What is empathy-based marketing?
It doesn’t matter what product you sell or service you offer; you’ll market towards people. A person will decide to buy or not to buy. Brian Carroll, CEO and founder of markempa explains that Empathetic Marketing is about codifying our intuition to walk in our customer’s shoes to understand their experience (i.e., how they’re thinking and feeling about their business). Your goal is to connect to how your customer is thinking and feeling. By doing this, we can better their customer journey (and increase conversion rates).
Why is empathy so important?
People make purchase decisions and build relationships with brands based on how they feel about a brand. We now have more marketing channels than ever. We’ve moved from traditional advertising to social media, content marketing and beyond, but we’re still not reaching the end-user effectively. A good start is by being more empathetic with our marketing efforts.
5 Ways to start implementing empathy in marketing.
1. Solve problems
Start by putting yourself in your customers’ position. What do they lack, need, aspire to, listen to, resonate with? And provide solutions to their needs. Your product or service needs to highlight and communicate that you can make solve their problems.
2. Add value
Guide your customer on how to improve, provide tips, add real value, and you’ll see the reciprocity effect when they share, recommend, or retain your product or services. You can add value in the form of educational content, tips, blog posts, video content, eBooks, or white papers, free products, and samples.
3. Speak your customer’s language
It’s essential to apply psychological triggers to your content. Use messaging that will resonate with them. When your content appeals to them, it will elicit a response from customers. That emotional response can lead to actions that correspond to marketing KPIs (key performance indicators).
4. Listen and analyse what your customer has to say
Don’t just make educated guesses or preconceived ideas based on your opinion. No marketer will create a campaign that truly resonates with their audience if they don’t know what it’s like to be them. Performing in-depth buyer persona research will allow for empathetic insight.
Digital marketing tools such as analytics, social insights, heatmaps, and customer reviews helps brands to understand what their customer has to say. It’s important to listen, analyse, and improve. Use the data and insights to create trust and build better relationships with your customers.
5. Humanise your brand
Your target audience isn’t some intangible, fictitious persona. They are real people, just like you. While it’s important to know what stage of the buyer’s journey they are in, just remember you’re creating communications for a human. Who are the people behind the brand and what happens behind the scenes? You’ll be surprised to know how well an audience receives content that gives a glimpse of the “human element”.
In conclusion:
Having empathy also includes being open, being flexible, transparent, and authentic. If a customer has the option to choose between you and your competition, it’s the empathy factor (or lack thereof) that will trigger their purchase decision in your favour (or not).
Empathetic marketing at its core is not about “creating emotional responses” in customers. Instead, it’s about understanding their current emotional state at that moment and being able to meet them there in a personalised way.
If we can emotionally connect and give customers what they want, we can create a lasting competitive advantage that will reap more revenue and profits.
When marketing to your ideal customer, create an experience that will last – for all the right reasons.
Sources
https://www.markempa.com/empathetic-marketing-7-steps /
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2821-consumers-relationships-brands.html
https://www.embryodigital.co.uk/emotional-content-vs-informational-content-its-on/
