Consumers have a lot of choices these days, especially when it comes to the online marketplace.
Yet, they’re also looking for brands to connect with on a deeper level. Brands that “get them” and understand their pain points.
As a result, it’s time to focus your marketing strategy on delivering a more customer-centric approach. In other words, lean into empathetic marketing.
Empathetic marketing is a human-to-human approach to build long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Making a sale can add to your profits one time, but gaining a loyal customer who trusts your brand, identifies with your messaging, and returns again and again will do so much more.
Here’s what we will cover in this guide:
What is Empathetic Marketing?
Gone are the days of the one-size-fits-all marketing strategies.
Connecting with your customers and potential customers now requires a more individualized approach. And that approach needs to be empathy-based.
What exactly is empathy?
Empathy is an ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to see life from a different perspective.
Empathetic marketing, then, is about conceptualizing that world you see through another’s eyes to help you create a digital marketing strategy to meet their wants and needs.
To see through the eyes of customers, consider the following:
- Who are your customers?
- What challenges are they facing?
- What is motivating them to take action?
By moving your customer into the center of your marketing strategies, then working outwards from there, you are changing how the process works.
One note of caution before you begin
Avoid manipulating just because you understand where customers are coming from. That will come back to haunt you at some point and negatively affect your brand.
Stay genuine in your marketing approaches, your brand’s tone of voice, and across all marketing channels.
Speak to your customers’ emotions and help them solve pressing problems by first understanding where they are coming from and what desires they hold.
To build loyal customers and increase conversion rates:
- Meet your customers where they are.
- Get to know them.
- Touch the emotions that matter to them.
- Incorporate it in everything you do, from your online content to the events you sponsor.
How Does Empathetic Marketing Help Your Business?
Taking an empathetic approach to your marketing efforts can positively impact your business. Here’s how.
Builds trust
Gone are the days when customers accepted being sold too only.
Instead, customers want to trust a brand. They are looking for more genuine and authentic interactions and connections.
Today you have more and more opportunities to directly connect with your optimal customers and the public at large. But this can also make building trust more challenging.
Start by looking at things from your customer’s perspective. Then add transparency into the mix.
From there, people will either feel the connection to your brand, learning to trust you and become a customer, or not.
Positively Affects Brand Reputation
Different generations and demographics participate in the marketplace today.
Couple that with the challenging personal and global circumstances, and the need for empathetic marketing grows.
While you may be good at describing your project or service, pointing out how beneficial it is, it won’t be enough today.
Your brand needs to go further, connecting with customers on deeper levels.
Show your awareness of their circumstances, needs, and wants, and connect on that deeper level. Provide solutions to their problems.
Your business will benefit from more exposure, more interest, and a more loyal customer base. In turn, your brand’s reputation will positively increase.
Increases Marketing ROI
Data-based marketing campaigns have been the norm in the past. You gather loads of data and turn it into a targeted strategy and let it fly.
Relying solely on this data today, however, may keep your marketing ROI static or even lower it.
Instead, combine your data with empathetic marketing, and see the results soar.
You’ll be able to develop innovative approaches, create meaningful content that gets results, and watch as your marketing ROI increases.
Leads to Beneficial Customer Loyalty
Brands that customers can personally relate to lead to long-term customer loyalty.
Along with that customer loyalty comes word-of-mouth sharing and promotion.
Social media platforms are popular spots for mentioning businesses that are not only solving a problem but doing it with empathy.
Essentially, your empathetic marketing, then, can be beneficial in gaining new customers directly and indirectly.
Tips to Connect with Your Audience with Empathetic Marketing
To incorporate empathy into your marketing strategy, and connect with your audience, follow these tips.
1. Shift Focus Away from the Hard Sell
While sales are still the ultimate goal and the hoped-for result of digital marketing strategies, you need to avoid starting with the selling mindset.
Readjust your focus away from the hard sell and set it on speaking to your customers in a different way. Don’t just tell them why they need to buy your product or service.
Consumers can quickly tell when you are just trying to sell them something instead of providing information that can help their situation.
Show them who you are and how you can help them reach their goals or desired outcome.
2. Listen First
Today you need to understand the sentiment surrounding your band. What are people saying about it on social media and elsewhere?
What do they like, and what are they saying needs to change?
If you’re not already incorporating social listening into your marketing strategy, it’s time to add it.
Listen in for clues, motivations, and emotional triggers. Seek out feedback from your sales team and customer service departments also.
Use this information to better understand what consumers are looking for and that all-important buyer intent.
