Advertising to Queer Women: Effective Strategies for Engagement.

The LGBTQ community is a force to be reckoned with – financially, that is. They alone were responsible for $1.5 trillion in consumer spending as of 2022. Add to that the spending of their allies among millennials and Gen Z, and that figure becomes a huge share of consumer spending.

Any business that ignores this spending group is making a poor business decision.

LGBTQ People Are Mainstream Now – A Bit of History

Since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the LGBQT community has been on a mission- the pursuit of equal rights in all aspects of living – housing, education, medical care, employment, legal standing (e.g., same-sex marriage), and general societal acceptance on the part of straight people. It’s been a long road and it’s not over yet. Consider, for example, that there were over 230 pieces of legislation in states last year alone negatively targeting the LGBTQ community and its rights. Attacks on DEI policies and programs stand out among these. Then there’s Project 2025 and its promise to go after same sex marriage and other protections.

Still, during the 21st century so far, progress marches on. Gay characters are now openly portrayed in the TV and film industries; gay and lesbian athletes have come out; and of course, same-sex marriage became legal in the US in 2015, affording same-sex couples all of the legal rights afforded to straight people who wed. Gay men, lesbians, transgender people, and those of any sexual orientation are free to love and marry who they want. And, while they do remain targets of hate on the part of certain segments of society, they also enjoy the support of many straight people, especially millennials and Gen Z generations – generations that will not do business with companies that do not support the LGBTQ community. Marketers take note!

Early Advertising Risk-Takers

Early risk-takers in gay and lesbian advertising were both subtle and not-so-subtle.

Subaru understood that its lesbian market was substantial, so it adopted some marketing slogans that were subtle, but on-point. “We’re completely comfortable with our orientation” and “It’s not a choice, it’s just how we’re built.” And it has used celebrity lesbians in its ads – tennis star Martina Navratilova, for example.

Others were not as subtle. Burger King launched its Proud Whopper during San Francisco Pride in 2014. It was a rainbow-colored wrapper with the statement “We are all the same inside.” While this may have seemed like a bold move on the part of Burger King, this “Proud Whopper” wrapper did not appear nationwide. Burger King identified a target audience for a specific event and took advantage of it with that Proud Whopper wrap, but the whole thing was a pretty safe bet.

Unlike Burger King, other retailers took bigger risks. Benetton, a UK clothing retailer, took a chance even though the AIDS epidemic was in full swing. It ran ads featuring lesbians with the slogan, “United Colors of Benetton.” This marketing campaign did not seem to impact its bottom line, but other brands were not about to follow suit at that time.

IKEA was one of those not-so-subtle retail companies that took the bull by the horns and ran daytime TV ads featuring gay same-sex couples shopping for furniture, in its East Coast US market. This launched a firestorm of public opinion, both pro and con, and even a bomb threat at one of its stores. The bottom line? The marketing campaign did not hurt company revenues at all.

Fast forward to today. There is pretty widespread mainstream media advertising that both includes members of the LGBTQ community and that is also targeting that community as consumers. It’s very common, for example, to see two men at the dining room table with their son advertising a breakfast cereal, gay couples out shopping at their favorite store, or lesbian and/or gay men on a cruise or at a beautiful resort as part of an ad campaign for those venues. Many of these ads target the gay market in their publications, via online dating apps, or on other websites and social media. But more and more, large enterprises are including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other queer consumers in their overall advertising campaigns.

LGBT Advertising Today

Enterprises, more and more, publicly support Gay Pride events, financially and through some of their advertising, although they are still more selective about their audiences. When they aren’t selective, they do face backlash and threatened boycotts. Just ask Target and AB InBev.

Target, a long-time advertiser of LGBTQIA+ merchandise during Pride Month, chose to add transgender swimsuits to its collection. That was too much for highly conservative anti-LGBTQ people and they called for a boycott. In some areas of the country, Target did see a flattening of sales but not in others. Going forward, Target is now offering its full line of Pride products online and advertising via LGBTQ-friendly venues. And it is offering its in-house merchandise only in certain stores throughout the country. Today, Target’s profits are up.

