Diversity is vital in every aspect of a business’s operations, but especially with influencer marketing. Using an influencer marketing agency can guarantee your brand uses a diverse range of influencers to ensure you are exposed to everyone your brand may appeal to. Diversity refers to an influencer’s background, ethnicity, skin colour, gender, body type, socioeconomic status, physical abilities, religious beliefs, and more. It’s everything that makes a person uniquely them.
When a brand uses a diverse range of influencers within their influencer marketing campaign, they reach a broader audience, cut through the social static, and create more credibility and authenticity. This results in more brand awareness, brand loyalty, and, ultimately, a higher conversion rate and ROI. But why does it work?
Diversity increases reliability
We all know influencer marketing works. It allows brands to harness the reliability and authenticity of influencers that convey a brand’s message in a way that resonates with their followers. When a brand goes one step further and intentionally creates a diverse influencer marketing campaign, they strengthen their strategy and introduce their messaging to a larger, more defined audience.
The Gen Z audience is highly responsive to diverse influencer marketing campaigns, and actively reject brands that fail to include people from all walks of life.
Diversity reaches a wider audience
When influencer marketing campaigns show a diverse casting, the campaign and brand appeal to more diverse followings. The more people who are represented within a campaign, the more potential audience members it will attract that feel associated with the brand. The more associated an audience feels, the more likely they are to try the products or research the brand promoted by influencers.
Without diversity, brands are only targeting a fraction of their potential customers. When incorporating diversity into their operations, brands can finely tune in to segmented demographics and understand how they can more acutely communicate with these clearly defined audiences.
How to implement diversity in your influencer marketing
Diversity for diversity’s sake doesn’t work with consumers. It’s a poorly considered strategy that comes across as tone-deaf. To authentically implement diversity into your influencer marketing efforts, you need to recognise individual attitudes and practices. Use market research and social listening to understand the various, unique qualities that create your target demographics.
With this insight, you will be able to implement a diversity-focused influencer marketing strategy.
Choosing the right influencer partnerships is important in any influencer activity, but especially when considering diversity. This is where influencer marketing agencies thrive—they can source, vet and brief influencers on your behalf. These companies offer a variety of influencer marketing services.
Before signing contracts with your prospective influencers, you need to know how they will speak about your brand and products or services. While diversity is important, influencers still need to have the values and tone of voice that resonate with their brand and audience.
When working with influencers, prioritise authenticity and let them speak for themselves. While you can provide topic guidelines, let influencers speak in their own ways. This means their words will resonate with their audience as it’s what they have become used to.
Be flexible on the content influencers create. One of the most successful strategies in influencer marketing is guiding content rather than spoon-feeding influencers’ brand slogans and boring corporate messaging. While certain campaigns will require more structure and input from brands, influencers should be allowed to create their own content, in their own style.
Use influencers to prove to audiences that you value and embrace consumer differences. Show consumers, you care about underrepresentation and prove that you want to overcome this industry fallback. Just because an influencer has a major presence and a lot of followers doesn’t mean their voice is right for your specific brand or cause.