Ramadan Campaign Tips for Inclusive Marketing
So here are the seven most important tips that I have for marketers to create a meaningful and successful Ramadan campaign.
I've worked with some of the biggest brands on activating moments like Ramadan and creating a true relationship with the Muslim consumer market and community.
Here are three reasons why she should create a Ramadan campaign:
1) Consumption spikes
Data shows that content consumption spikes dramatically during the month of Ramadan.
Last year, Muslim consumers in the MENA region spent over 50% of their time during Ramadan consuming online entertainment, including on platforms such as YouTube and apps (source). If you don't take advantage of this heightened attention during the month, you're missing out.
2) Be there or be square
To efficiently expand online presence, you need to be there when the community that you want to reach is actually present in moments that matter.
A lot of how Muslims organized their year evolves around the month of Ramadan. So to be visible in moments that matter for your consumers is not only valuable, it's also a risk if you don't do it. Brands that do not offer relevant content to the consumer market during the month of Ramadan could suffer a 39% reduction in brand awareness (source).
3) Credibility
The Muslim consumer market has the potential to grow to $2.4 trillion by 2024 (source: State of the Global Islamic Economy Report). And if you want to build a relationship with the consumer market, you need to start now. Credibility comes with a strong relationship of actually creating rapport and relevance in the consumer market that you want to activate.
So building a brand campaign during the month of Ramadan helps your brand create a connection with the consumer market, understand trends, and be there when it matters to the community.
This article is specifically for non-Muslim marketers. If you are Muslim and you want to create your own Ramadan campaign, these tips are still helpful. But I created a special edition for you around how to prepare your brand for Ramadan and how to use Ramadan to build your brand. So if you're interested in that, click here and watch the video about that.
I know that you will like the content that we put up because we talked all about the power, diversity and business branding and womanhood.
About Ramadan
Now, I trust that you know a little bit about Ramadan, but just to recap it, Ramadan is the 9th month of the Islamic calendar.
It's the holiest month for Muslims around the world and is observed by fasting from sunrise to sunset, praying, giving to charity and taking time to visit the mosque and give back to the community. The 30 days of Ramadan conclude in a celebration called Eid and marks the New Year for Muslims where they observe self-reflection betterment and a more purposeful way of living.
And everyday Muslims fast until sunset and they break their fast with a breakfast with a breakfast called Iftar. Eid (pronounced ‘Eed’- as in the word feed) is a day of festivities, given to charity, and eating as a community and celebrating the day that marks the end of Ramadan and the beginning of a new year.
Knowing about the background of Ramadan and how it is observed is crucial for creating a campaign during that month.
Ramadan Shopping Behaviour
Let's talk about the top tips that I have for marketers to create a Ramadan campaign. I want to talk about consumer and shopping behavior during the month that will help you understand the absent flows of Ramadan and how it's actually lived by Muslims around the world.
So we're going to connect data with insight and cultural understanding. Let's look at this graphic from Google Trends:
Source: Google Trends
Shoppers experience Ramadan in four phases and for your brand. It's important to understand those trends reflect in search behavior. The shopping behavior starts with the preparation for Ramadan, goes throughout the entire month through the preparation for Eid, and then ends with the Eid celebration.
The Preparation Phase
The preparation phase is all about preparing for Ramadan, which has a lot to do with decorating, making the home valuable for the experience of Ramadan, getting to enter the spirit, organizing your space, organizing your entire plan and your intentions for the month. So search behavior, of course, when it comes to products spike in terms of home decor, cooking sets and grocery appliances.
The Excitement Phase
In the excitement phase, which already goes into the month of Ramadan, consumer behavior shifts more from a hosting mentality to a self care mentality going inwards and preparing to take care of your own intention in Ramadan. And of course, we have Muslim brands that really cater to what is happening during Ramadan, including Islamic products such as prayer beads or prayer mats.
But you can also think about it from a lifestyle perspective and offering them me time products that help them go in words such as journals or workout sets, depending on which industry your brand navigates. In.
Eid Prep
The next phase is the Eid preparation phase. Eid as mentioned is a celebration that ends the Holy month of Ramadan with the community aspect in it.
It's also a celebration that spikes in fashion and makeup and beauty because on it people actually get ready to look beautiful, to have their cultural garments and clothes on and actually spending mindful time beautifying themselves for the celebration.
Eid
The Eid phase is really much focused on spending time with family and friends and community.
People are relaxing at home, they're looking for online entertainment. Also, app downloads and active users spike in this time. During that time, people are also a bit tired from cooking the entire month of Ramadan themselves. So of course, trends spike, such as food delivery apps here. It's also, as mentioned before, a time of self care and grooming and beautifying yourself.
So searches spike in terms of hairstyles or grooming services. So looking at the shopping behaviors, you understand the cycles of Ramadan a bit better. But to understand the impact that you can have with your brand, we need to look in depth into the community.
