Make your marketing more effective with empathy

Rachel Klaver is a marketing strategist, specialising in lead generation and content marketing.

OPINION: A general quick-fix for most small business marketing is to ask: “Are you sharing what you want people to hear, or sharing what they want to hear?”

This flip of thinking can often help us remember that people will always engage, respond and buy from brands that they feel connected to. The easiest way to connect with them is to create content that meets their needs.

That’s a simple truth to accept. Working out just how to do that can be the tricky part.

Part of the problem is that we now have so many ways to collect data, from G4 analytics, social media reports, website and email platforms, and more.

I get a weekly report telling me how many people have filled out my contact form. All of these numbers help tell part of a story for our audience. It can help us see if our content is converting, or if people know how to take action.

Last week I spent time with a client looking over her website visitor avatars, using information gathered by Google.

We could tell her visitors love to travel, and a large proportion of them also have purchased online recently. We could tell their ages and their locations. We could see what they were reading on the website.

It’s all heady stuff but, in the end, it’s generalised data, and it’s only part of the picture.

But what data can’t tell us is how and why our content is resonating on an emotional level. Looking at engagement metrics such as comments, shares, and saves can help us. It’s not able to tell us how it made them feel and why it was that feeling that drew them a little closer to us.

Getting inside the head of your customer is not a ten-minute job. This bothers me a little as I’m like you – a small business owner with myriad jobs to do, and I’d like them all to be about ten minutes, so I can complete my to-do list! This process, however, can bring you more of your ideal customers and so it’s worth doing right.

Sometimes I’ll ask a small business owner to explain their ideal audience, and they’ll say: “They are just like me.” I normally say: “If they are just like you, they won’t need you. So what parts of you are like your ideal customers? And what parts have you got that they don’t?”

When we think our customers are just like us, or we make quick assumptions, we often miss the real gold of how they are iterating with us.

A recent study by Dr Johannes Huttula surveyed 480 experienced marketers, asking them to predict how their customers would react in a market test. The results were surprising.

The more empathetic a marketer thought they were, the worse they performed.

When investigating further, Huttula connected this with the unconscious bias that these marketers were bringing into the test. The more they h ad a pre-existing idea of how they expected each person to react, the worse they were at predicting.

Once this was highlighted, and Huttula gave the marketers some tools to become more self-aware of their own bias, the marketers were able to be more empathetic and accurate in predicting what their ideal customers would do.

One of my big turn-offs as a buyer is when a business leads with their wins. I know winning an award is exciting, but it’s all about you. It’s not about your customers. We get to share this type of “look at me” content in balance with content that’s about our customers. What often happens is this type of “win culture” content becomes the stop gap for easy content to post, and all it does is give you a dopamine boost, and no leads in the pipeline.

Right now, the businesses not feeling the pinch of an economic slowdown are the ones who are taking time to connect with their clients, email lists, and social media pages.

They are looking at ways to build community and trust, knowing people buy from us because of the way we make them feel, even if that feeling is “I know I can trust you to do this job”.

If you have absolutely no idea what your ideal customers are thinking, be brave. Ask your past and current clients to give you feedback about why they chose you, and why they should work with you.

I know I got some things very wrong when I initially marketed my group coaching programme for small business owners. I made sure I talked about the benefits and thought I had them all covered. But when I actually asked my coaching clients what they loved most it was the community I’d built as part of the programme. That wasn’t even on my radar as a selling point!

Now it’s something I mention to people interested in becoming part of the programme. It’s a benefit I didn’t realise so many of my clients actively needed and loved.

Here’s what you need to think about when preparing to use empathy more in your marketing:

Empathy begins with understanding our customers more. You can take time to listen to your current and past clients about why they chose you, why they refer people to you, and why they come back to work with you more than once.

You can also use this time to really listen to the other things said around this information. They might mention they are time poor and tell you why that is. They could mention pricing constraints and what else is competing for their spending. They might even share what’s keeping them up at night. All of this information is gold for your marketing. We all think we’re living a single experience in life, but what one client is living, is likely to be lived by many others who could also use your services.

We start with clearly defining who we are trying to connect with and attract, and also developing clarity around why they would want you, and what needs you are meeting for them.

Then we begin to look at the interesting areas to find a wider understanding of our ideal customers. What are they experiencing around them right now? How do they explain their world (the more we use their language and not ours, the more we connect with them). How do they act and react to what is going on around them? How do they prefer to communicate or connect? And who else are they listening to or watching that’s also influencing them?

All of this helps us create a detailed picture of what life means to our ideal customer. When we take that, and we speak to it, we then create a connection between us and them.

If we add to this an understanding that everyone is on a slightly different stage of the journey to buying from us, we can then take the ideas and content we’d create for our ideal audience, and then reshape it a little for each stage of the customer’s journey for is, talking to them at whatever stage they are at from “I just discovered you” to “I’m your biggest fan.”

Yes this approach does take a little more thought and preparation to get it right. It’s getting some big thinking into what our content needs to look like. It’s putting aside what we feel people have to know, and clicking into what they need to know instead. And it’s trusting both the audience, and the content to do its magic. It’s a big deal.

It’s also completely worth it. This approach builds trust in you. It increases your inbound leads. They are better leads. It can reduce or even cut out the need for paid advertising, as it starts to work its magic.

Who knew that a little empathy could be quite so profitable?