Empathetic marketing is creating a marketing strategy by imagining what your customers might want or feel. It allows you to understand your audience’s thoughts, emotions, and needs. Doing this gives you a chance to build strong, trustworthy relationships with clients.
Empathetic marketing is understanding what the customer is feeling and then creating a marketing message or campaign that speaks to that. It’s not just about selling a product, but connecting with the customer on an emotional level.
What Is Empathetic Marketing?
The events of 2020 have indicated the significance of empathetic marketing for businesses, regardless of size. Given the world’s current state, companies need to adjust their strategies to satisfy the revised needs of their target market if they want to continue to progress. The most effective way to achieve this is by empathizing with them.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share another’s feelings and emotions. In marketing, empathy is about understanding the customer’s perspective and making sure the customer is at the center of your marketing strategy.
It is important to be empathetic, but this does not mean that you should be fake. You cannot create marketing campaigns that are only meant to manipulate customers.
You need to create believable empathy in order to build trust and organic relationships with customers. Empathy creates authentic connections between brands and users throughout the customer journey.
Having a high conversion rate is the main goal for every marketing campaign, but brands need to rethink how they achieve those conversions.
If your marketing strategy mainly uses aggressive or forceful selling techniques, you should consider changing your plans for next year.
Why Is Empathy Important in Marketing?
Although there are many reasons why empathy is important, we have provided an overview of how it works in marketing. In 2022 and beyond, it will be increasingly important to have empathy.
Now more than ever, emotion and connection are necessary. The way we live and work has changed in ways we couldn’t have imagined, making “business as usual” a thing of the past. The emotions generated about the future impact how consumers react to marketing campaigns.
The range of human emotion is large, from positive emotions like joy, interest, and amazement, to the more negative, such as fear, anger, or sadness. Campaigns should be geared towards causing these real emotions.
Too many marketers rely on a one-size-fits all model that is no longer effective. Brands need to change the way they sell products and services, as the traditional method is no longer effective. This should be a ground-up approach, as too many marketers rely on a one-size-fits all model.
You should adjust your content marketing strategy, take another look at the customer journey, and explain to your employees why it’s beneficial to evoke emotion in marketing.
Is Empathetic Marketing Efficient?
When you can understand how your customers feel and what they want, you can figure out ways to serve them better. Being able to empathize with them is always the best solution.
Smart marketers understand the importance of eliciting an emotional response from their audience. They do this by using subtle cues like colors and abstract images. More obvious cues include the tone of voice and body movement. Facial expressions can also be used to show emotions like sadness, happiness, fear, anger, excitement, or surprise.
While emotional marketing can be successful in getting customers to purchase items, the best way to create lasting relationships with customers is by understanding them and helping them make decisions that will improve their lives.
The following are some suggestions to help you think from an empathetic perspective and connect with customers on a more personal and deeper level.
Get to Know Your Audience
You need to know your audience in order to figure out which emotion will be most effective in resonating with their needs, desires, or pain points. Do some research on your customers to figure out what they perceive.
Determine the problems, concerns, fears and frustrations your clients have in order to find out what they need and what their idea of success, achievement, happiness and failure is. Ask them questions about their environments and the risks they are willing to take in order to get a better understanding of who they are and what they want.
Knowing how your customers see and feel about your business will help you to make their experience better.
Tools to Help You Determine How Your Customers Feel
To better understand your customer’s perspectives, you can use techniques like ethnography, focus groups, surveys, and social listening.
Netnography is a type of research that analyzes the customer’s free behavior, as opposed to interviews and surveys. This type of research can offer valuable insights into your customers’ hobbies, influences, goals, concerns, and pain points. In essence, it is a tool to study virtual communities through observation and social network analysis.
If a hotel wants to understand how to better serve couples with children, it can be helpful to assess discussions in social media groups where parents discuss traveling with kids and infants, bottle feeding while traveling, sleeping arrangements, choosing a vacation destination, etc.
How to Navigate Empathetic Marketing
The goal of brand marketing has been to sell products and amplify your brand image by emphasizing the characteristics of your company.
Here are the best ways to foster an empathetic marketing mindset.
Be Authentic
For brands to be successful, they need to be authentic. Customers will quickly abandon brands that seem insincere or fake. When brands are being genuine, people will do their marketing for them through word of mouth, shares, and likes.
This will help draw in consumers who appreciate your mission and goal. Authenticity marketing is all about the stories you tell. Share the hardships your team has overcome, the challenges you face, and the driving force behind your business. This will help draw in consumers who appreciate your mission and goal.
Let Customers Know Why You Exist
Your brand purpose is what you stand for, not the product you market. When you think of Nike, it is athletic excellence that remains at the forefront of what it stands for, not sports gear and sneakers.
