Are you using empathy in your marketing?
Why?
Because marketing isn’t something you do to people; it’s something you do with people.
You might be wondering: why am I saying this?
The problem with modern sales and marketing
I see this with marketing (and sales): we get clinical and treat our customers as objects to convert rather than people who need help.
We can get off track by thinking, “How do I get what I want?” (revenue, leads, opportunities, etc.)
I recently met with a group of sales and marketing influencers, and we discussed trends and our projects.
We shared what trend is most affecting our work.
As I listened, I realized there’s a greater need for customer empathy.
Why? Because as marketers, we have more marketing channels, content, and technology than ever before. But, it’s become harder to connect and build trust with customers.
Let me explain.
Why do you need to build customer empathy?
Today’s crazy-busy customers are wary of sales pitches, cold emails, and hype-filled messages. The result? They tune them out.
So in our rush to obtain leads, drive opportunities, and move the sales needle, it’s easy to forget that we need to address our customers’ emotional needs (fears, hopes, wants, and aspirations).
Additionally, neuroscientist and USC professor Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery to which he responded, “we are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.”
Damasio concluded from his findings that when emotions are impaired, so is decision-making.*
What does this mean?
We must go beyond rational-logic-based sales and marketing to understand how our customers feel.
How do we gauge customer feelings?
We can do this by looking into their experience.
The gap between customers and us
So, we want to market and sell OUR solutions.
Our customers aren’t saying, “We need your solutions.” Instead, they’re saying, “We need to solve our problem.” So, what would happen if you focused on helping them do just that?
I’ve learned you can’t answer “how can I help” unless you know precisely what your customers want.
The CMO Council states, “Only 20% of marketers can predict the next best action for their customers.”
Additionally, Forrester Consulting discovered, “65 percent of marketers struggle to employ emotional marketing as they turn to automation to improve customer engagement.”
To understand, you need empathy which, according to Miriam-Webster, “is the ability to share someone else’s feeling.” We need to walk in their shoes to see things from their perspective.
What is empathy-based marketing?
Empathetic Marketing is about codifying our intuition to walk in our customer’s shoes to understand their experience (i.e., how they think and feel about their business). Your goal is to connect to how your customer is thinking and feeling. By doing this, we can better help them get what they want (and increase conversion).
To do this, you must move from business-centric to customer-focused thinking. And you need to speak to your customer’s motivations and from their perspective.
So, where do you begin?
Empathy-based marketing is based on the following ideas:
- The best marketing and selling is helping.
- Empathize with your customer’s feelings and problems by going into their world to understand.
- Think like your clients when they set out to solve a buying problem and discover each step they may take to help them on the journey.
- Look for ways you can help your customers make their lives better.
- Provide your customers with what they want by understanding what motivates them.
- Help your clients identify and solve problems.
- Give customers useful content, hero stories, and expertise that helps them gain clarity
- Empower your employees, especially those who directly touch customers like sales development reps, with the resources, training, and tools to help them
Examples of empathetic B2B companies
The team at Slack practices empathy in their marketing and considers it part of their core values.
Former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stated in this interview, “It’s very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.”
Additionally, IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest design company. As part of their boot camps, employees learn how to apply empathy to connect better with colleagues and clients. They’re learning how to tap into their customers’ and colleagues’ feelings and need to come up with better solutions.
“The need for empathy towards the buyer is huge. It’s a differentiator…” -Doug Brown, former CMO, IBM Systems
Since 2015, I’ve studied the most successful customer-centric and empathetic companies and marketers to discover what’s helping them connect with customers.
Here are seven ways you can apply empathy to your marketing and sales.
1. Put your customers first
Instead of trying to sound appealing to people, be interested in them. Understand your customer’s motivation (what they want) and ensure it’s something you can deliver.
So much of what we see today are product-centric claims aimed at impressing the prospect. The root word of emotion and motivate is the same.
Buyers base most of their actions on feelings and then backfill them with logic. That’s why it’s important to get beyond the product and speak to the results and the feelings the buyer seeks.
Read more about customer empathy and how to solve buying problems.
2. Get into the world of your customer and listen and observe to understand
Most people don’t listen with the intent to understand – they listen with the intent to reply.
Listen with the third ear, which means you want to understand the implied assumptions and motivations behind what a person is saying. That’s empathetic listening. And it’s a deeper level than active listening.
Empathetic understanding is not the product of survey data. Too many marketers rely on survey data or focus groups to tell them how customers think and feel, but that’s not enough.
You need to get out of the building and observe your customer’s world. It’s shocking how little of this happens.
Some of the ways marketers can build customer empathy:
- Get out in the field with your sales team and meet customers face to face
- Please pick up the phone or listen to calls your inside sales or sales development reps have with customers (it will be eye-opening)
- Survey customers on your email list to validate what you’ve learned intuitively from listening/observing
- Use empathy maps
It is critical to know what customers want and what motivates them to think about their experience. Once you do this, you can use your applied empathy to consciously and intuitively understand and see the world from their perspective.
It helps you intuitively interpret the context and understand your customer’s pressures.
The key to understanding another person is empathetic listening – trying to understand everything (including the nonverbal signals) the other person is communicating.
What’s emotions motivate them? You listen for feeling, meaning, behavior, and other signals.
3. Stop pushing. Start conversing
Focus on developing conversations, not campaigns.
Don’t err on the side of pushing your agenda rather than extending an invitation to talk and converse. To the customer, it feels like “somebody wants something from me” rather than “maybe they can help me get what I want.” Do this invite, listen, converse and recommend/help.
You need to demonstrate that you’re interested in their world and their motivations as fellow humans. Use empathy maps and personas to understand your customer and how to better connect with them in conversations.
If you’d like more help on this topic, feel free to check out my empathy map checklist, where I’ll walk you through it more thoroughly .
4. The best marketing and selling feels like helping (because it is)
Our marketing and lead nurturing are anchored on this idea. As customers, we can feel when someone’s trying to push us to do something.
We know when we’re being treated as objects to convert. Also, we recognize when someone sincerely cares. They’re not trying to push their agenda; they’re genuinely trying to help us.
Ask this as your approach your marketing:
Is it how we’d like to be treated?
