How can you make your integrated media strategy more inclusive and accessible?

1 Understand your audience

The first step to creating an inclusive and accessible integrated media strategy is to understand your audience. You need to research their demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and pain points, as well as their media consumption habits and preferences. You can use tools like surveys, interviews, analytics, and social listening to gather this information. This will help you segment your audience and create buyer personas that represent their characteristics and needs.

2 Choose the right media mix

The next step is to choose the right media mix for your integrated media strategy. This means selecting the most appropriate and effective media channels and platforms for your goals, message, and audience. You should consider the strengths and weaknesses of each media type, such as paid, earned, owned, and shared media, as well as the specific features and formats of each media channel and platform, such as web, social, email, video, audio, etc. You should also consider the accessibility and inclusivity of each media option, such as how easy it is to use, how well it supports different languages, cultures, and abilities, and how responsive it is to different devices and browsers.

3 Create inclusive and accessible content

The third step is to create inclusive and accessible content for your integrated media strategy. This means producing content that is relevant, valuable, and engaging for your audience, as well as respectful, empathetic, and representative of their diversity. You should follow the best practices for content development, such as using clear and concise language, avoiding jargon and stereotypes, providing context and examples, and using visuals and multimedia to enhance your message. You should also follow the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG), such as using alt text, captions, transcripts, headings, labels, and contrast to make your content accessible to people with different disabilities.

4 Optimize your content for SEO

The fourth step is to optimize your content for SEO (search engine optimization). This means improving your content's visibility and ranking on search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You should use keywords, titles, meta descriptions, headings, links, and tags to make your content relevant and easy to find for your audience. You should also use schema markup, sitemaps, and robots.txt to make your content understandable and crawlable for search engines. You should also monitor your SEO performance and metrics, such as traffic, impressions, clicks, conversions, and bounce rate, to measure and improve your results.

6 Engage with your audience and measure your impact

The sixth and final step is to engage with your audience and measure your impact. This means interacting with your audience through comments, feedback, reviews, ratings, and social media. You should respond to their questions, concerns, compliments, and complaints, as well as encourage them to share your content and refer others to your brand. You should also use tools like analytics, dashboards, and reports to track and analyze your integrated media strategy's performance and outcomes. You should use key performance indicators (KPIs), such as reach, engagement, conversions, retention, and loyalty, to evaluate and improve your integrated media strategy's effectiveness and efficiency.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?