The W Hotels offer an extraordinary travel experience with style; people don’t just go there for food and lodging.
Though Disney is known for their theme parks, resorts, and movies, they stand for happiness and magic.
This is the most important part of your brand. Many businesses say that their core values are things like respect, accountability, trust, honesty, loyalty, and simplicity. However, if you just choose values randomly, they won’t actually reflect who you are or what your company does.
When it comes to important factors in launching a new product, convenience is not as important as innovation. Responsibility and accountability are key, as is respect for communication and teamwork.
The most important thing is to be genuine and true to yourself. Your customers will appreciate this and will be more likely to trust you.
Engage with Customers
More and more people are using anti-spam software and ad blockers to filter out non- genuine messages. To build a genuine connection, you need to be able to speak and listen to customers.
Make sure to pay attention to what your customers need and want, and make them feel like they are your only customers. If they don’t feel valued, they will go to someone else.
There are plenty of ways to make customers feel valued so that they feel understood and special. You can retweet their tweets, participate in conversations, and respond to comments on social media and on your blog. Be sure to respond to questions, inquiries, and requests promptly, and thank customers for doing business with you.
Tell Your Customers’ Stories Using Empathetic Marketing
Nowadays, it’s common to see customer success stories, case studies, and testimonials from brands. These stories and videos are meant to show customers how much better off they are after using the service or product.
So why bother investing in customer stories?
Your prospects will be more interested in you and your products when they see that you have helped people with similar struggles and concerns.
Use Empathetic Language
Most brands use the word “should” a lot, just like most of us. They use it to express emotions such as remorse, shame, and frustration, as well as to keep themselves in check and make others do something.
Hannah Braime, author and coach, explains that when you tell others they should do something, you are not respecting their ability to make the best decisions for themselves. The words “must” and “should” are unnegotiable and take away people’s sense of autonomy, freedom, and choice. Instead of tell others what they should do, Braime suggests using phrases such as “I feel,” “I think,” and “I wonder.” These expressions show that your opinion is just that—an opinion—and doesn’t have to be followed.
Do not make statements like these:
“I must be on time for that meeting”
“I should start eating healthy”
“We should go to the park tomorrow”
In our daily lives, we often use the words “must” and “should” too much. However, this habit can be harmful because it can create unrealistic demands and expectations which can make us feel like we have failed, are frustrated, or are disappointed.
When there is only black and white with no gray area, there is no room for discussion, active listening, and negotiating. “Must” and “should” put people under a lot of pressure to act instead of focusing on what they want.
Instead of saying “I should start eating healthy,” it would be more empathetic to say “My goal is to eat healthy as much as possible.” Instead of saying “I must be on time for that meeting,” it would be kinder to say “I want to be on time for that meeting.”
Understand Your Audience’s Pain Points
It is important to understand what your audience needs in order to create successful content. Now is a good time to update your buyer personas to accurately reflect the current situation your customers are facing.
How can you do this? By understanding that customer empathy works in two ways:
- What are the customer pain points in the real world?
- What are the customer pain points regarding your business?
The recent pandemic has had a large negative impact on the world, resulting in people feeling lonely and uncertain. This has caused many people to miss out on opportunities to travel and meet new people.
Your brand will be able to make a stronger connection with your audience if it can help them cope with their feelings, for example by offering virtual classes or providing entertainment.
JetBlue has done a good job of understanding customers’ current pain points — how to travel safely in the pandemic and what to do in an emergency — and created videos addressing those issues.
In order to understand your customers’ issues with your brand, you will need to do some more research.
It’s a good idea to analyze your traffic and conversions each week and take note of the things that have increased or decreased the most. This can help you understand what parts of your brand are appealing to customers.
Social listening can help you understand how people feel about your brand. However, you shouldn’t get involved in every conversation, even if you’re feeling defensive. If customers aren’t happy with your brand, you should learn why that is and how you can improve things.
Of course, nothing beats talking to your customers directly. Schedule a call or send out a short survey and ask them a few questions:
- Are they happy with your brand?
- What product/service has benefited them the most?
- What would they like to see improved?
Don’t make any promises that you can’t keep, but use this as an opportunity to learn how to improve your interactions with customers.
After you collect this information, you can create a customer traffic report that will show you how to change your marketing strategy.
It’s important for brands to avoid confusion.
This is closely related to marketing strategies, but clarity is often neglected when you’re trying out a new mindset. If you’re selling a complex service that will eventually help customers, you don’t want to confuse them with technical language or a long, complicated process.
Share guides with users that contain detailed instructions on how to complete the onboarding process. Using visual aids such as screenshots, videos, or timelines will help make the process easier to follow.
Onboarding guides help customers feel like the company cares about them and is willing to help them through every step of the process. This builds trust and strengthens the connection between customer and brand.