“ Empathy can be defined as the ability to place yourself in the shoes of someone else and attempt to think and feel as they do.”

When it comes to devising and implementing a marketing strategy, a content strategy is pivotal.

The right content has the power to attract and in the best case, retain the right audiences.

By crafting the right content to complement your strategy, your business has a higher scope of creating a larger appeal and strategy even driving profitable consumer action from your target audiences.

However, getting your content right is the crux of this entire process.

Content cannot be created in isolation. It needs to be crafted taking into consideration a wide variety of factors — including the interests, concerns, habits and thought processes of your target audience.

How can empathy help you achieve your marketing goals?
Empathy allows you to create content that answers the questions and addresses the challenges faced by your target audiences.

Let’s take the case of a small-loans firm that helps start-ups find financial support to kick-off their businesses.:

When you place yourself in the shoes of this firm's target audience, you understand that this audience may be new to the business world and may require a simple process with step-by-step guidance. This means that you have identified a potential route to place this firm as the solution in the minds of the target audience, by providing them exactly what they're looking for!

This empathetic approach provides a base for you to create content that addresses their concerns and challenges with obtaining financial support and helps you appeal directly to them and attract their attention.

Simultaneously, you position yourself as the solution for their concerns and have moved up considerably higher in their chain of possible options.

Don’t know what to share with your target audience? Here’s how you can fix that...
Even if you still have difficulty in articulating your plus points, simply understanding what your target audience is looking for can point you in the correct direction.

It would help you understand what aspects of your business can really make you shine.

It can also help you narrow down the concerns of your customers for each stage of the buyer journey and shape your content strategy accordingly.

By placing yourself in the shoes of your customer, you open your marketing to a world of possible routes you can take to appeal to them.

Empathy in marketing involves treating your audiences as humans rather than just numbers. And in a world where competition is at its highest, it is important to make yourself shine however you can. Appealing directly to the concerns and needs of your target audience is a sure-fire way to guarantee you a spot in their consideration process.

By being empathetic, you gain insights into the rationale of your target audience, attempting to understand the reasons and thoughts behind their actions. Furthermore, being empathetic helps you look through the window of what they want and how they would want to navigate certain situations.

Implementing empathy in your content is an important ingredient in the recipe for the best content strategy.

By using empathy, you put out content that resonates with your target audience.

After all, we only consume content that appeals to our interests and needs.

Your target audience will not stay with your brand unless your brand continually produces content that interests and draws them in.

What does this mean for your approach to content writing?

The backbone of marketing lies in understanding the consumer. 
As you devise your content strategy, it is important that you select and highlight which aspects of your business would appeal the most to your target audiences.

This could be conveyed in your content through brand personality or through the explanation of product attributes. By taking your customers' perspective in your content, you stand a higher chance of drawing in the right audiences and creating solid relationships.

Of course, just being empathetic isn’t everything.  

Effectively translating your findings into a solid content strategy and implementing it through the correct channels is equally important. And this is where we come in.

Contact us to find out how you can integrate empathy into your content strategy seamlessly, while still checking off all the boxes on your ROI to-do list.

To conclude, empathy in marketing is imperative to understand the emotional, contextual and psychological standpoint of your target audience.

In a world where we fight to create lasting impressions, demonstrating empathy with  your audiences and understanding their perspective is a sure way of staying top of mind.