And so here are my seven top tips to create inclusive branding and actual purpose driven activations during the month of Ramadan:
7 Top Tips for Marketers to Create a Successful Ramadan Campaign
1) Be mindful
Planning your content ahead by understanding Ramadan consumer behaviors and doing your research on Google Trends is important. However, it is so much more important to understand the realities of Muslims during that month. Google Trends can help you find the ideal focus area, but your brand needs to understand its values first to be mindful of how to connect in that special moment.
Ramadan and Eid are not moments where consumption is glorified. However, of course, consumption happens throughout the lifestyle that is lived during Eid and Ramadan.
The most important part is the values and the intention that people bring behind the month and what it actually means to them personally. You want to avoid the commercialisation of the moment and the month, and you want to focus on how to actually create a relationship with the community first here, consumer research is crucial.
The consumers knows best what they expect from the brand. The importance here is if you do not have credibility in the Muslim market before, meaning you have never had a close relationship, you have never amplified or an influencer from the community, you've never really invested in the community.
It's important that you first look at what the consumer expects from you and your brand.
The earlier you start, the more insights you will gather and the more you will actually take advantage of the peak spikes during Ramadan. Diverse consumer markets expect much more intentionality from brands around the world. The Muslim consumer market is not one size fits all.
It is diverse in itself and it's important to understand the intricate differences within communities around the world.
With spiking, Islamophobia and Xenophobia, it's also important to understand your impact and the brand impact you can have with that campaign. To raise awareness and create more visibility for Muslims around the world to include them in a much more natural way into your brand sphere.
It can reduce Xenophobia by a lot when big brands actually invest in diverse communities because then they are less alert because the brand connection actually creates a connection between the consumers outside in the world.
Here's an example of what this can mean:
People are much more likely to associate myself with someone that they could know that they could be friends with because their local brand is endorsing a culture that is being inherently branded as other or foreign.
They then understand more that this is simply a piece of cloth. It's just a product that people wear. There is a sense of normalizing cultural experiences and cultural expressions through the endorsement of big brands. It shouldn't be that way, but it is the perception of a cultural event or expression changes.
If a big brand or an industry actually gives you a tick of approval that this is totally normal. We celebrate it with you. We see you. We understand you, and you are part of us.
Be mindful of the actual impact that you can have with your brands by using this moment to celebrate your Muslim influencers, consumers and even employees.
2) Understand Realities
We've talked about this before, but this is so crucial. Brands that have tried to activate Ramadan, have failed miserably because they did not understand the realities of Muslims.
For instance, we have seen global makeup brands creating a line of makeup for Suhoor.
Suhoor is the meal that you have before you start fasting again, which is the meal you have usually around two in the morning. No one ever has makeup on. At two in the morning, we crawl out of bed at two in the morning, have some water, have a meal that we prepared with the night before, and then we crawl back into bed.
Reactions to the MacCosmetics Suhoor makeup campaign for Ramadan
The reason why this makeup brand has failed miserably is because they did not understand this simple concept of realities of what Ramadan is. They thought the concept of Suhoor just means dinner. Maybe through a Google search.
Please do not try to google your way to a consumer-centric Ramadan campaign. You have to understand the realities of Muslims how you can do this. Come to my next tip.
3) Pick Your Campaign Focus
My third tip is choose whether you actually want to create a Ramadan product campaign, a Ramadan content campaign or a Ramadan brand campaign.
I hope as a marketer you understand the difference. Product you sell a product or service brand you sell the brand's vision, values and purpose and content you create a campaign content that is published during Ramadan. Now let's talk about these four important steps.
Values during Ramadan:
The important values during Ramadan are mindfulness, intentionality, giving back, self improvement and community impact. Muslims around the world use this month to give back to charity. They also use time to give back to the communities by doing any kind of project, helping out in the mosque or educating the community.
Mindfulness
And it's all about self reflection betterment during the month to become a better version of yourself.
Lifestyle
The lifestyle is all about health, community gathering, and acts of service and access.
Service can vary throughout the day. It can be in three to five prayers, it could be an extended way of your praying, it could be reading more of the Quran, it could be meditating and using prayer beads, and it could be spending the entire evening in the mosque.
And that is usually what Muslims do after the last prayer. So understanding this lifestyle is crucial because again, you don't want to make that same mistake of thinking that at two in the morning someone's going to have a weird celebration. Lifestyle is crucial.
Celebration
The month is also a part of celebrating your faith in your community and just the purpose that you have in life and the intentional analogy you bring behind everything.
So Iftar is a small celebration that you have every day with your family and friends, Eid is of course, a big celebration, as we already covered.
Intersectionality
This is very, very important. A lot of times, brands fall into the trap of thinking the Muslim consumer market is the Arab market.
It is not. The Muslim consumer market, as I mentioned, is incredibly diverse and intersectional.
However, those who are still underrepresented a lot of times are Black women, women in general, Asian women, women with disabilities, and so forth.
So make sure that you look at the intersectionality of your representation in your marketing campaign is crucial.
4) Work with influencers
Work with Muslim influencers because that is where you create credibility.
If your brand does not have credibility in the Muslim market yet, how to do that?
