BLOG

23 AUGUST 2021

EMOTIONS & DIGITAL MARKETING: 5 ways to integrate empathy into your Digital Strategy.

Events that took place in 2020 & 2021 under the pandemic of covid-19 proved to all people involved in business the importance of integrating empathy into the marketing strategy of every small and large business.
━
The world has changed and businesses, in order to prevail and grow, have to adapt to new needs and new data.

#1 What is empathy - based Marketing?

Empathy is the developed ability of emotional identification with another person's mental state, putting yourself in the other person's shoes.

For businesses and brands, empathy-based marketing means seeing all the marketing campaigns and promotions from the customer-user side. You do not enter the process of thinking like the customer, you are the customer. This is how the customer-individual is really at the heart of the marketing strategy.

But it is very important to point out that the basic condition of empathy is authenticity. In particular, you can not create empirical marketing campaigns with the sole purpose of manipulating customers.

Empathy is believable when it comes to creating real bonds between brands and users. You need to build trustworthy relationships with your customers throughout your journey.

Of course, constantly increasing conversions is the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign, but companies need to change their mindset on how to achieve this goal.

The sales strategy of most companies resorts to harsh and aggressive approaches, which must be reconsidered for the rest of 2021 and beyond.

#2 Why empathy in marketing is important?

Emotion and connection with the customer is more important than ever. The way we live and work now has changed in a way we never imagined, and these changes will accompany us for quite some time to come. Consumer reactions and feelings towards advertising have changed dramatically.

The range of human emotions is huge, from positive emotions such as joy, interest and surprise, to the most negative ones, such as fear, anger or sadness (anger, in particular, can be a powerful motivator for sharing content). Campaigns need to focus on challenging and connecting with these emotions.

So the way that all brands, big and small, integrate and direct the consumer in the so-called funnel must be changed and rebuilt from the beginning.

Customize your content marketing, review customer travel, and educate your employees about the benefits of evoking emotions in marketing channels.

So how will this be done? Here are 6 ways to do it:

> Perceive and understand the weaknesses of your audience

Empathy for customers works in 2 ways:
1) What are the weaknesses of customers in the real world?
2) What are the weaknesses of customers regarding your business?
The whole planet is currently under covid-19 status. This means that the public struggles with very negative emotions, which every business owes as much as it can to normalize them.

Depending on the genre you trade, you can create corresponding smart response videos, which will be combined with your products.

Use social listening to understand the emotion around your brand. If customers are not happy with your brand, a fact that is often perceived by the conversion rate, you need to know why this happens and how you can fix it.

You can submit mini-questionnaires and ask the following questions either by mail or through other tools:
- Are they happy with your company?
- Which product / service has benefited them the most?
- What would you like to see improved?

> Adapt to the needs of your audience

The adaptation of your business model to the new needs of the public can be done in various ways.
One way is product categories with special prices for the public, but another way can be to change the way customers are treated. It is good to make this treatment more emotional, immediate and human.

> Capture everyday life

A basic condition for the use of empathy in marketing is the recording of daily beautiful moments of life. These important daily beautiful moments are currently "frozen". So why not make the smart move of businesses?

For example, people no longer go to the cinema. How smartly and easily a company can integrate this process into the home while promoting its product. Then it will truly connect with the consumer.

Many companies believe that content marketing means high definition video and a large number of stories. But it is not so. They need to think about the world as it really is at the moment. Consumer lives are not high quality right now, so the message of any campaign should reflect that.

> Interaction

Interactive marketing has taken off in recent years, as the rapid advancement of technology (especially in social media) has made it more feasible for businesses.

If a video can offer great interactivity and invoke the needs of people who can not be met, including its genres, then it will be a definite success.

More specifically, recent research on marketing videos, argue that Youtube is not just one of the largest online platforms of billions of views, but also one of the leading social media market. This means that many videos of companies and advertisements affect the consumer audience so much that they go shopping or in the middle of the plethora of videos, the consumer being emotionally charged, proceeds to market emerging promotional products.

> Use user-generated content

User-generated content has been a key element of social media marketing for some time. But it is also a powerful tool for building brand relationships with consumers.

Marketers need to spend some time looking at the type of content that users create, as this will help them create a strategy that appeals to consumers. People will be happy to appear on the platform of a brand and share the post or page with their circles.

In addition, it shows that customers send their content because they strongly believe in a brand. This proves to potential customers that it is worthwhile to deal with and buy from this brand.
━