3. Create Better Buyer Personas with Empathy in Mind
To gain a clearer, more precise understanding of your customers, create more detailed buyer personas, including pain points and needs.
By doing so, you can better understand how to communicate with each one and at each stage along the buyer’s journey.
These buyer personas help guide your empathetic marketing efforts, including the content you create to reach your targeted audience.
To add to your buyer personas, and gain insight, do these two things:
Discover Where They are Engaging
What type of content and on what platforms are your personas engaging.
Understand What Your Collected Data is Telling You
Instead of just compiling analytics, such pages visited and purchases made, try to understand your persona’s motivations and needs. Look for specific behaviors and preferences. Put yourself in their shoes.
4. Humanize Your Brand
Instead of setting yourself apart as strictly a business, show you have a human side as well.
Begin with your story, the story behind why you exist, and how you got started. People connect more readily when you share more about your company and brand in relatable ways.
Humanizing your brand also makes you more approachable.
5. Address Pain Points of Your Customers
Your marketing efforts need to center around your customer and their particular pain points.
A pain point is an ongoing or recurring issue or problem that frustrates, bothers, inconveniences, troubles, or annoys a customer.
Show how your specific product or service can alleviate those pain points for your customer.
By showing that you understand what the problem is and then providing a solution, it puts you on a more personal level with customers, which is where you want to be.
To determine your customer’s pain points, start by looking at the information you gather from social listening efforts.
You may need to also go out and connect with customers directly for more specific information. From there, create content that directly addresses those pain points.
6. Create Content to be Helpful
Once you gather information and discover the pain points of consumers, your next step is to create content with a focus on being helpful.
Provide the content they are looking for, the content they are craving.
You’ll need to adapt parts of your content marketing strategy and focus on evoking an emotion that consumers can relate to in their daily lives.
Create an even more personal experience by including various interactive content across platforms.
Also, reevaluate or audit your current content. Do you need to remove some of it or modify it in some way, so it will be more useful?
Finally, consider incorporating color psychology in your content as an additional way to reach customers
7. Relate Your Brand to Their World
Storytelling has long been a technique to understand something better.
You can apply empathic storytelling to your marketing strategy and show how your brand relates to them and their world.
Create videos and animations of everyday situations that customers can relate to. Let them see themselves in your presentation.
Show them how your product or service can improve their life, solve a problem, save them time and money, or any number of issues they face.
Successful Examples of Brands Using Empathy
Check out how companies are already using empathy to expand their marketing strategies.
Zappos
This online retailer focuses on the customer experience by empowering its employees to make a difference.
When a customer in South Carolina needed to return an order that was incorrect, Zappos staff responded by sending her the right order while also donating to flood victims in her area.
Delta Air Lines
Delta realizes that its employees are the ones on the front line when flights are delayed, or other travel issues occur. So, they empower them to find ways to alleviate customer frustrations.
For example, when bad weather delayed flights from Atlanta in 2017, Delta employees handed out pizzas to those trapped on planes on the tarmac as well as those camping out in airport terminals.
These passengers shared photos and positive comments on social media, turning a frustrating situation into a more positive experience.
Dove
Dove’s social media and video campaigns promoting positive body image are successful examples of how to put empathy into action.
Their tagline of “You’re more beautiful than you think” hit an emotional chord with consumers and created trust and affection for the brand.
Dove also promoted interactions with consumers with its #ShowUs campaign, eliciting them to share personal experiences.
Lush
The beauty brand Lush is all about providing high-value natural products, so they established transparency through a video series entitled How It’s Made.
Each of the videos showcases how their products are created, with employees taking the viewer into the kitchen with them for a first-hand look at ingredients and processes.
Educational, entertaining, and humanizing, these videos are a win with customers.
Home Depot
When it comes to creating educational content, Home Depot excels.
While their customer base is already interested in DIY projects, they go the extra mile to provide additional inspiration and ways to use their products.
For example, their marketing team created an infographic on how to grow a salad garden. Within it, they included step-by-step instructions, vegetable suggestions, and the supplies needed.
All of these, in some way, incorporate empathetic marketing and makes these companies stand out in the minds of customers.
Wrap Up: Choose Empathetic Marketing to Better Connect with Customers
Finding more ways to reach customers and stand out in the crowd of marketers jamming up the internet these days can be challenging.
But you can do this by incorporating empathy into your marketing strategy and connecting with more customers while humanizing your brand.
Ready to learn more about human-to-human marketing and make a difference in both your customer’s life and your bottom line? Check out our guide!
