How to Apply Empathic Marketing in Your Contents

One way to catch people’s attention is to evoke high-arousal emotions, as discussed in previous blogs: Why People Share a Content: Psychology of Viral Content and Tips for Making your Content Viral and Shareable. To do so, as marketers or business owners, you should understand and know your target market and how they feel. Empathy is the best way to exactly know how your consumers feel before, during, and after availing of your products and services.

Empathy is placing oneself in another’s place or shoes. It seeks to understand how others feel from the perspective of the person who is experiencing it. It is an emotional mimicry. It is different from sympathy, where the feeling is subjective. A person may feel sad, pity, or sorrow for another person when he or she sympathizes.

In marketing, empathy happens when a brand understands the needs, feelings, and struggles of its clients. According to Antonio Damasio, a well-known neuroscientist, humans decide based on their emotions, oftentimes they are unconscious. Since purchasing is a decision, marketers need to capture the necessary emotions that will later lead their clients to avail the brand’s products or services. One of the aims of empathic marketing is for clients to connect with the brand.

It’s a bit different from persuasion, wherein marketers sometimes tend to be stubborn to convince their buyers to purchase their product at that very moment. In empathic marketing, the marketing process may take longer than usual because it does not intend for buyers to act immediately. Empathic marketers want their buyers to decide on their own by incorporating emotions into their content.

HOW TO APPLY EMPATHIC MARKETING

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Understand Your Target Audience.

You need not only to know your audience but also to understand where they are coming from so that you will know how to communicate with them. You should understand their pain points so that you would know how your products or services can solve their problems. 

*Ways to Understand your Clients*

1. Research about your customers, like what are their interests, needs, struggles, and pains.

Review stats like page visits, post engagements, etc

Make assumptions of possible emotions to test which ones are applicable and which are not. Ask questions and let them engage in your posts to gauge their feelings. Listen to your customers and think like them. Make use of the digital power like in collecting data to understand your target audience; use cookies in the site and the targeting power of Facebook and Instagram ads.

2. Use empathy maps

Updated Empathy Map
Source: https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a

Empathy map was created by Dave Gray, founder of Xplane and Boardthing. It is a tool used by marketers to identify the emotions involved in the customers’ buying experience. This is a guide for marketers where they can list down their customers’ experience through these six quadrants:(Add quadrants of empathy maps)

1- Goals (Who are we empathizing with? What do they need to do?)

2- What do they see?

3- What do they say?

4- What do they do?

5- What do they hear?

6- What do they think and feel (Pains / Gains)

As marketers and business owners, you should understand the empathy maps to know where in the buyer’s journey is your target customer. By using these quadrants, you will know which emotions trigger them to avail of certain products or services. You will also know when the right timing of release for every content that you create. You can listen intently to your customers, and think and feel like your clients.

3. Should you put your customers first, or your employees first?

We have a saying that “customers are always right”. You have to serve their needs and wants for your brand to be noticed, and for your customers to stay loyal to you. You have to help them in their struggles. You have to make them feel comfortable so that they would feel comfortable to you too.

But how about those people who serve directly to your clients?

You can start the empathic marketing process by being empathic to your employees first, especially to front-liners. If they feel that you empathize with them, they will pay it forward to your customers as well. You can even encourage other employees, like those who work at the back-office, to create posts that are aligned to your empathic marketing goal. It’s like having micro-influencers of your brand for free.

Create Your Buyer Persona

In marketing, one of the first things to do is to know your target market. But marketers also need to create a buyer persona or customer avatar. By creating customer avatar, you create their dream customer based on specific descriptions like demographics, nationality, personality, interests, behaviors, attitudes, etc. By doing this, you can easily identify the pain points of their target market. You will know which platform/s to use to get the attention of your audience. You can customize or tailor-fit their marketing strategy based on this specific audience. You would know which emotions to use to capture the attention for this specific buyer. Though your buyer persona is your ideal customer, this person should not be far from reality.

Communicate to Your Clients

With the internet era, you can communicate now with them not only through emails, chats and video chats, and mobile calls, but also through social media and blog posts in text, graphics, and video format, or combination of these. The more appealing or eye-catching they are to the viewers, the better engagements they would get.

1. Tell stories

Brand stories are different from fairy tales. They are realistic. They show real problems of customers and give solutions to these.

Sharing of brand stories is effective in empathic marketing because, through these stories, people can remember the brand through the emotions that are incorporated to the stories. Consumers tend to buy a specific brand because of the stories shared by the brand. The brand story becomes part of the identity of the brand. Your story is how your brand will be remembered by the customers. Through this, the audience can feel that you are with them while they struggle, and they trust your brand more.

You can share your own story or someone else of a similar situation with your target audience. You can even create a fictional story based on your buyer persona, but mention at the end that it is just a made-up story and relate it to the lesson that you want them to learn or emotions that you want them to feel. Still, true stories are the most effective storytelling because they elicit emotions that came from real people.

But keep in mind though, that you should make your stories simple because complications can ruin the trust by making them think more and lessening the emotional connections.

