What's your take on how to effectively market to multicultural audiences? As Gusto caters to small businesses, and minority- and women-owned SMBs are the two fastest-growing market segments, how do you strive to engage diverse-owned businesses?

Seek out underrepresented groups, listen to what they’re saying—and not saying—and amplify their voices to be even louder internally. Never stop thinking about your work as an ally. Be thoughtful in how you represent your customers in your marketing materials. Be honest. Work to educate yourself so others don’t have to.

At its core, this work is all about customer empathy. All kinds of people run businesses, and almost all people who run businesses have the same fears that keep them up at night. Are we going to make it? Can we pay our people next week? Etc These fears are shared regardless of gender, ethnicity, orientation, or otherwise.

All small businesses have their own unique stories. If you truly want to serve SMBs, you should be championing their authentic stories above your own.

language, empathy and understanding your customers even communities perspectives is super important. Because people listen to what their peers are saying.  

Today authenticity is most important as consumer movement has become stronger thanks to social media and multitude of ways in which ordinary people can have a voice and amplify the good and bad about a brand. 

Finally -- I would also focus on the "how " you communicate, whether the message is "translateable" into other languages without loosing its authenticity. I remember one time, we did a global campaign for the education segment and the main message (first para itself) - we found was offensive to "asian countries". Further, we couldn't run the campaign in china because the words wouldn't translate to mandarin :-)... Big lesson in diversity training. 

Three things to add here that could be helpful:

1. First is branding and values. Don’t be afraid to showcase your values before you get to a specific campaign, especially while thinking about your audiences. For example, in Brazil women are still very underrepresented In tech, both as founders as well as product and engineering people. We had this great internal initiative where we raised the % of women on our tech team from 18 to 29% in Q2 amidst a hiring spree. We decided we should talk about that in our customer/product newsletter and got tons of fantastic responses From customers and leads. We may even include it in our product keynote at our 15K person event. This sends a message that our company cares about women In tech and I believe that will make more women founders comfortable buying from us.
2. Treat them as personas. Many of us do separate campaigns for separate personas, perhaps one of these groups needs to be treated as a separate persona with a campaign specifically adapted for them, whether they are inside your country or not. 
3. Make sure to have solid representation in your cases: do you have enough cases with minority or women owned businesses? Does your sales team know to pull on them?

This is a terrific example of why it's important to think less about what your customers do, and more about what problems they face. A huge part of being relatable is demonstrating an understanding of what keeps someone up at night, and how you can help them sleep soundly. As an example, let's consider a ten-employee plumbing supply company in Milwaukee, WI, but with two different owner profiles:

Profile 1: 50-year-old white guy who went to vocational school out of high school, became a plumber and, after 15 years, went into the supply business. Initially it was just him, but now it has grown and he's starting to think about whether to ultimately sell it, or train his son and nephew to run it.

Profile 2: 32-year-old Hispanic female who majored in accounting at state college and, through observation, saw a particular opportunity in plumbing supply after working in the back office of a major valve manufacturer and financed the acquisition of her business through a small business loan. 

Yea, they're both the "same" business, but I can think of many differences in the problems each owner faces, and how each perceives those problems. 

I see relatability being about understanding both what it means to be in plumbing supply and how the issues each of these owners face, and how they will interpret those issues. I think this, in many ways, accounts for messaging to multicultural audiences by considering "diversity of problems" as much as diversity of people. 

Where the "multicultural" portion might figure in more prominently (I would imagine) is in the demand/lead generation aspect, where you have to pick exact distribution methods, channels and places for your marketing, which may perhaps have more of a demographic-driven component (because you want to reach people where they are/spend time). That's just a guess, though.