Marketing Tips For A Diverse Audience: “Why Treat Them Like A Minority?”

Everyone who’s anyone will know the Ad:Tech conference is in town in Sydney, and journos and industry players alike have been dashing between sessions and keynote speeches.

But why wade through the bucketloads of information when you could nab your top marketing tips courtesy of B&T?

When it comes to marketing to consumers, it’s no surprise that the 45-year-old white male is no longer the only person you’re marketing to, and the diversity marketing panel made that abundantly clear.

“91 per cent of women don’t think marketers or advertisers understand them,” director of BecBrideson.com, Bec Brideson, said.

“Marketing and advertising strategies were invented in the 1950s and it was a post-war era, where women were housewives and men went to work.

“And the men came up with marketing, and it was a very masculine construct and we’ve all inherited this.”

So what can you do about it?

“Men are more focused on headline and the facts, women more drawn to people, community, detail, how does it make us feel?” Brideson explained.

“I want everyone to go and look at their female opportunity and put a taskforce together.

“Brands need to say are we speaking to males or females? Because females are very different to men – not better or worse – just different. It starts with gender.”

Looking to the LGBT market, Pink Media Group’s managing director Ben Mulcahy said it’s unrealistic to ignore a market that is so much ingrained in our society.

“There’s a $20 billion earning in this market,” he said. “And they are early adopters of new technology.”

Mulcahy used the recent Mardi Gras sponsorship of Airbnb as an example of this, saying the reason the home-sharing business is so in tune with the audience is because they “knew the LGBT market was very quick on the uptake with Airbnb”.

“What holds a lot of clients back is laziness. It’s easy to put an ad on TV and say ok job done. There’s a lot more work involved to tailor a message to a range of audiences but you get a better result.”

“Go that extra mile and adapt your marketing campaign to talk to different audiences.”

But it’s not just the younger consumers that marketers are missing. Founder and CEO of WYZA, a platform for over 50s, Michael Farley, said marketers aren’t listening to this age bracket.

“There’s 7.9 million Australians over 50,” he said. “The spend of this group of $200 billion on household products annually.”

“It’s a huge market and marketers are not addressing it. We’ve got to understand our audiences better.”

“Talking to our age demographic of 50 plus, our survey shows that age now is just a number and they didn’t like to be talked to as if they were old, or a senior or a pensioner,” Farley added.

“There’s this realisation that when you get to 50 you’ve still got half of your adult life to go. It’s all about speaking to them in a way they want to be spoken to. Why treat them like a minority?”

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