AB InBev featured a trans female on its Bud Light can. Again, too much for the anti-LGBTQ community. And again, a boycott. Sales were flat for about a year, although some of that can be attributed to the advent of some stiff competitors. After a year, however, sales are again rising.

For the most part, though, LGBT advertising that features gay and lesbian gender identities engaged in normal human activities and other similar situations is becoming pretty mainstream, but targeting specific segments of the LGBT community will require more than a generic ad campaign.

So let’s get to the heart of the matter of this article. How does a company engage in advertising to queer women, specifically lesbians and those who may be bisexual as well?

Targeting The Queer Women Market

So, you know a bit about queer women and their sexual orientation. They have romantic and/or sexual relationships with other women. They may also be bisexual and involved in relationships with both other women and men. What else do you, as a marketer, know about lesbian and bisexual women and how to reach the LGBT community with an advertising campaign?

Some Facts About Queer Women

Among the total buying power of LGBTQ people, lesbians account for 40% of it. That’s a huge chunk of change for any company to be interested in targeting.

Over 40% of lesbian and bisexual women are married and at least another 20% are in a living together partnership.

Over one-third of lesbian and bisexual females earn more than $100,000 a year. That’s a lot of buying power.

Queer females are geographically more dispersed than the LGBT community as a whole. They will be found in large and mid-sized cities and suburban areas as well. Like the rest of the LGBT community, they seldom settle in small towns or rural areas, given the far more conservative nature of these locations. Still, gay and lesbian consumers do live in those places too, and excluding them is never a good idea.

Lesbians are smart and educated. 77.4% have post-secondary degrees or certifications; among female bisexuals, 68.1% do.

The point is this: if you want to understand lesbian consumers, you need to know everything about them before you can develop any type of advertising campaign Their sexual orientation is only a tiny piece of who they are. Do your research – there’s plenty out there.

Now, about developing a marketing campaign that will be effective and successful. Here are the steps and strategies that you will need to use.

Tips and Strategies for Marketing to the Lesbian Market

If you are in charge of marketing for a company, you have probably used many of these strategies already. But you must recognize that the lesbian community is unique just as any other group of consumers. So, let’s take a look at the steps and strategies that will make this ad campaign successful.

Develop a Lesbian Consumer Persona

If you are a seasoned marketer, you are familiar with a customer persona. In short, you are going to design a fictional character who represents your targeted audience.

• Give her a name. This serves to personalize her in your mind. Obviously, her gender identification is a part of who she is but she is much more than that. So use a name that is far more than that.
• How would she describe herself? What roles does she play? This should include a typical job/career she might hold, her role as a spouse or partner, her outside interests and/or hobbies, her passions and values, etc. The point is lesbians as a group are complex people, just as other consumers are. Give her the complexity she deserves. Think about what she might write as a bio on her LinkedIn account.
• What are her goals? An important element for targeting any audience is to understand where they want to go – professionally and personally. So, maybe Lively Lilly is a corporate accountant or an IT specialist. What might she see as career growth? Maybe she is in a marriage or partnership. What might their goals be as a couple? How will the products or services you offer fit into those goals? How will the content that you craft for articles or that you post on social media be relatable to her?
• Give her detailed demographics. What’s her age range; what’s her household income? Where does she live? What’s her education level?
• Detail her personal story. Here you can use the results of your research. And can start with the discussion of facts about lesbians above. But you have to dig a lot deeper to answer the following questions about her:What does a day in her life look like?What challenges does she face?How might she make purchasing decisions?
• You may need to develop more than one persona because there is diversity within the lesbian community too. How will your product or service provide a solution to a single lesbian living alone, for example? And if it won’t, then there is no use in targeting that market.

