Many people think that empathy is just a throwaway word, but the reality is that it’s one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing. Empathy means understanding what your customers need and want.
It also means being willing to go the extra mile for them. It is the ability to understand somebody’s perspective and see things from their point of view. For empathy-driven digital marketing efforts to succeed, you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes.
The stiff competition in the industry often makes companies insensitive to the human side of the business. That’s why creating an empathetic digital marketing strategy has never been more critical than it is now. If you want to succeed online, you have to remember your audience: real people with real problems who need real solutions.
While it is essential to create a genuine connection with your customer base, you should also not design a marketing campaign that is solely manipulative either. With that being said, let’s look at the five ways you can incorporate empathy in your digital marketing strategy.
1. Understand Your Audience and Their Needs
The most basic way to incorporate empathy in your digital marketing strategy is by understanding who your audience is and what they need. An easy way to do this is by looking at your customer base and examining their problems.
One way you can do this is by going through the “Contact Us” section of your website and seeing how many questions people are asking about specific products or services, as well as who are contacting them in the first place.
Similarly, to reflect on real-time customer needs, you’ll need to develop consumer personas. Customer personas are a collection of the demographic, psychographic and behavioral information to understand your customers.
If you want to go even deeper into understanding what motivates your audience, one way to do this is by looking at their social media activity. You’ll want to note any trends or hot topics they’re discussing, which may give you clues about their pain points.
Once you’ve truly understood your audience and their needs, it will be easier for you to provide relevant content that captures their attention. For example, overviewing how a specific demographic feels about their everyday life or providing information on what they may be doing in the future can help personalize your message, making it easier for them to relate to you. By doing this, they’ll feel like the time spent on your website was worth it, and they would want to come back again.
In addition, you can make efforts to develop customer relationships. Schedule a short call or send them a survey asking them to help you improve your work. The survey could ask them to rate your product/service satisfaction, the most beneficial of your services and ask them to rate the online buying/delivery experience.
These acts will help your brand develop a connection with your customers or users. This connection will also allow you to understand your audience and make decisions based on empathy and not assumptions.
2. Make Customers Your Priority
Taking the time to listen and understand your customer will allow you to serve them better. Remember that needs drive empathy, and it’s the users’ needs that should be the priority. It won’t always be clear what your customers need; that’s why good customer service goes a long way in projecting empathy.
Customer service doesn’t have to be expensive; it just has to be timely. The best way for your business and brand reputation to succeed is with good customer service. It’s not about making a sale but rather creating loyal customers who will come back again and again if they are happy with their experience.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and then act accordingly. You must provide the information that your customer needs quickly and efficiently. Doing this will make your customer a priority. This is an excellent way of projecting empathy towards your customers because it means that you know what they’re going through on the other side of the screen.
Another way to make customers a priority is by providing value propositions that fulfill their needs. There’s a famous saying, “Don’t sell what you make, make what sells,” and that’s what offering a customer-centric value proposition is about. This is where taking the time to understand audience needs pays off because it means that you’re not just selling to them but fulfilling their needs.
3. Communicate Effectively with the Audience
You can’t hope to project empathy towards your customers without communicating with them—some of the most successful brands in the world project empathy by devising comprehensive and well-thought-out communication strategies. Social media is the obvious way to initiate this communication, but there are more refined and nuanced ways. For now, let’s talk about social media.
The best way to communicate with the audience to project empathy is by picking the right platform. You don’t want to end up using YouTube if there’s no helpful video content to publish. Remember that the best way to project empathy is by understanding and addressing consumer needs. As such, you need to pick the platform that is best suited for achieving this goal.
Next, you’ll want to be sure your social media strategy has a clear mission statement. Ask yourself: “What are we trying to accomplish with our communication on this channel?” You’re looking for something like “Create empathy through images and videos of people using our product.” Once you have the mission clear, it’s time to act on it.
Video content always seems to resonate more with the audience as compared to graphics and images. But it can’t just be any video content; it has to be content that addresses consumer needs while inviting future communication. This is where you cannot discount the importance of initiating conversation on the website through chatbots.
Don’t forget that B2B brands have the exact needs as B2C when it comes to empathy. B2B customers may need even more connection, so they feel like you’re on their side and understand what they do for a living each day.
4.Educate Users to Project Empathy
Educating users has to be central to your B2B digital marketing strategy. That’s because it will help them understand your perspective and appreciate the hard work you put into developing a product or service. Empathy is a two-way street, and your customers must reciprocate the feeling.
This education process can take anything from hosting live webinars to creating short and snappy video tutorials. Educating the user is smart for two reasons, (1) it will help the user feel like they’re a part of the brand, which would, in turn, make them more invested in what the brand has to offer, and (2) it provides users with a roadmap of what to expect from the brand going forward.
A great way to educate consumers is through the use of user-generated content. Testimonials and feedback from previous customers can act as education for newer clients. This content can create a dialogue about the brand, thereby educating consumers while also providing them with social proof of how great your product is.
User-generated content is a great way to connect with your users and educate them at the same time. It will create a sense of community and connection between your business and the people using your site or services. This content is in the form of tweets, social media posts, and videos that are all shared by your readers and customers. The more that you can use this type of content, the better.
The only thing that you need to consider when using this type of content is ensuring that the people who have created it give their consent for it being published on your site or used in any other way.
5.Get User Feedback on How to Improve
Users love to give feedback, especially when businesses provide them with the opportunity to do so. This is a quick and easy way for you to know how your customers feel about what’s taking place on your site or with your service, and it shows that you care enough to take their desires into account.
After all, it’s your customers who you aim to satisfy, so considering their opinion is an essential step to developing an empathy-driven digital marketing strategy. The more feedback you accumulate, the better you can incorporate it into your marketing strategy. This is especially true for B2B marketing strategies, which rely heavily on customer feedback.
How can Accurate Digital Solutions Help Project Empathy in Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
We at Accurate Digital Solutions have helped dozens of businesses connect to their customers in a more meaningful way. Most of what we do centers on assisting companies in understanding what their customers need and incorporating empathy into their digital marketing strategy.
If you want to evolve your digital marketing strategy to include empathy and connect with customers in a more meaningful way, then contact us and get started today.
Conclusion
This empathetic marketing approach will make your brand stand out. It will also help you create long-term relationships with your customers that are more meaningful and sincere than those that would have been made through an impersonal marketing campaign.
People want to feel like they matter, so a personal touch when it comes to their business dealings is always appreciated. So, connect with your customers on a deeper level by bringing empathy into your digital marketing strategy.