Empathy in marketing is such a great state of having the power of understanding the perspective of another person’s feelings and emotions as if they are your own.
Have you ever experienced it?
I’m sure everyone has experienced it once in a while. Will you like to listen to a short story to understand it better and how I came to know about empathy?
One day one of my knowns called me, I haven’t talked to that person for many months. But he called me and asked for my help. I listened to his problem and helped him even though I barely know him. Here, I had two options either not to help or to help him. I chose the second one.
This is not an issue if it happens with you once in a while, but it happened with me every time, and I couldn’t say no to anyone at least once.
One day I was talking to someone, that person is in the field of healing, and I told her why this happens to me every time, and why I can’t control myself. She told me I’m an Empath and it’s natural for me but it’s not natural for everyone.
Then, I started digging about it and came to know that we use empathy in our daily lives, and because of having empathy in me I helped those people.
Some People use empathy to ask for help even though they don’t need help, it’s for us to determine whether is it the right decision to help or not.
You can take the right decision only when you know about empathy in depth. Even I myself started identifying who need my help and who doesn’t. So, let’s explore empathy in marketing more and take the right decision!
What is Empathy in Marketing?
Empathy is a vast concept in the field of marketing. In simple words, Empathy is the power of understanding what someone else is going through. It enables a person to see the world from another person’s perspective.
Marketers use common words for elaborating empathy in marketing such as, “Empathy is all about putting yourself in your audience’s shoes”.
Two well-known psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman have classified Empathy into three aspects;
Cognitive Empathy
Cognitive Empathy is also called perspective-taking. In cognitive empathy, you’re only aware of the emotional state of other people. Cognitive Empathy gives you the power to get to know how another person is feeling and what he/she might be thinking at the moment. In this situation, you only have a perspective, so it’s called perspective-taking.
You can build your perspective through several means such as conducting audience research, social media listening etc. You can know what your consumers are feeling just by observing and listening to your consumers without engaging with them.
Emotional Empathy
We took the perspective of other people in cognitive empathy, but emotional empathy moves one step ahead. It’s the state of empathy where you start feeling the emotions that the next person is feeling. It happens because you start engaging with the person to share those emotions.
If you start experiencing the emotions your target audience is feeling, you can optimize the brand messaging according to the emotions.
Compassionate Empathy
Compassionate Empathy is balanced between cognitive and emotional empathy. Compassionate empathy gives you the power to not only understand the perspective but also feel the emotions that other persons are feeling. And this empathy allows people to help spontaneously when another person is in need of something.
I hope you’ve understood everything about empathy. I would like to put light on sympathy also. In both sympathy and empathy, we understand the thoughts and emotions from the point of view of that person who’s facing the situation rather than our own.
As we know in empathy we feel the emotions of another person, but in sympathy, we keep an emotional distance from the person who’s facing the situation.
Sympathy is just about understanding, not feeling those emotions, and a sympathizer will not be willing to help as much as an empathizer will.
I hope now you understand empathy, and how sympathy works. One more thing I would like to bring to attention, empathy doesn’t happen naturally for a lot of people.
Let’s move and discuss the tips for incorporating empathy in marketing!
Tips for Incorporating Empathy in Marketing
If you know a little bit about marketing, you can easily incorporate it into your marketing strategies. Empathy is the way of building strong relationships with your target audiences through connecting on a deeper level with them.
Here are some tips to remember to easily and successfully incorporate empathy in marketing;
Know Your Customers and Be Sensitive with their Reality
Knowing your customers is the first step in every marketing strategy. Research in the marketing, and build customer personas according to them. One more thing while performing research is to be sensitive to the reality of your consumers. As we all know that empathetic marketing is all about strengthening relationships with consumers through feeling their thoughts and emotions. It can all become possible if you’re being sensitive to the emotions and reality of your consumers. Knowing your consumers will allow you to understand the emotions your target audience is resonating with. Thorough market research will provide you with information about the needs, desires, pain points, problems, concerns, fears, and frustrations they’re facing. Ready to perform market research now?
Tell your customer what they want to know
Nowadays customers are becoming more enthusiastic and eager to know about secret recipes, resources, and whatever that’s happening behind the scenes. That’s why most of the brands you’ve seen sharing behind-the-scenes videos on their marketing platforms and this is happening most in the film industry. You must have seen many actors, directors, and producers sharing behind-the-scenes content. Are you ready to share behind the scene content?
Tell Origin Story of Brand and Let Customers Know Why You Exist
Telling your origin story will let your consumers know about your vision, mission, goals and the impact you want to put on the world through your brand. The essence of the brand is the values a brand is associated with. Show your brand’s purpose and values in a way so that users can connect with you on an emphatic level.
Put Yourself into Your Audiences’ Shoes to think like your customers
You need to start to think like your customers and for this, you need to put yourself in your audiences’ shoes. The best way to put yourself into your audience’s shoes is to listen to what they’re saying about your brand without reacting. It’ll help you in understanding the things your target audience is struggling with. Once you understand their pains, needs and desires, you can provide them with customized solutions to fulfil their needs and solve their problems. Always remember emphatic marketing is all about solving and fulfilling consumers’ problems, so build products to fulfil consumers’ requirements, not yourself.
Educate your customers
Education is what empowers all of us in several aspects. Educating your target audiences can be a great emphatic move you can incorporate into your marketing strategies. If you’re providing educational content to solve your consumers’ problems, then whenever they need answers to their problems, they’ll look at your brand to solve the problems. This way you can establish yourself as a problem-solver in the market.
Make your marketing interactive
Making marketing interactive helps you and your audiences to build strong relationships with each other. There are many ways of making your marketing interactive such as quizzes, and giveaways. Always make your interactive content as simple as possible. As simple as the process will be as much as the interactions you’ll get for your brand.