What you need to remember is this: The audiences you are targeting have challenges and problems to solve, even if those are minor ones. If your product or service can help them overcome a challenge or solve a problem, then you are targeting the right ones. Consumers want solutions, and they will patronize companies and brands that provide the best ones.

Go Where Your Audience Is

So, where do lesbians hang out? This will be your next task. They hang out in lots of places online – chat rooms, online dating websites for the LGBT community, and, of course, plenty of social media platforms. They may subscribe to LGBT community publications too. Look into various groups, communities, subreddits, etc. It is within these sub-communities where meaningful conversations take place and you can learn about your audience beyond who they want to have sex with.

You might also look at LGBT advertising and marketing campaigns – these could be competitors for lesbian consumers. What is working for them?

Your goal is to “listen in” to conversations. Even join in and ask questions. Companies that make a habit of listening and communicating with targeted consumers do far better with any advertising or marketing campaign they develop. Any company can survey their customers after the purchasing event – in fact, most do that today. But to find audiences before the purchasing event and develop enough of a relationship to understand their pain points is what top advertisers do.

Here are some key tactics to use on various social media platforms:

• Facebook: Join private LGBT groups such as #BeTrue to connect with gay people of all gender identities, including lesbians, of course. Or, if you are a small company, search for LGBT groups by city and state. Once you join, listen and ask questions.
• Instagram: Use Instagram’s analytics to find top-performing content within the LGBT community. Identify the most relatable hashtags and insert them in your posts. Use location tagging if you are a small local company.
• Twitter: Join related Twitter Chats and participate in discussions. Don’t promote your product or service until you have first developed a relationship with the chat group. Share content relative to the LGBT community in general and lesbians specifically. Use pertinent hashtags in your tweets and post regularly. the posts don’t have to be long – just a relatable quote supporting gay people and perhaps a link to a piece of content you have produced.
• TikTok: Research hashtags that relate to the LGBT community, and then use them in any posts you create. Use the comments section to encourage your lesbian audience to talk to you and to each other.
• YouTube: Learn how to optimize your videos and partner with other YouTube creators to promote one another. Use related hashtags so searches bring your audiences to you. If your company has the marketing staff to create YouTube videos and ad campaigns, great. If not, find other creators you can piggyback on for a fee.
• Reddit: There are several subreddits for bisexual and lesbian gals. Some are focused on people living in a specific region. Others are sex-themed or welcome a subset such as late bloomer lesbians or lesbians who are also gamers.

Use Big Data to Capture Past and Present Behaviors of Lesbian Consumers

There are oceans of data out in cyberspace, and recently data analysts have developed algorithms to capture that data and churn it for a diversity of specific purposes. Banks use it to track past and present behaviors of consumers for all sorts of things – what types of loans they like best, for example. And these behaviors are used to predict future acts on the part of their consumers.

Until recently, big data was only available to the “big boys” in marketing and advertising, but, as with all things, this data necessarily became available to the little guys too. Even a small company can now tap into data analytics research if they come up with the right questions to ask. There are plenty of data analysis platforms and software that can be used for advertising and marketing by a company of any size. So, you might begin with questions related to lesbians purchasing your product or service. What are their purchasing behaviors and what companies are they buying such products or services from? You might even narrow the questions to professional lesbians or single lesbians.

And based on past and current purchasing, big data can also make predictions on the buying behavior of consumers in the future. And it can also tell you which segments of the lesbian population hang out on social media.

All of this gives you significant information that can be used to drive your advertising campaigns. Continue collecting data during the process and you can continue to refine those ads until they work for you.

For example, you can use the data for targeted ad campaigns to reach your prospects where they are with the right messages.

Publicize Your Commitment to the LGBT Community

No company today can conduct LGBT advertising with any hope of success if they cannot show that they support the community. Brands that contribute to Pride events, both financially and via their advertising content are more likely to gain loyalty from LBGTQIA+ consumers.

