My name is Xiomara. I am a Product Marketing Manager. A Product Marketing Manager works on telling the story about why a product or a feature or some tool that we're building can be helpful for them. So you might think of that as seeing a commercial or seeing an ad online and why that thing is special for you. An inclusive marketing consultant is someone who reviews creatives or campaigns at the company to make sure they're being more inclusive. So an example of that is thinking about what users we're showing and how we're showing them and if the creative is accessible so we're creating a website or we have an event and making sure that anyone is able to attend that event, or able to see or hear the website. Being an inclusive marketing consultant fits into my role because I get to use that lens every day when I'm reviewing my creative or reviewing my campaigns. But on top of that, I also get to work with other teams and provide the knowledge that I have about inclusive marketing, so they too can apply those principles. My personal experiences, growing up low income, being a first-generation college student, being part of a family that had small businesses, an immigrant family— all those things come into lens when I think about what stories I want to tell, what users I want to show in our marketing campaigns. And I think in terms of work experiences— definitely being able to be an inclusive marketing lead at the company has also given me the ability to learn about other perspectives that I'm not aware of personally, and then making sure those stories are also being told in the marketing that we put out in the world. We have the influence and the power to tell stories that a lot of people— millions of people—can see. The benefit of having inclusive marketing is that you are building and telling authentic stories in the world. That is not only good for your brand, but it's good for the people who are seeing it. We're telling stories that matter to people. We're making them feel seen and represented in our work. One way you might see inclusive marketing principles being applied is who you show. Are you showing a range of ages, people with disabilities, people from different racial or ethnic backgrounds? Are you thinking about geography? Are you showing people in communities that are in a city versus a rural area? Another way you might see this is if you have a digital ad running and it's a video, do you have captions? Because not every user has the ability to hear, so they need to read what you're saying in your campaign. Inclusion can be right from the beginning to the end of your creative. Marketers can think about inclusion early and often, first by starting with their project brief, outlining who their audience is, what the story is that they want to tell, whose perspective might be missing. The next step might be partnering with an agency, an organization, or doing research with a set of users to then make sure that that story is told authentically. Afterwards, when they're actually working on the creative, is getting feedback early, getting feedback often, again, bringing back a lot of the users' perspectives may be missing on your team and making sure that that's reflected in the feedback process. Getting different perspectives from a big group of people may seem daunting in the beginning, but it does become an exercise that's actually just really important, no matter what you're working on, whether your intention is being inclusive or not, it's part of the process. As a marketer, you are always managing a lot of perspectives or opinions from maybe your stakeholders or from your team. Just think of it that same way. Now you actually have another set of users who are also providing a perspective, and you just have to get the themes out of it and back to analyzing data. It's the same thing. What is the theme that I'm hearing here, and how do I make sure it's being reflected? In the end, it's really worth going through all of this because you'll have really beautiful, successful stories that you're telling and putting out in the world. There's always room for learning. If you're interested in learning about inclusive marketing, a great resource is Google's All In Inclusive Marketing Guidelines. If you're learning about a particular audience for the first time, if you want to get research or other insights, or want to learn how to avoid stereotypes or even see really great marketing campaign examples, this is a good resource for you to go to if you're starting for the first time. Challenge yourself to get other perspectives to continue building your knowledge. We all have biases, and the people we surround ourselves with also help us build certain biases. By putting ourselves out there, by looking at things that were not familiar with, we can challenge ourselves to have other perspectives to start removing the biases we have. That way we build inclusive marketing that's put out into the world, so we're always telling authentic stories.