How can adopting an ‘empathetic mind-set’ enhance your brand promise?

Marketing has always been about establishing a relationship of trust with potential customers. Unfortunately, too much of our marketing is just selfishly promoting how great WE are and why you should buy from US. Empathetic marketing asks, “how are you?” and seeks first to establish a

relationship. It also tells your audience that you are focused on them and not the brand first. As consumers, we are more open to brands who appear to care.

Why do businesses need to make sense of marketing metrics?
Traffic has no value. It’s a vanity metric. Engagement is the key. Engagement is a measure of volume for those who need to count things, but it also measures how much time and effort your audience puts into your marketing messages. I like to use subscribers as the ultimate measure of engagement. Subscribers are opting in to your content. Inviting you into their already overcrowded inboxes. And subscribers have value. You can nurture them and send them deeper stage content where you can measure real conversion and sales.

What are your thoughts on capturing unbranded search results?
I’m a big fan of looking at unbranded search traffic. If all we do on our websites is capture people typing our brand and product names into their search engines, then we are just talking to ourselves, our current employees, customers, the people who already know us. Every business has a much larger opportunity to capture unbranded search traffic. For most brands, 90% of their website traffic is branded. But there are typically 10-100 times more people making unbranded searches.

Why is content marketing important in 2017?
As famous author Seth Godin said, “Content Marketing is all the marketing that’s left.” In a world that tunes out promotional messages, the only way to achieve marketing results is to create content people want. That requires empathy. And so, we come full circle. You have to care about your customers, their challenges and pains and seek to help them with your expertise.

It’s important to focus on what you know and how that can help them, than it is to promote what you sell.

Where do businesses fail and where have you seen best practice?
The biggest threat to businesses today is a culture of promotion and inward thinking. Empathy allows brands to break through that. To create a Vision that focuses on customer value. To encourage ideas and promote the leaders who deliver customer value. So, the best practice is to focus on culture.

Culture is everything and it’s the new mandate for marketing. The leading brands have focused their vision and mission statements to clearly define the value they can provide to a specific target audience.