Tell Your Customers’ Stories
Customer Stories are a great way to incorporate empathy into your marketing strategies. As we all know, people want to see themselves in marketing materials, and customer stories are the places where customers can see their own struggles and problems along with the solutions to overcome those stressful situations. If you want to learn more about storytelling then read about it on our blog “Storytelling: Tell the Story of Your Brand”.
Use UGC to honour your customers
Sharing user-generated content makes your brand a responsible and caring one in front of your consumers. User-generated content can be of different types such as a collage, a review, or anything valuable information that has been generated by a consumer. It is a strong tool for building brand connections with consumers as users will only create content if they’re very much satisfied with your products or services. You can also say your users to develop content for your brand by announcing brand contests, giveaways etc. You will also be able to expand your reach by tagging your users.
Give Customers Useful Content
Since when marketers have identified the potential of content marketing, they’re putting so much content as a publishing machine. This type of content lacks empathetic context. Brands are focussing on producing so much content without paying attention to its usefulness, and value. All of this has created a state of content shock that means the content is not going to work anymore.
Is it so? Then, why are marketers still developing content?
Is there any way to overcome the situation of content shock?
Yes, there’s a solution, if you’re developing content keeping the context in mind using empathetic language along with solving the problems of your consumers with your useful and valuable content, then you’ve won the match. The state of content shock isn’t going to affect your business if you’re creating customer-centric content and helping your consumers to move on the right paths with your valuable resources.
Be authentic and Clear with No Confusion
Provide authentic content to your audiences with a clear and single message in one campaign. If you’re not having a clear conversation, it’ll create confusion and repel your audiences which will end up in losing consumers or loyalty. Do you want to lose the loyalty of your audiences? If not, then provide authentic content as much as possible. And even if your products or services are complex, their description should be clear and concise with a single message.
Empathetic Language in Branding Materials
Using empathetic language in your marketing materials, messaging and stories will help you in connecting with your consumers on an emotional level. This way you can build a strong relationship with your consumers in no time.
Improve UX of the Website
User experience and user interface tell so much about the brand. User experience tells how your brand is treating consumers, and user interface tells how much your brand understands your target audience. If you know your consumers very well, then you can improve both UX and UI in no time.
Listen and Observe closely to Map Buyer Motivation and Evolve
Listening empathetically and observing closely will give you deeper insights into your consumers. With the help of empathetic listening, you can get to know about the implied assumptions, beliefs and motivations behind what a consumer is talking about. To map your buyer’s motivations you should personally meet them only when you’ll be able to understand the context and nonverbal things such as feelings and behaviour.
Develop Personalized Conversations
Conversations are more natural than any other marketing strategy, and there is also so much value in understanding other person’s problems and solving them. Being so powerful conversations have a big role in therapy. Even one of our clients has named his whole initiative conversations, you can visit his web platform by clicking here. In the same way, conversations are also playing a wide role in marketing, and marketing through conversations is called conversational marketing.
Conversations work in a slow but effective way and contain so many empathetic values, so first invite your consumers, then listen to them as people want to be listened to, converse with them and at last when they’ve established good communication with them you may recommend products and services of your brand without hesitating. Be focused on developing conversations more rather than running campaigns.
Help Others with Your Services instead of selling them
Helping others with your services will also help you in return in terms of return on investments. And we should always try to help consumers with our services and products. But One thing to keep in mind is if you genuinely want to help people only then it’ll work as we subconsciously can tell if the next person is genuinely willing to help or not, so consumers will recognize if you’re faking for the sake of sales.
Provide Exceptional Value
Providing exceptional value through your brand’s messaging, marketing materials, content, and conversations will help you in establishing authority in your domain. So, be focused on consumers’ needs, and solving their problems.
Give them a positive experience
Providing a positive experience to your consumers will push them to get back to you for advice and guidance in future in the domain you’re providing services and products. It will help you in building retainer clients. So, if you’re willing to retain your clients, then your consumer experience should be positive, genuine and unique.
Well, I hope we’ve covered every tip related to empathetic marketing. Now, let’s discuss some of the benefits we can get by implementing empathetic marketing.
Benefits of Empathetic Marketing Strategy
Benefits are what everyone looks for. Implementing empathetic marketing has thousands of benefits in which some following;
- Using empathetic language will help you in establishing yourself as an authority in your domain
- Your consumers will start listening to you as you’ll be addressing their problems, and solving them with your solutions.
- Empathy in marketing will strengthen your consumers’ trust in your brand.
- Empathy in marketing will help you in building more brand advocates in no time and with no extra effort.
- It simplifies conversations with more deep insights.
- There is an easy generation of leads with the help of empathy in marketing.
- Empathy in marketing nurtures your relationships with your consumers in a genuine way connecting with them on an emotional level
I hope empathy has the power to provide everything you need from your marketing campaigns. Now, let’s conclude this blog!
Wrapping Up
People want to share their thoughts, emotions and feeling with others and empathetic marketing provides them with an opportunity to share these things as empathetic marketing is all about putting yourself in consumers’ shoes and understanding the above-mentioned things.
After the pandemic, people need more support on an emotional and mental level and they want to be heard and understood, you can cash this opportunity through empathetic marketing.
Start with understanding your audiences first, and feeling what they’re feeling, then establishing conversations with them along with following the tips mentioned in the blog. At last, you can recommend products and services to them. This way the number of retainer clients will increase drastically.
We would love to know in the comment section how you’re going to incorporate empathy in marketing. If you’ve any questions and want the help of the DigiAvtar Team to build your empathetic marketing strategy then Connect with Us.
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