How to Build a Diverse and Inclusive Marketing Team

The key to creating inclusive advertising messages that effectively promote your brand to your entire target market is having a diverse marketing department. A department that matches the diversity of your audience is. In fact, organizations that prioritize diversity in their workforce tend to be more financially successful. See what a CMO resume says and you’ll know exactly what a marketing team should show. Here are some tips to help you build a more diverse and inclusive marketing team.

Review Your Recruiting Process

The first step in building a diverse and inclusive marketing team is to ensure that your recruiting process reflects that goal. For example, you should work with your human resources department to create job postings with inclusive language that will reach and appeal to a larger, more diverse audience of job seekers. Furthermore, you should instruct recruiters to include a minimum percentage of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds per hiring pool, as well as provide you with blinded resumes. Look at some resume traits that you would want to include on your recruiting process. That way your marketing department will have a more diverse pool of job applicants.

Periodically Audit Your Marketing Team’s Composition

In addition to setting diversity hiring goals for your marketing team, you should examine the composition of your current team as well. Look for different backgrounds and life experiences that might be missing from your team. You should also analyze their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their personal qualities and characteristics. You can find both free and paid online assessments to measure those attributes. Gaining key insights about the composition of your current marketing team will help you hire new members who can bring different perspectives and new skill sets.

Go Outside Your Organization When Needed

If budgetary restrictions keep you from being able to expand and diversify your marketing team, then you need to consider outsourcing creative projects to a more diverse and inclusive content marketing agency. For instance, by working with multiple writers from diverse backgrounds, your brand’s content won’t be limited to the same perspectives. Furthermore, your marketing team will learn how to craft more inclusive messages that can be more appealing to a highly diverse audience. Therefore, avoid using the same writer to create all of your brand’s content.

Train Your Marketing Team to Become Better Listeners

Oftentimes, it can be very beneficial for people to listen more and talk less. Good listening skills are essential for your marketing team – especially when it comes to making your team more inclusive. That’s because when people know how to listen, they know how to learn from others who have different backgrounds and experiences. It will also make them better at collaboration, as well as improving their creativity. Basically, good listening skills will help your team have those tough conversations about diversity that will ultimately lead to greater inclusion. Plus, you never know where a good idea will come from, so everyone should always keep their ears open to new ideas.

Consider Inclusion in the Production and Execution Stages

The worst thing you can do is build a more diverse marketing team, but fail to make your creative projects more inclusive to your audience. Therefore, building a more inclusive marketing team doesn’t stop after the creation and collaboration stages of projects. It’s still very important during the production and execution stages as well. For example, let’s say that your marketing team is producing videos to promote your brand on social media. Your team can make those videos more inclusive by adding closed captioning to make the content more accessible to your entire audience. That means you should have someone type up written transcripts for all of the audio and video content that your team produces.

Encourage Your Marketing Team to Continue Learning

If your marketing team truly wants to embrace diversity and inclusion, then its members must never stop learning. That’s why you should encourage your team to take advantage of opportunities to learn both in and out of the workplace. As mentioned, good listening skills are important when it comes to learning. However, your team’s members must also be open-minded enough to embrace new ideas and different perspectives from those who come from different backgrounds and experiences. Those on your marketing team shouldn’t feel threatened when their traditional viewpoints are challenged. Instead, they should see it as an opportunity for both professional and personal growth.

In short, building a more diverse and inclusive marketing team starts with ensuring that your hiring practices embrace diversity. Make an effort to recruit applicants from underrepresented communities. If you’re looking for a person that can handle your team, make sure you know what to look for on their resume. A project manager’s resume is way different from another. Furthermore, you should review your marketing team’s current composition to identify the different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences that your members lack. That way you can make more informed hiring choices that align with your goal of building a more diverse marketing team. However, to truly be more inclusive, you might have to go outside your organization to find marketers with more diverse backgrounds who can appeal to more of your audience. Train your team’s members to become better listeners, as well as encourage them to never stop learning. Remember, you must make sure that each stage of a project – from conception to execution – is inclusive to reach your full audience.