5 Ways to Ace Your Marketing Efforts With Empathetic Content

Customers now expect a personalized experience when they interact with a brand, even in the B2B business environment. Therefore, delivering content that forms a connection between a brand and its audience has become key to successful content marketing.

As a content marketer, you are probably always on the lookout for new ways to grip your audiences’ minds and drive engagement. But getting the expected outcome is not always possible. Especially with the dynamic nature of marketing and intense competition, it can be quite a struggle. You need to deliver the type of content that your audience finds relevant to stand out from the rest.

This is where empathetic content comes into play. When your audience finds your content relevant, they’d want to engage more. And that is how you build an emotional connection with them.

Let’s dive into what exactly empathetic content is and how you can embed empathy in your content.

What is Empathy in Content Marketing?

Empathy is the feeling that you share with another human being by walking in their shoes. When you connect with someone’s perception, feelings, and thoughts about a certain situation, it means you’re empathetic towards them. In content marketing, you integrate empathy by understanding your customers as a brand.

Whether you sell enterprise-level software or homemade jewelry, there’s always room for empathy. For instance, if you are creating content for job seekers, think about a fresher desperately looking for a job with no experience. Or, if you are writing about hosting solutions for websites, think about how the risk of server downtime is the last thing a business wants to deal with in this competitive age.

5 Ways to Infuse Empathy in Your Content

Infusing empathy in your content strategy is a skill. Those who master this skill can infuse empathy in their content strategy to address the issues on a deeper level by assessing the audience perspective. Following are the 5 ways to create content by involving emotions –

1. Create Customer Personas and Curate Content Around Them

Creating a customer persona is like creating a fictional character with behavioral traits based on your customer data and other analytics. When you know who your customers are, you can understand their requirements and expectations better. And when you understand their expectations, it becomes easier to come up with the content that will appeal to them. Regardless of the nature of your content, whether it is entertainment or education, it must benefit your customers’ lives.

2. Prioritize Customers Over Yourself

Let’s suppose this scenario – Brand-A talked about how great their product quality is and how they are growing significantly and handed you their business card. Here comes the brand- B that addressed the problem you are facing and how they can help you with their services. Who would you consider doing business with? Probably brand-B, right? This is how empathy plays when appealing to customers. Similarly, when you curate content, ask yourself –

• Is your content helpful to the audience?
• Does your content provide easy-to-navigate steps?
• Does your content help your audience expand their knowledge in their niche?

When you look for ways to address your customers’ needs, intent, and inspirations, your content works better.

3. Quality Over Quantity

The value versus volume is a long-going debate and in content strategy, value always wins. Remember you want to shape your content strategy according to your brand. And empathy is all about relating to your customers. So, figure out what value your customers find in your content, instead of assuming. Even though you are delivering one post a week or just one eBook a month, ensure that your customers find it relevant and valuable.

For quality content, focus on the intent, offer easy-to-follow steps, and trim the excess. This can be implemented to all content types including website content, promotional content, product descriptions, downloadable content, and more.

4. Include Personal Stories or Experience

Internet giant like Google rarely advertises their search capabilities on-screen. But when they do, they switch off the sales pitch and focus on human emotions. Remember the Parisian Love by Google, a young man starting his adventure from studying abroad to falling in love, and finally starting a family. All this is shown with google searches only and they didn’t even show the male protagonist. The brand could have just listed out the benefits of Google search engine. But none of us would’ve remembered it the way we do the story. What makes the story relatable? It’s the character and flow that the audience can relate to. So, try to curate content and weave your personal experiences into your narrative.

Sharing a tidbit from your personal life will connect your audience with you on a personal level, adding empathy to your content. So, know your audience, add personal experiences that they can relate to, and show how your services or products can help them.

5. Pitch the Right Emotional Angles

Extract the emotional element of the content to pitch it in a positive manner. It is possible if you know your audience well. For instance, if your target audience is new moms, you know that they are struggling to adjust to motherhood and a new routine that now involves a baby to be taken care of. In that case, you can offer them tips to keep their infants healthy and happy. Or share videos of customers having a good time with their toddlers using your products. Now, think about the emotions of a new mom desperately trying to maintain the balance between motherhood and her personal routine. It will instantly help you establish an emotive connection with your audience. And if you are going to pull the emotional strings, do it genuinely and do it right.

Conclusion

Creating customer-centric content is the key to delivering value through your content. Good content sticks with your audience for a long time even when the words leave readers’ minds. That’s why when you add emotions or personal experience to your content, it helps establish long-term relationships with your audience.

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