Rule 1: Understand them
Understand their values, and understand their restrictions and lifestyle during Ramadan. So if you want to create a campaign in Ramadan and you start within Ramadan, understand that their energy levels may vary because of their fasting schedule.
So please don't ask them to go on an Instagram LIVE at Iftar time. Understand and respect to their realities.
Rule 2: Consult them
Let them take the lead. A lot of times, marketing agencies have their own vision of what a brand product campaign should look like.
And as a marketer, I understand the friction it can create by giving the baton over to your influencer consumer. But it's so important. If you have knowledge in the consumer market or in the moment, please consult them and let them take the lead because they know best what will actually resonate with their audience and with the Muslim consumer market.
Rule 3: Intersectional Inclusion
Understand the intersectionality and make sure that you create representation of those often underrepresented when you pick your influencers a lot of times I see big brands always use the same two to three Muslim influencers. There are a bunch of more influencers out there.
Don't just take the first ones that you see on Google search. Do your research and actually find influencers that resonate with your brand and your values and your lifestyle that you portray with your brand as well as the industry that you're in. They're a crazy amount of Muslim influencers.
If you do your research that are valuable for your brand.
Rule 4: Pay them
Pay your influencers fairly. Studies show that underrepresented groups and content creators are often underpaid severely in marketing campaigns because you say, oh, the consumer market is not our main consumer market, but you still want to tap into it, understand that we know our value.
We talk to each other. Most of us Muslim influencers know each other. So having worked in a bunch of brands, I understand payment structure and I understand when a brand is severely underpaying their influencers because they think, oh, well, there's another Muslim influencer that would take this for less rates.
Pay them fairly.
5) Hire Muslim Brand Experts
My fifth tip for marketers is to hire Muslim experts. Now it's important that when you hire an agency for your marketing campaign, that you pick a Muslim agency, a Muslim lead agency, or a diverse agency which has Muslim representation. The reason here is I've worked with some of the biggest brands that use incredibly not diverse agencies to activate cultural moments.
The problem here is you either are going to create an incredibly inauthentic campaign because you only focus on the data that you find and not the consumer behavior or the consumer feedback that the community can actually give you. You are way behind the trend because you cannot keep up with community trends and developments.
Your agency is not in the culture, so they don't know what's happening. And some of the language is already outdated. Often employees from within the company are used as free labor to advise those non diverse agencies on creating a campaign. The problem is here you spend too much time educating the agency about an issue which they actually should know.
So please, if you're a brand who hires experts for your marketing campaign, hire experts for your marketing campaign.
Use a Muslim agency. They will know best what resonates with the audience, what kind of styles and trends are right now happening, and how to best position your brand on the market.
The reason also here is the community knows best what kind of reputation your brand already has in the market because you might have had some scandal without even knowing in a diverse community. So that Muslim agency will actually be able to tell you, listen, what you did 510 years ago did not resonate well.
You have to start from scratch. You have to make sure that you use this language instead of this because you need to shape your image in the right way. So make sure that you hire muscle agencies. And now there's a bonus tip.
6) Focus on Video Content
Focus on video Content Spaces like TikTok really come alive during Ramadan in comparison to non Ramadan month, the video views spike by 28% during Ramadan and that is over 32 billion views (source: TikTok).
And also videos published in Ramadan last year have increased by 11% in comparison to non Ramadan ones.
Source: TikTok
And it's also important that you stay on top of the latest content trends on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. There are trends like "Vlogmadan" - which are daily vlogs of Muslim influencers and there's also content trends going on on TikTok and Instagram that you should follow during the month of Ramadan.
7) Create Spaces
Now, the last advice that I want to give you on your way to really expand your marketing potential and create more inclusive brand campaigns is to create spaces more important than commercializing the moment of Ramadan and Eid and selling products and your services and pushing out your brand is actually creating meaningful spaces.
If you want to create credibility in a consumer market and community, you need to make sure that you create safe spaces for them together and specifically in Ramadan.
This makes such a difference in creating a space for Muslim influencers that you have a brand partners or even employees, even if it's internal, that is a marketing campaign because it is eventually going to go out of the company.
There's no such thing as doing things within the company that will not be reflected outside. So instead of simply focusing on the external marketing campaign, Focus on creating spaces such as hosting stars, Eid dinners or parties and events, and also create online social virtual spaces like an Instagram live conversation for instance, or a podcast conversation.
And if we're on the topic of creating internal events and recognizing your internal diversity and Muslim employees and how they observe Ramadan, It's important to create internal spaces for your employees to feel safe. Data shows that 78% of people expect brands to take special care during the month of Ramadan of their employees health and wellbeing.
I've been working with brands both on a Brand Communication and Corporate Communication side and they always are interconnected.
Your reputation as a company and how you treat your employees is as much as a marketing campaign as a marketing campaign that you put on your YouTube or Instagram.
So those are my top tips for creating a successful Ramadan Marketing campaign.
If you want to know more about inclusive marketing and branding, book a call with me on my website.
