If you really want to relate to your audience and convince them that you are on their side and viewing the world through their eyes, you need to step into their shoes and be at one with them. This can all be achieved through empathy. Empathy alone is what can create an unbeatable rapport between you and your audience.
The story of who you are as a brand and what you stand for must appear relatable in the mind of your audience and this can be achieved if you create a narrative that is shaped by your ability to understand your audience. You need to ensure that the public is connecting with you. This can all be done through empathy, one of the most effective ways of building content for a brand. Here are some of the key ways you can use empathy to help your brand connect with its audience.
When you first begin creating content, the use of empathy helps you create a feeling of intimacy between yourself and the reader. By empathising with your audience, you can create content that helps people connect with you on a personal level. If you create content that offers a talking point and encourages people to think or discuss and debate with each other, you will find that your audience very quickly starts to attach human emotions to your brand. It associates you with more than just a product range, you become a brand that communicates in such a way that the consumer is moved to feel something. Empathy will allow us to understand who our consumers are and what drives and moves them. We can then weave this into our content. Content which is evocative and can illicit a strong response is a good route to go down. If you know that your consumers feel strongly about, for example, environmentalism, you can talk at length about the ways in which your products hold a lot of green value and therefor make a connection with your audience by showing that you empathise with their concerns.
When creating empathy-driven content, you don’t have to see your audience as a single demographic, you can afford to see them as individuals. You can view them as human beings capable of strong feelings and honest expression. Once you recognise this, you can give your audience a platform to voice their feelings and concerns. Through an empathetic approach you have determined that authenticity is important to your audience and therefore allowed them the opportunity to debate freely various issues, on forums and social media. This raw human element will appear far more relatable than the everyday generic content found elsewhere on other sites.
The key secret to creating quality empathetic content is to just keep on testing it. To accurately anticipate what it is your audience are really inspired by takes empathy indeed, but it also requires a bit of guess work. Make small bets and then make your move. When you create those evocative headlines and embed emotionally-driven video content, do it in a gradual way.
An empathetic approach to content creation and communication is not groundbreaking. It makes sense that brands would try and prove to their audience that they understand their needs, desires and lifestyles and are also on the same page, right? Well, you’d be surprised how frequently brands fail to present themselves as open to the needs of their customers. Instead, they dictate to them, they tell them how they should think and feel rather than adapting to their wants. By taking an empathetic approach you avoid talking down to your audience and patronising it.
The empathetic approach is surprisingly underused in modern day eCommerce marketing, but if you want to make a meaningful connection with your consumers which will foster increased brand loyalty and more sales, then use it.