But it goes beyond just supporting Pride and other LGBT events and selling gay Pride merchandise during Pride month. Brands need to demonstrate that they embrace diversity in their workplace. Featuring gay employees (gay men, lesbian women, etc.) in their company content is a powerful form of indirect LGBT advertising that shows you “put your money where your mouth is.” Not only does this appeal to the gay community but also to millennials and Gen Z who insist upon diversity in the brands they patronize. And many of them may be potential consumers of your product or service too.

Support for Pride and diversity is more than a temporary thing. It’s targeting your lesbian audience all year long, and that means creating the right content on a regular basis. So, let’s talk about content.

Don’t Pinkwash

People in charge of creating ads targeted at gay, lesbian, and other LGBTQIA+ consumers may want to tread carefully before adopting the same approach as burger king. Gay consumers and their allies are increasingly skeptical of brands that partake in what they see as pink washing or rainbow washing. That’s the practice of running ads and marketing campaigns targeting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other queer audiences during Pride month or when it is otherwise profitable without engaging in any other form of allyship.

What are examples of pink washing?

• Levi’s running ads to promote a Pride collection to gay consumers while manufacturing that clothing in places where being gay is a crime.
• BMW changing it’s logo rainbow on its website to promote gay Pride, but only for countries that were queer-friendly
• AB-InBev caving to pressures from hate groups and effectively abandoning Dylan Mulvaney when that partnership was no longer profitable to them
• Target removing Pride items from stores under the guise of protecting worker safety when the motivation was meeting sales goals.
• AT&T, UPS, Comcast, and others donating millions to politicians that oppose same-sex marriage and other rights for the queer community while also running pride themed ads.

Before you run ads, know that gay consumers are going to take a holistic view of your brand. If you only care about them when they spend money, you’re likely to be rejected outright.

Create Relevant and Engaging Content

If you have been in the marketing business for any time at all, you understand the importance of content in targeting a specific audience. Whether it is an ad, a social media post, a video. emails, SMS push messages, newsletters, a well-placed article, or a blog they maintain, every piece of content that brands create makes an advertising statement and must be focused on targeting their consuming audience.

If you’ve completed all of the previous steps, you know exactly who you are targeting, their goals, their challenges, the solutions they seek, and more. All of this will drive your content.

Identify a problem or a challenge, provide a solution, and endear the audience you are targeting. For one of the most memorable videos targeting a problem and solution, check out this hilarious video that launched Dollar Shave Club into a multi-million-dollar company. Here is everything this video did in less than 90 seconds:

• Identified a problem – men forgetting to stop and buy razors and then dealing with dirty ones for shaving
• Provided a solution – a monthly subscription service delivering new razors to the doorstep

Now, think about a challenge or problem your lesbian audience faces. Let’s take “coming out.”

• Problem – How to come out to friends and family, some of whom may still view homosexuality negatively.
• Solution – Create a serious blog post that provides tips and strategies in the coming out process
• Solution – you might create a humorous video about “Coming Out to Aunt Martha.” It will resonate with some, but if not, you have a serious post for them.

The whole point of content is not to sell. It is to develop relationships. As those relationships are developed, then when the targeted lesbian audience is ready to purchase a product or service, they will think of the enterprise they have a relationship with before any other. And that should be you.

Now, in thinking about your content creation, remember the following:

• It should be helpful in some way
• Each should be focused on a single challenge, problem, or issue
• It should be well structured with sections, bullet points, etc. if the content is longer
• Language should be simple
• It should address topics that trend currently
• It should be engaging. If you are not a creative writer, find someone who is.

Make Use of Influencers

There’s a diversity of leading influencers within the LGBTQIA+ community. While homosexuality comprises the majority of them (gays and lesbians), there are plenty of others representing all segments of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum.

But your focus is necessarily on lesbians as a group. And there is an abundance of them. Looking only at Instagram, for example, there are hundreds, from Hannah Hart (1M followers) to the gay couple Allie and Sam Conway with 324K followers, to the traveling gay couple Kristie and Christine and Ash Hardell with thousands of followers as well.

