“Put yourself in their shoes.” While the phrase may be cliché, understanding and empathizing with your audience is a necessary step to identifying and retaining your customer base as a marketer. Far more valuable than other marketing hacks, tapping into human connection is one of the most underrated tricks to expanding your audience and significantly improving your consumer relationships.
Empathetic marketing is an approach that seeks to capture the unique identities of customers to create relevant and responsive content that puts their needs at the center. In our field, discussions of increasing databases and contacts are so frequent that there is the default to group thousands of names and figures into one giant entity.
When we generalize an audience, the individualistic desires of each customer can be lost and result in a decrease in engagement, business, and trust. Yet when collecting data about a base’s demographics, values, lifestyles, and behaviors, the ever-amorphous audience can now be seen as individuals with their own emotions, backgrounds, and stories. With empathetic marketing, marketers look beyond the numbers and metrics and instead, step into the world of customer perspective, making sure every audience experience is represented and accounted for.