketing activities that result in collecting information and using it to build a list of potential clients. This data can be collected both online and offline. Offline channels include cold calling, direct mail, hosting events, print ads, etc. Online channels include websites, blogs, ads, social media posts, and SEO.

What does this mean for you?

It means that this year, you should take action as soon as possible. Roll up your sleeves, collect the necessary data, check out some presentation templates, send out emails, and get out there to make your brand more recognizable than ever. With all this being said, here are the 5 most promising tips to follow this year.

5 Tips for Lead Generation in 2021

Have you been looking to expand your brand and make it bigger? Here are some excellent ideas for generating leads these days.

1. Knowledge Base Software

Knowledge base software is an essential lead generation tool these days. This applies to a database where you store a wide range of information. Such bases are located online and in most cases, based on clouds.

How can you use such software?

Essentially, this software is the brain of your company. You can use it for both internal purposes and communication or external support and communication. By using free knowledge base software, marketers can manage, store, and organize the documentation and information they need to take any further steps into branding their business.

You’re probably a very busy person and as such, you need to find a single solution to most of your problems. Rather than having all your data spread across systems and platforms, apps, email chains, tools, widgets, and notes – you should have them placed in a central, easy-to-access place.

When you have it all organized and gathered, you can create better planned and carefully executed lead generation strategies.

2. Email marketing

For many years now, email marketing has been one of the top priorities of business managers and owners when it comes to lead generation. Research shows that over 80% of marketers already use it in their strategies. Seeing how email marketing stands right beside content in terms of affordability, this is one of people’s favorite methods to find more leads.

According to BtoB Magazine, 59% of marketers consider email to be their best channel for generating revenue. Chances are, you are already aware of this and have built your email marketing to some point. This year, make it your priority. Create quality content to send to potential customers and use cold email outreach to generate new leads. If you do it properly i.e. with quality content and by targeting the right people, it will surely get some leads flowing in.

3. Automation

On average, 51% of companies use at least one automation feature or platform. This comes as no surprise – people are busier today than ever. Lead generation used to be much simpler when you needed to offer a downloadable product or white paper, create an email funnel and simply pass it off. Now that the competition is much bigger, this takes long hours that many marketers don’t have at their disposal.

In 2020, most companies opted for automation in at least one project in terms of marketing. Some automated the tasks for employees, others used this to schedule their online presence, etc. As long as you use accurate and carefully collected data to prep the automation process, this can save you a lot of time and yield amazing results.

If you don’t know where to start when testing for your brand and lead generation, use this usability testing guide. It will help you find out which parts of your business can be automated and how this can be achieved.

Some of the most prominent ways that automation is driving lead generation efforts in the past few months include chatbots, tool integrations, and of course, nurturing leads. Estimates have already shown that by the end of this year, the automation industry will be worth over $83 billion. This number sure gives you a push in that right direction, doesn’t it?

4. Content Marketing

Content has always been the strongest tool in marketing. This applies to lead marketing, too. This year, when you think content, think whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and videos. But most importantly, focus on quality content.

Creating quality content demands a magnitude of resources, experience, and planning. You need it for your email funnel, website, blog, social media posts, and even the conversations you have with potential customers. They don’t say that ‘’content is king’’ without a reason.

High-quality infographics, whitepapers, videos, eBooks, webinars, and podcasts have been in high demand these past few years. This year, you should make it your brand’s priority to create only original, quality, and planned content across different platforms and for different purposes.

One of the most promising content types is a video right now. Experts have predicted that by next year, 82% of the internet traffic will be dedicated to some kind of video content. This shows that video marketing:

• increases engagement
• provides more accurate, visual, and detailed demonstrations
• is an amazing tool for spreading word-of-mouth

How does this apply in the lead generation world, you might ask?

In this sense, videos can be used to get your brand’s name recognized, make it memorable, send more personalized follow-ups, and reach a wider audience.

5. Social Media Communities

Social media doesn’t always have a good reputation when it comes to lead generation. In reality, this can go both ways. But, if you know where to look, social media can turn out to be the best place to find new potential customers.

In addition to social media advertising, try tapping into online communities and social media forums on different platforms. Find out where your target audience hangs out. Some research on your current audience will help you narrow down a buyer persona, information that you can use to find the right groups and reach out to them.

When you find them, how can you use them to generate leads?

First, make sure that the group allows for promotional content. Hunt down the groups that are relevant to your brand and mention the problems you aim to and can solve. Second, check the group’s post. Go through their history and decide whether or not your target audience hangs out there.

Once you find those groups, get subscribed and slowly build yourself a name in the group. Answer people’s questions to establish yourself and your brand as experts in the field. Provide people with solutions and ask them questions that could help you improve your strategies. Reply to their comments and messages. This is how you will generate new leads.

Final Thoughts

Trends like video, automation, and knowledge base software can easily become a win for landing new customers, sales, and leads. Even though these tips aren’t written in stone, they have proven to be very effective in the past couple of months. Research shows that their effects will only grow, which makes it undeniable that you need to use these tactics in your lead generation strategy.