Gaining access to these lesbian LGBTQIA+ influencers requires a lot of work, but using influencers to ramp up your own audience is a trend that is not going away. Brands with a huge ad budget can obviously afford to pay for access to big-name influencers who will run plugs (indirect ads) for them.

Your marketing group may be much smaller and with a much smaller budget. In fact, you may only be able to craft content for articles and blogs and pay for well-placed ads. So, finding influencers of lesbian homosexuality to tap into will take work rather than bucks. Here’s how you begin:

• Pick one or two with a following in the thousands, not millions.
• Begin following them on at least one of their platforms. Instagram is a pretty good one.
• Participate in plenty of leading discussions – you’ll have to do this on a daily basis to get noticed. Ask questions and make engaging and pertinent comments.
• Look for other brands that are being mentioned – get on their sites and have a look around to see what you might “steal.”
• The influencers all have email contacts. After you have engaged in conversations for a time, and once you locate a topic you have an amazing piece of content on, shoot an email over to her and attach it, asking her for her thoughts and if it might be appropriate for any of her audiences. Wait for a reply, and don’t be a pest. Continue to be a part of discussions on her platform.

Wash, rinse, and repeat.

Start a Referral Program with Incentives

Place ads for your referral program everywhere you have a presence.

To become a part of the referral program, the lesbian will need to sign up for emails and/or your newsletter. Then, every time they refer someone who also signs up, they will receive a discount on whatever they may purchase.

Your job is to make your newsletters full of great content, even though you will include ads. The same goes for your emails, although most advertisers only focus on a single ad at a time.

Use your emails and your newsletters to address issues and challenges, the celebration of diversity within the entire gay community, the breaking of stereotype images, and the promotion of gay pride throughout the year, not just during the month of Pride events.

Be Certain to Keep Your Target Audience in Your Sights

You know where your target audience hangs out online. Make sure that you have an active account on all of these platforms and create posts that are targeting them. If you keep active and even include an incentivized referral program for additional followers, they are likely to bring in friends and family. Like ripples, your pool of followers becomes a lake and more.

Some of your posts can include advertising for your product or service, but parse these out sparingly. An ad placed every 4-6 posts won’t make followers see you as just another sales pitcher.

Make the posts relatable, add some humor, feature your staff and customers, and validate their pride in who they are. They’ll keep tuning in, and the occasional ad may bring some results.

Once you have subscribers to your email or newsletter, put an incentive referral program in those too.

Relevance is a Broad Term

Think of the brands that have successfully targeted the gay community with their ads. Many of them aren’t selling products or services that are specific to gay audiences. After all, there’s no sex or gender requirement to drive a Subaru. So, never assume your product or brand doesn’t have something to offer this audience segment. Instead, focus on creating ads that connect.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t be sex positive or sell products that are specifically sex-themed. There is certainly a need to be met in this space. This is also an audience that is largely sex-positive, open-minded, and sharp as hell. Ads that use sex appeal in a smart way are likely to perform well.

Your Takeaways

LGBTQIA+ advertising is not unlike any other kind of advertising when you consider how it is successfully accomplished and ultimately brings in revenue. Remember these things:

• It’s all about relationships, not ads. Lesbian audiences are just like all others
• It’s knowing your target audience inside-out and crafting content that resonates and validates pride in who they are
• It’s going where your target audience is and meeting your lesbian gays on their terms and in their places of comfort.
• It’s connecting with influencers who can promote your brand to your target audience.
• It’s understanding their goals, challenges, and pain points and providing solutions with your product or service
• It’s being a part of the lesbian gay community with financial support and commitment to its goals of equality in all aspects of their lives – not just being a “fair-weather” friend who gives a donation, markets pride merchandise, or specifically shows support one month a year (e.g. Burger King).
• It’s developing every ad campaign by targeting your audience based on its needs, not yours.

In the end, if you follow these strategies, your ads will reward you with the revenue you want.