The Role of Empathy in Marketing

Put Yourself in the Customer’s Shoes

Today’s consumer has become increasingly savvy in how they absorb information about your brand. In turn, the never-ending flow of information has also made consumers progressively skeptical about brand messaging and the truthfulness behind self-promoting content. This makes the creation of marketing initiatives much more complicated when it comes to creating messaging that your audience can relate to. Ultimately, when your goal is to build trust, improve customer loyalty, and drive revenues, customer empathy is an important tool for marketers.

Be the Customer in Order to be the Brand

If brands want to truly develop deep connections with their customers, employing an empathetic approach to your marketing can provide valuable insights when it comes to understanding how the consumer feels about your brand.

Understanding the emotions of your customers better equips you to respond to their needs for your products and motives for engaging with your brand at a personal level. As a brand that exhibits empathy, you establish trust with your audience and a more consequential connection with your clientele.

How to Establish Brand Empathy

How do you establish empathy with your customer, or, to put it another way, understand the experience from their perspective? If you want to experience everything that your customer does in dealing with your brand, you’ll need to navigate all the touchpoints that make up the customer journey. 

In order to experience the customer’s highs and lows when it comes to interacting with your business, you’ll need to be the customer and embark on their journey; find out where they first connect with you; identify precisely when the buying decision occurs; understand their experience when it comes to dealing with your customer service team. In other words, look at your brand from the outside to empathize with what your customers experience.

Once you’ve gone through that process, you’ll begin to understand their overall journey, areas of satisfaction, pain points, problems, challenges, frustrations, and concerns. By experiencing these as a customer, you can begin to empathize with your audience and better understand the customer experience and perceptions of your business. This will allow you to find solutions that better meet the needs of your clientele. 

Making Your Marketing Empathy Actionable

Once you understand the customer experience from a user perspective, you can take steps to improve your overall interactions, create enhanced messaging and content, better target your advertising, personalize your messaging, and increase the likelihood of customer conversion and retention.

For example, after identifying issues or complaints about the length of time it takes for your customer service team to respond to complaints or answer questions, you can demonstrate empathy by creating campaigns that address your new approach to customer service and your commitment to answering all inquiries within a specific timeframe. If clients complain that they are hesitant to make a purchase because product information is limited, you can create better content through informational storytelling whereby you go into more detail about your products, how they were conceived, their quality, lifetime warranty, provide better images, and so on. 

Customer reviews or self-made videos can also show your brand as empathetic by personalizing the messaging that you share with your market. After all, there are few things more personal than seeing other customers express their satisfaction with your product or service. 

Conclusion

Building a meaningful relationship with your clients comes from understanding their needs as they relate to their expectations of your brand. If brands want to truly understand the customer experience, they need to step into their shoes so that they can empathize with their emotions and create a more meaningful relationship through messaging and content that speaks to the customer’s emotions. Once you understand how your customers engage with your brand as individuals as opposed to as an audience, you’ll quickly be able to increase loyalty and long-term client retention.