“Tell your story in such a way that it tells your customers we relate to you, we understand you, we are like you.”

– Neil Patel

“Brand stories are not marketing materials. They are not ads, and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage. Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can.”

– Susan Gunelius, from Forbes article

You can also let the customers share their own stories and use it in your marketing. On Instagram, some marketers are already using the “user-generated content” wherein, they share posts or IG stories based on the clients’ point of view. By encouraging your customers to tell their stories, you will be able to capture the exact emotions that your target market has. Your target market can relate to these stories because these are their stories.

“When people hear your story in more places, it reinforces their trust. And when they start telling your story themselves, they trust it even more.”

– Neil Patel

• Rags-to-riches and inspirational stories

Rags-to-riches stories is one of the most effective brand stories because masses can relate to these. Inspirational stories, in general, make the audience feel positive that their dreams, wishes, goals would come true through hard work, luck, prayer, etc. It only means that even if you are an ordinary person, you can be the person that you have dreamt of. For the inspirational stories to be effective, the products or the people offering the services are with the person who came from being poor or having struggled to being rich, happy, free, and/or contented. Without these products or people, they wouldn’t reach their dreams. This happens when you share stories that highlight the strength of the protagonist and how he was able to surpass his challenges through the help of the products or services.

• Bad ending with lessons

Contrary to inspirational stories, bad ending with lessons would still have an impact on the audience. But how can this become a part of empathic marketing? When you share stories with a bad ending, people who are struggling can relate to these stories. By sharing the lessons behind the stories with bad ending, people will know how they can prevent their bad ending by availing the products or services offered by a certain brand.

However, there should be caution in using the stories with bad endings. The lessons should be clear enough for the audience to understand what the story is conveying. It should also be clear that the bad ending would not happen to the potential customers if they avail of the products or services that you offer. If the storytellers were not able to convey the right message, people might interpret the message differently and would not convert high sales later on.

• Stories of influencers

(Read also the #9 of Tips for Making your Content Viral and Shareable)

Influencers are effective in engaging the brand’s clients because they appear to be more authentic than celebrities. Micro and nano-influencers appear to be more authentic too compared to macro-influencers as they are closer to the target market’s social status. By being brand ambassadors, they represent themselves as both part of the brand and part of the target audience. They are bridging the gap between the two.

As brand owners, you can send products or let the influencers experience your services so that they can give honest feedback. By doing this, influencers can share how they feel before, during, and after using the product or experiencing the services. Even if the audience has not tried availing from the brand, they can have a virtual experience just by reading or watching the blog, vlog, or social media post.

2. Share educational posts about the products or services

Give them valuable information related to your brand

You connect also with your audience by posting content with valuable information. As marketers, you do not make them feel like they’re idiots. You educate them so that they will have more advantages than the others who do not follow or use your brand. You also inform them of the benefits of using the products or availing services from you, and the things that they might lose, if they do not avail of your products or services. By giving them information, you help them identify their problems and solve them. You are also giving them the power to decide based on their newly-found knowledge, which they owe from you. You also build authority and your brand can be seen as expert in your field and thus your market trusts you more.

Show some facts on the solutions that you are going to offer, but these facts must be tagged along with the positive emotions that they would feel if they follow your solutions.

Hannah Braime, a British life coach, said that her script is more effective whenever she tells her customers about the emotional benefits of availing her services than giving them the ‘shoulds’, this is called the framing effect, a term coined by a behavioral economist named Daniel Kahneman.

3. Ask questions that make them evaluate their emotions in relation to the brand.

As marketers, you should talk to people who possess certain emotions so that they would understand how they feel. Connect with your audience by creating engaging posts and asking them questions or making them think about the answer. This would also elicit certain emotions that make the audience feel that you can relate to their struggles. Allow them to express their feelings and confirm their feelings so that they would feel that you listen to their woes and you are there for them. Later, you can structure marketing strategies that would fit the emotions of their audience.

Example of Empathic Marketing

Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign

A global brand has a very good example of empathic marketing. Dove used empathic marketing in their Real Beauty campaign. They created an ad that taps people who are struggling with low self-esteem, and in turn, encourages them to believe and empower themselves.

Some Cautions in Using Empathic Marketing

The intention is good, but because the process does not follow the ethical standards of advertising, you might be sued for it.

As marketers or brand owners, you should be cautious in using empathic marketing. There are instances that instead of making your consumers feel the right emotions, it becomes the other way around. You should take note of the audience, gender, race, even feelings of most people. You should also take note of the fact and not to mislead your consumers by giving false information. There are universal ethical standards that marketers should follow too. There are also some cases where the campaign becomes controversial because of the wrong message that it implies.

The ways of applying empathic marketing need not follow the exact sequence because it can vary for every brand. What is important is that marketers and brand owners should catch the right emotions of the audience, and use it to make marketing strategies while following the ethical standards of marketing.

If you need someone to handle your social media pages and Facebook groups or online communities, or someone who can create tailor-fit posts for your brand that can capture the right emotions from your potential clients, may it be a social media posts or blogs, you can contact me here.