Empathy is becoming a crucial part of brand marketing as consumers are demanding that companies show understanding of and sensitivity to their issues, concerns, and struggles. As the year continues, the world is swiftly moving toward a more customer-centric marketing model where brands must know and identify with its customers. Here, marketers and business owners can learn more about empathy brand marketing and how to use it to cater to their target market.
What is Empathy, and What Does It Mean?
The word gets used quite often in marketing, but few understand what it really means. Empathy is often confused with sympathy, but the two terms have different meanings.
- As defined by Psychology Today, empathy is the human ability to recognize and share others’ emotions.
- Sympathy, while it involves compassion, doesn’t require one to share feelings with another. It’s a simple acknowledgement of the other person’s situation, as well as the hope that things will improve.
When a company relies solely on demographics and mass distribution, it misses a significant opportunity to build relationships with its customers. Empathy is crucial in building solid connections between businesses and consumers.
Gaining Customer Insights
Many of today’s businesses, especially those in the tech sector, are task-oriented. They want to create a brand marketing plan, write content, and post it as quickly as possible. While such tactics are effective, they don’t always take customers’ feelings into consideration, and they don’t lead to empathetic engagements. When marketers gather customer insights, they can learn how to use social media and technology to help customers build an emotional attachment to the brand.
Convergent1’s Smart Marketing uses the following methods, among others, to gain valuable customer insights.
- Cultural behavior, decisions, and lifestyle trends can be used to understand the target market, its motivations, and how their culture affects purchase decisions.
- Focus groups help marketing teams understand why and how people make purchase decisions. While the logistics and cost of focus groups may be problematic for a company on a budget, medium- to large-size companies may use them to remain empathetic to customers.
- Building of and consultation with buyer personas can give marketers deep insight into customers’ concerns and issues, as well as info on how the company’s products and services can help.
Now that marketers know how to gain customer insight, they’re ready to learn why empathy is such a powerful brand marketing tool.
It Makes Ad Targeting Easier
To capitalize on the immense popularity of social media advertising, businesses must focus on empathetic brand marketing. When marketers understand customers and their needs, they can effectively use tools like those listed below.
- Custom targeting allows company owners to target potential buyers via criteria such as phone numbers, email addresses, and app UIDs
- Interest targeting lets companies target ads according to users’ interests. When the company understands its customers’ struggles, they can target market segments that are more likely to engage with the brand.
Persuading and teaching prospects is more involved than telling them about the company’s products and services. When companies understand customers and put their concerns at the center of the marketing message, they form deeper, more emotional connections. By reaching consumers on a purely emotional level, companies can inspire the engagements that really matter. For help in creating a brand marketing message that resonates with customers, call Houston’s Convergent1 at tel:713-690-0707 for more information.
