Inclusive messaging tips for your Mother’s Day campaigns

Mother’s Day marketing is rapidly evolving away from traditional stereotypes and towards a truer representation of modern motherhood by incorporating inclusive Mother’s Day messaging. Aside from being a more empathetic approach, it’s also the smart thing for marketers to do – your audience needs to be able to relate to your messaging, after all. 

Out of this change has also come a greater understanding of the challenges some people face around Mother’s Day, and why handling the subject with sensitivity is so important for not alienating your audience. 

But having a great inclusive message is one thing and having people actually see it is another. With the scale of Out of Home (OOH) advertising, reaching diverse audience segments is easier than ever. In this guide, we’ll explain how you can use the medium to create meaningful connections with inclusive Mother’s Day messaging.

Understanding Inclusivity in Mother’s Day Messaging

In the context of Mother’s Day messaging, inclusivity means acknowledging that the day means different things to different people. For some, it’s a celebration; for others, it’s a tragic reminder of loss and for many, it can bring up mixed feelings. 

Without an inclusive approachmessaging, you risk alienating large segments of your audience. On a human level, you might accidentally inflict or intensify emotional suffering – and nobody wants that. 

However, by considering the following factors when creating your Mother’s Day marketing messages, you can easily make your campaign more inclusive and appeal to a wider audience.

Acknowledging Diverse Experiences of Motherhood

Motherhood takes many forms and extends far beyond the traditional mother-child biological relationship. Foster mothers, stepmothers, grandmothers, guardians and other motherly role models deserve to be celebrated on Mother’s Day for all that they do.

Celebrating Non-Traditional Families

Families come in all shapes and sizes – some by choice, some by circumstance, but all as important as each other. Non-traditional family models might include:

• LGBTQ+ parents

• single mothers or single fathers

• blended families

• more than two parents

• non-parent caregivers

By recognising different family structures, you can ensure that your Mother’s Day marketing messaging resonates with all kinds of people and reflects the modern world in which we live. 

Sensitivity to Loss and Different Life Stages

Mother’s Day can be a challenging time for a variety of reasons. Those who have lost their mother, have a difficult relationship with their mother, are struggling with infertility or have experienced pregnancy loss can find Mother’s Day to be overwhelming or upsetting. Treating these issues with compassion and sensitivity is a vital element of any inclusive Mother’s Day campaign.

Crafting Inclusive Mother’s Day Marketing Messages

Here’s how to craft a thoughtful and inclusive Mother’s Day message that ensures your billboard stands out for the right reasons.

Using Language That Resonates with All Audiences

Language is one of your most powerful tools for creating a Mother’s Day message that resonates with all audiences. You can avoid alienating specific groups by simply choosing the right words.

Acknowledge different mother figures and family setups with phrases such as ‘to all the mothers, parents and caregivers’ and ‘celebrating all types of families’. Crafting a message that resonates also means avoiding presumptive statements such as ‘nobody loves like a mother’ and potentially hurtful reminders of loss, such as ‘where would we be without our mums?’.

Avoiding Stereotypes in Your Mother’s Day Messaging

Most Mother’s Day card selections would have you believe that all mothers love wine, spend their time running around after everybody else and would have all of their problems solved if they just got a bit of peace and quiet. 

While there might be some elements of truth in this for some mothers, these clichéd ideas are outdated and parroting them in your advertising messaging is unlikely to help you form a genuine connection with audiences. 

Instead, steer clear of the stereotypes and focus on creating original, thoughtful Mother’s Day advertising messaging that reflects the diverse reality of modern motherhood. 

Emphasising Connection and Appreciation

The essence of Mother’s Day isn’t about the label ‘mother’ – it’s about universal themes of love, connection and appreciation. By homing in on these emotions and paying less attention to generic ideas around what Mother’s Day means, your messaging will resonate more broadly and come across as more genuine.

Designing Inclusive Digital Billboards for Mother’s Day

We’ve put together some tips for designing an inclusive and visually appealing Mother’s Day billboard that will capture attention in any advertising environment. 

Diverse Imagery and Representation in Your Mother’s Day Campaign

Human imagery helps forge an emotional connection with your audience. But to do so effectively, you need to make sure that different groups are represented in your billboard ads. When choosing imagery for your campaign, think about how you can appeal to a wider audience by including different:

• races

• ages

• disabilities

• body types

• family structures

It’s human nature to relate to those who are most like us, and humans are wonderfully diverse. The best Mother’s Day ads reflect this. 

