TAPPING INTO THE HUMAN CONNECTION WILL HELP EXPAND YOUR AUDIENCE

By MARY MARGARET HOGAN , Special To Mortgage Women Magazine

“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 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.

Active Listening

So, where does one begin? How can a marketer behind their computer and phone emit empathy through marketing materials, outreach, and strategy? Hint: It involves the very crucial, but sometimes difficult, skill of active listening.

To gain insight on individual customer profiles, it is imperative to collect data on consumer identities, emotions, and needs. Unfortunately, this type of information won’t naturally find its way into your CRM without some active listening efforts.

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 of Instagram and Facebook “stories.” Here, these platforms provide the simplest version of intake forms that can get you quick, easy, and non-invasive customer feedback. Just a “poll sticker” away, this 24-hour feature collects customer data from one-answer polls on your story and with immediate shared results, your audience can be informed too. Collecting this data doesn’t have to be elaborately difficult!

Internally, gathering knowledge of customer interactions from those who work closest to them is a great first step. Whether through a companywide survey or a routine check-in with the sales and business development teams, your team members should be encouraged to share the patterns of desires and expectations they are seeing in their customers. Tracking of customer interactions should extend beyond the standard intake of post-sale feedback and instead focus on collecting statistics of the customers themselves.

Are their customers confident in this economic climate?

Did their confidence affect their purchasing experience?

Do their customers have a family behind them to support?

Are they the sole wage earner in their household?

Are they yearning for a major shift in their day-to-day life?

How does your service fit into their lifestyle or how do they need it to fit in?

These questions can certainly vary but should derive from a genuine, noninvasive place of getting to know your customers to better their experience. By implementing this standing checkin, team members will be reminded to actively listen beyond the details of the deal and furthermore, supply both marketing and sales with tangible ways to improve the customer experience with empathetic responses.

Externally, there are quite a few ways to break down your audience into individual customer profiles. To begin, it is beneficial to take note of their buying environments. Of course, this can be gathered from existing data in a CRM platform and/or economy-driven data, but how can we expand upon geography and market climate?

Once again, surveys act as a great gateway to insight that would not normally be documented otherwise, but this time they should be taken directly by the customer. These surveys could be crafted to capture a range of data such as consumer confidence levels, customer demographic data, and/or experiential scores after a networking event. In all cases, audiences are granted the rare space to provide their personal insight while your team gathers invaluable consumer profile data.

Monitoring social media is also a prime way to elicit intel on audience identity, emotion, and confidence.

Resonate With Audiences

While there are quite a few methods to acquire customer profile data, it’s ultimately up to each marketing team to decide which captures the most informative and authentic customer responses. By actively listening to customers, companies will be able to craft an empathy-based and customercentric marketing strategy that resonates with audiences in no time.

Active listening on social media comes in the form of taking note of comments and reactions to your posts as well as their responses to other competitors. The convenience of social media acts as the perfect playground for unfiltered customer feedback so it’s important to pay close attention and tailor marketing tactics as needed.

Do not underestimate the power

Empathetic marketing campaigns should not only be a direct reflection of the newfound customer data, but should retain messages of inclusion, consideration, and transparency. If there’s a trend of customers feeling nervous in this volatile market, marketers can employ empathetic marketing to provide comfort. This might include an email blast that highlights the more positive existing market trends or perhaps includes a webinar invite for a free educational session that offers reassurance and negates fear.

There’s no place for false promises or outlooks in empathetic marketing. All experiences and deliverables should address customer needs without sacrificing authenticity,

In addition to maintaining transparency, empathetic marketing also requires upholding inclusive narratives across all marketing initiatives. When a company’s marketing neglects diversity of race, gender, culture, and more, they are ostracizing entire populations deserving of representation. From designing imagery that includes people of various ethnicities to adding closed captions across all video marketing campaigns, there are endless ways to transform your marketing materials into spaces of inclusion and accessibility. However, remember, employing diverse campaigns must extend beyond mere tokenization. These efforts should derive from a place of establishing a genuine human connection and ensuring that all customers feel valued. With all the previous active listening endeavors, it’s essential to return with affirming messages that say: “We see you. We heard you. And now here’s what we’re going to do for you.”

Applying a lens of empathy throughout your marketing strategy can make a major impact on your business. When seeing empathetic campaigns, clients will feel represented and cared for and in return will reciprocate with loyalty. Being able to identify your individual customers at a granular level ultimately increases your knowledge of your audience base and therefore maximizes your reach and retention. By demonstrating a clear knowledge of your customers’ needs, your empathetic marketing efforts will show that your company values customers more than just faceless numbers; they are at the integral to your company’s story.

Mary Margaret Hogan is an event marketing specialist at RCN Capital n

Mary Margaret Hogan is an event marketing specialist at RCN Capital.