The year 2020 has shown us just how important is empathy in marketing for your businesses. With the changing needs of customers, companies should adapt to their customer’s needs. And it is all possible through empathy marketing.
Empathy-based marketing is the ability to see the situation from your customer’s point of view. It means putting yourself into your customer’s shoes to understand their experience and expectations. That’s how you can better help them get what they are looking for. So, all you need to do is, think like your buyers. Empathy marketing is a customer-centric marketing strategy that is totally opposite to marketing-centric thinking.
Empathy-based marketing can be divided into the following ideas:
- Use empathy tactics to understand your customer’s experience.
- Think like your customers.
- Come up with ideas to help your customers make their lives better.
- Understand and provide your customers with what they want.
- Help your clients identify problems and offer solutions.
- Empower employees who are in direct contact with customers. Provide the tools, resources, and training.
Let’s take an example; the core value of Slack is empathy. So they make sure to practice empathy in their marketing.
Remember that being empathetic means being original — you can’t create empathy marketing campaigns for the sole purpose of manipulating customers, so remember being genuine.
When you become successful in building trustable relationships with your buyers, it will create a believable organic connection between both parties, helping you grow.
The goal of marketing campaigns is to Increase conversion rates is the ultimate goal of every marketing campaign.
Now here comes a question that why Empathy Marketing is important? Let me tell you why.
Customers want to engage with sellers who genuinely care about them, who want to see them succeed. The key is to be honest, and real.
Would you rather interact with someone who cares about making bucks or someone who cares only about you?
Customers are incredibly smart these days. Statistics show that buyers do 75% of their research before purchasing anything.
Now, this is an incredible opportunity for marketers. Worrying how?
Let me explain it.
You can take the research off of a customer’s plate, build a genuine relationship with them, and help them along their buying journey by offering the tools to make intelligent decisions.
When I said tools, they are already there in the form of content. So yes, content is still one of the most powerful tools in marketing.
After deep research and engaging with a potential client, you craft engaging, insightful, and relevant content that resonates with their need; they will not only listen but also engage with you.
So, it is really important to interwoven marketing and empathy. When marketers are empathetic, they can profoundly nurture the needs and connect with the customers on an emotional level, hence building long-term relationships. Therefore, building a genuine relationship should be the number one goal for marketers.
The human emotion range is massive, from positive emotions like happiness, amazement, and interest, to negative emotions like anger, sadness, and fear. Therefore, empathy marketing campaigns must be geared towards evoking these real emotions.
LinkedIn is great example of empathetic content marketing
The marketing purpose of LinkedIn is all about motivating marketers to grow their reach, craft and share knowledgeable content, and, ultimately, achieve their marketing goals.
LinkedIn creates content that educated all levels of marketers on a variety of niches. Check it out on its blog.
The ebook, The Secret Sauce: Learn how LinkedIn uses LinkedIn for marketing will give you deep insight into how LinkedIn itself uses the platform to meet its marketing targets.
LinkedIn uses an immensely effective empathy tactic and wants to educate its audience to work better.
Following are the ways to apply customer empathy in Marketing.
Table of Contents
6 ways to apply empathy in Marketing
Put yourself in customer’s shoes
Your customers just don’t need solutions. Instead, they need to solve a problem. So you must focus on helping them to do that
But, you can’t help them unless you know precisely what your buyers need.
Instead of attracting people, show a genuine interest in helping them.
Listen to Customers motivation
Businesses now don’t listen to understand; they listen with the intent to the response.
Listen with the 3rd ear, to understand that’s called empathetic listening. And it’s one layer deeper than active listening. Marketers should go out with their sales team and meet buyers face to face.
Digital conversations, not campaigns
It is important in marketing to build campaigns but aim for friendly conversations, not campaigns, when you talk about empathy marketing.
If you focus on the campaign, customers feel like you want something from them rather than helping them get what they want.
Follow this simple rule of empathy marketing during conversations;
- Invite,
- Listen,
- Converse
- Recommend or help
- Share your point
Helping is the best Marketing
I know being a customer myself, I can sense when someone’s trying to sell me anyway. This happens when we’re treated objects to generate leads.
On the contrary, when someone shows a genuine care, I can feel that too, and that’s an interesting style of empattthy marketing while trying to help others.
Share value-adding content
Everyone writes content to engage people. To be empathetic in writing, always keep your customers first, then understand their needs, talk about them, and finally offer help via your text.
Unfortunately, most of today’s content does not cover those points and lacks empathetic context. Content without empathy is just a loud noise in B2B marketing and sales.
Now we’ve become publishing machines, not filling up the emotional needs. So, creating content for content’s sake is not to bring change in someone’s life.
Customers are always looking for customer-centric content to help them.
Empower your team
Empower your sales and development teams as they are directly dealing with customers.
Gerhardt shared a marvelous step taken by his CEO.
He realized that marketing was becoming more about fill out forms, so he dropped this idea and replaced it with emails. When you keep your team updated with tools, they find value and eventually build trust.
Bottom Line
Now empathetic marketing is an emerging priority for businesses due to the global situation.
It isn’t enough to talk about your brand or products; now, you need to connect with buyers on a deeper level. I know this marketing tactic may seem touchy and odd, but it’s not. It has an economic benefit for businesses.
Imagine that when we can emotionally connect with our potential customers and provide value, we can create a powerful competitive advantage to generate more sales and revenue.
Creating the content as a brand from a perspective that puts its customers, their needs, dreams, and wants before their own is the smartest way to generate more sales.
That’s how you’re showing customers that you care about them, not your product or service.
If you want to share any tips to incorporate empathy in marketing, let me know in the comments below.