Subtle and Thoughtful Design Elements

Thoughtful and inclusive Mother’s Day marketing often includes subtle design elements that help to reflect varied experiences. With digital billboard advertising, a great place to start is by making use of the dynamic capabilities to show rotating creatives that include diverse depictions of motherhood.

Colours and symbols can be used to convey feeling without having to rely on language. Gentle colours and gradients are really effective at creating a warm visual atmosphere that’s reminiscent of motherly nurture. 

You can imply connection and appreciation with gift and heart symbols. Alternatively, you can experiment with creating abstract design elements that represent the essence of motherhood without the need for traditional imagery. 

Highlighting Inclusive Campaign Slogans

Your Mother’s Day marketing campaign slogan is often what leaves the biggest lasting impression on your audience. It’s therefore extra important that it captures the inclusive nature of your campaign. 

If you’re stuck with where to start, try looking through the following examples to ignite inspiration:

• ‘Honouring All Mums’

• ‘Celebrating Every Kind of Mother’

• ‘For Those Who Embody Motherly Love’

• ‘Motherhood: As Diverse As Love Itself’

Engaging Audiences with Inclusive Mother’s Day Ads

Finding new and innovative ways to create meaningful connections during Mother’s Day is crucial to marketing success. Here are some Mother’s Day advertising ideas to help you engage your audience with inclusive messaging. 

Storytelling Through Digital Displays

Digital billboards have advanced functionality that can enhance your campaign storytelling. Unlike traditional static billboards, the content they display is dynamic, meaning you’re not limited to one creative design.

When it comes to Mother’s Day marketing, this means you can share diverse stories of motherhood with rotating creatives that highlight different experiences. Using dynamic DOOH, you can also adapt your campaign messaging depending on factors like time of day or local weather, to make your storytelling more contextually relevant.

Real-Time Interactive Elements

Interactive ads are a great way to increase engagement with your Mother’s Day marketing. In OOH, interactivity can be as simple as including a QR to integrate the ad with your social media, or as complex as building a Mother’s Day-themed game that can be played via touchscreen displays.

Other options for incorporating interactive elements include using motion tracking, augmented reality (AR), or immersive experiences that interact with the senses.

Encouraging Community Participation

Involving the local community in your Mother’s Day campaign can make it much more relatable and improve engagement. Community involvement can happen both before and after the campaign goes live.

You can highlight the work of local charities and organisations by inviting them to collaborate with your campaign. Alternatively, take a more personal approach by featuring local stories of mothers and maternal figures. 

Another option is to incorporate user-generated content by inviting users to share their own Mother’s Day messages which can then be shared on screen in real-time.

Measuring the Impact of Your Inclusive Mother’s Day Campaign

You won’t know how well your inclusive Mother’s Day messaging is resonating with audiences until you evaluate its effectiveness. Here’s how to go about measuring campaign performance. 

Metrics That Matter

The metrics that matter will vary depending on your campaign goals and the techniques you use to achieve them. In general, key performance indicators (KPIs) for an OOH advertising campaign might include:

• Reach

• Exposure frequency

• Dwell time

• Website visits 

• Foot traffic 

• Sales uplift

However, when trying to understand the impact of your inclusive messaging, it’s also a good idea to gather data around things like audience sentiment and brand perception.  

Tools for Assessing Campaign Impact

The go-to tools for assessing campaign impact should always be:

• Metrics provided by the OOH media owner

• Google Analytics

• Sales data analysis 

Combined, these will provide a comprehensive understanding of what your campaign achieved and where it was most effective. However, to gather a more nuanced view of audience reactions to your inclusive messaging, it can be useful to use tools such as social listening platforms and direct audience surveys. 

Adapting for Future Inclusivity

Once you’ve conducted your analysis, you can use the insights gained to improve inclusivity efforts in future Mother’s Day marketing. From the audience feedback and data that you gather, you might have pinpointed:

• Messaging themes that did not resonate as intended

• Specific elements or versions of the creative that performed better than expected

• Underrepresented groups to include in the future 

• Which locations respond best to different messaging themes

• Missed opportunities for activation

As you adapt and refine your Mother’s Day marketing and messaging over time, you can build your brand’s reputation for inclusivity and strengthen the emotional connections that your Mother’s Day advertising efforts have forged. 

For more advice and tips on how inclusive advertising can transform your Mother’s Day campaign, get in touch with our expert team.