Utilizing empathy in your marketing strategy lets customers feel directly engaged – and in turn, inspires them to care about your business. At our digital marketing agency in Thailand, empathy is integral to how we deliver excellent brand storytelling for our clients.
But what does empathy in marketing mean?
Empathy is more than simply agreeing with someone or feeling sympathy or pity for them. Good marketing requires that we take an extra step into someone’s shoes, to understand their motivations.
Empathizing with our heroes
Effective marketing is about being a good guide. The role of a business owner or marketing team is not to cast yourself as the hero, but to be the guide that helps your customer along their journey. This is how you make your customers feel engaged with your brand and your business – by making them the hero of the story.
Being a good guide is only possible when you have empathy for your customer. To be able to step into your customer’s shoes, you need to learn more about your hero. This starts with their demographics and interests, and extends to their specific pain points, especially their motivations and concerns. Accurate customer personas are built by listening and gaining understanding from focus groups and through desktop research. The insights gained into your audience’s needs and wants are as important to your marketing as your Big Idea, Content Pillars, and KPIs. Therefore, empathy for your target audience is the centerpiece around which you should build your market research strategy.
For more on what makes a good marketing strategy, check out the below video.
Your brand through a different lens
Taking on your customer’s point of view is important when framing the way you market your business. In order to establish your customer’s perspective of your brand, you need to ask the right questions. How can your business answer their needs or solve their problems? How can you make your customer’s life better? What do they need to know to get started?
By failing to establish the answers to these questions, companies often make the mistake of framing their own business as the hero of the story. Instead of creating content that resonates with customers and increases engagement, such marketing becomes company-centric.
We have seen this tendency pop up in our work with professional services firms. Our client would outline an informative article about an important update to the law, with the focus purely on the ways that the law has changed. To the average reader, this approach could come off as perfunctory. A better frame would be to write from the customer’s position, while focusing on how the updated law would affect the average reader.
Being a good guide is important across all industries. It is essential to apply empathy to all of your marketing, letting your customer see that you put them first – whether in blog posts, videos, or personal branding on platforms like LinkedIn.
Customer focus works best in all situations. That’s why, when our digital marketing agency in Thailand guides you on your journey to improve your marketing, our empathetic approach lets us understand you – as our hero.
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