Marketing to Make You Feel: How Does Empathetic Marketing Work?

Bringing empathy into your personal relationships is easy. You want to be there for your friends and family when they are facing tough times and celebrate when life is good. To increase your market share by using empathy will require those working on your campaign to make themselves more vulnerable. Those who provide customer support and write marketing copy will need to fully embrace the mess that is the human condition to encourage potential customers to dig more deeply into your products and services.

How It Works

Empathy marketing lets your customers know that they are important to you. Their problems, desires and purchasing goals are critical to your business health, so the choices and challenges of your potential client base must be incorporated into your marketing message. Your products and services do more than just fill a need; they provide your clients and potential clients the sense that they and their needs are unique and worthy of great products. Whether you're selling scented lotion, tech support or a special bottle of wine, your clients know they are special and deserve unique attention.

Make Them Feel Important

If your client is struggling with a problem, put that problem front and center in your work. Be open to listening to negative feedback. Let an angry or upset person vent long enough to make sure they can hear themselves and hopefully talk themselves into a place where they can listen. Avoid group communication, as meetings can cause some participants to shut down. To that end, make sure that all participants know that feedback will be completely confidential. If you can't offer that confidentiality, say so at the outset of the conversation. Listening to customers goes a long way toward showing them that they are important to you.

Incorporate It Into Everything

Empathy isn't false or excessively cheerful. You're going for engagement, not just a chirpy chat that ends with a request to complete a survey. Sometimes, compassion and empathy are about allowing some silent space on the line or in the chat box so the person with the problem can think for a bit. For example, companies that focus on providing health plans often hire with compassion in mind. Providing a compassionate ear is mostly about listening, and that will take some space of thought to provide customers the most comprehensive support.

Marketing used to be about promoting the best that you could offer. Often, consumers felt that marketing messages were hyper-positive and, on occasion, false. To build great marketing campaigns, we need to remember that no product can be a cure-all for every situation. Instead, marketing can actually promote and build community.

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