The belief that being empathetic means being emotional is not actually very empathetic. Marketers often misunderstand customers when crafting messaging and marketing content. How can marketers be genuinely empathetic?
Todayโs guest is Megan Thudium from MTC – The Content Agency. Megan discusses how to adjust, adapt, and authentically understand the needs of customers from different cultures and countries.
[podcast_motor_player]
Some of the highlights of the show include:
- MTC: Berlin-based B2B organic content marketing agency w/empathetic mindset
- COVID and Cultural Barriers: Stay connected and relevant during tough times
- Empathy Marketing: Long-term gain emphasized now when emotions are high
- Empathy: Them to you, not you to them process for messaging and marketing
- Worst-case Scenario: Miss the marketing message? Lose customers
- Bottom Line for Business: Make messaging more empathetic for direct impact
- Marketing Evolution: People want authentic, engaging, empathetic conversations
- Consequences: Failing to do right messaging or following cookie-cutter structure
- Practical Takeaways: Connect with and talk to customers/teams to get feedback
- Back to Basics: Marketing should be empathetic; put buyer personas into action
Links:
- Megan Thudium on LinkedIn
- MTC – The Content Agency
- Patagonia
- Slack
- Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
- CoSchedule
If you liked todayโs show, please subscribe on iTunes to The Actionable Content Marketing Podcast! The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.
Quotes by Megan Thudium:
- โEmpathy marketing is a long-term game.โ
- โEmpathy is understanding your audience at a level that has a deeper understanding of what they need.โ
- โYouโre going to isolate your audience. Theyโre going to step away from you. Theyโre going to disconnect, which is the worst thing that we want in marketing because then we lose customers.โ
- โDepending on your specific audience, there might be specific needs.โ
[Tweet “Empathy is more than emotion: how to infuse the basics of human relatability into your content strategy with @ThudiumMegan from @mtccontent.”]
Transcript:
Ben: Hi, Megan! How are you doing this morning?
Megan: Iโm doing well. Thanks for connecting.
Ben: Iโm really excited about this episode because I think this is a really important topic just in general, but probably now more than ever. Before we get too far along in this conversation, would you mind taking a moment just to introduce yourself to our audience and explain what you do at MTC?
Megan: My agency is called MTC | The Content Agency and we are a B2B content marketing agency based out of Berlin, Germany. We work specifically with German clients who are going into the North American market. In a lot of waysโwhich we will dive into this conversationโwe have to be empathetic in our market but also our clients. That is what we do at MTC. Everything we do is for B2B companies and we do only organic marketing, so we are specialized in that.
Ben: I think youโd be well-prepared to answer this question even if we werenโt in the middle of a global pandemic. I think if youโre in a somewhat unique situation where you have to be mindful of cultural barriers, cultural differences, language differences and so forth, then empathy is going to be very much at the front of your mind all the time.
In your view, why do you feel that itโs important for marketers to really understand, though, that empathy means more than just emotion? Especially in situations such as the one that weโre in right now with COVID19, but also more broadly in general. Why is it important to understand truly what empathy actually means?
Megan: You are 100% correct to say that empathy marketing is a long-term game for marketing. It is not something that needs to be discussed now, itโs something that always has to be discussed as part of our marketing playbook. The reason why itโs really being emphasized right now is because itโs the most needed. Our world is a little bit crazy. If you havenโt noticed, a lot of things are going on. Emotions are high. Thatโs what empathy is very important in understanding so that we can remain connected to our audience during these tough times.
When you define empathy, how would you define it? How you define empathy is understanding your audience at a level that has a deeper understanding of what they need; developing in a context of marketing and content, developing your messaging, your marketing, your content to help them, so itโs them-to-you and not you-to-themโtype of process. Something we should always be practicing in marketing.
Right now, during COVID, when people are very emotional and things are tough, this is even more important to remain relevant with your audience to keep connected to them. This is something for us to keep in mind because if we make a mistake, this is where you donโt want to mix up just being emotional, monopolizing off of the emotions that are happening, but taking a step further, being understanding, and empathetic with where they are coming. If you miss this mark, youโre going to isolate your audience. Theyโre going to step away from you, theyโre going to disconnect, which is the worst thing that we wanted in marketing because then we lose customers.
Ben: We certainly donโt want to be losing customers. Thatโs literally the opposite of all of our jobs. Beyond being good for business, do you feel that businesses have any ethical or moral obligations to make their marketing messaging genuinely empathetic in times of crisis?
Megan: This is a very interesting question. If I look at it from the business side, I would say absolutely, if you want to remain relevant to your audience. Yes, you have to take and understand that the positioning that youโre taking as part of your messaging and the position as to how you are presenting yourself during this COVID time is going to have a direct impact on your bottom line. Kind of like what we already played into, so there is a business.
Ethically and morality side, actually, if we want to take COVID out of the picture, it goes into the much bigger picture of where marketing is evolving in general. Marketing our audience is looking for more authentic, communicative, engaging, and empathetic conversations on marketing from companies. Theyโre not looking for sleazy situations with salespeople, theyโre not looking to feel disconnected. Weโre looking for different experiences.
Overall, the audienceโs needs, pains, and things that theyโre looking for are adjusting overall. COVID, of course, plays into that. But if you look at it as a bigger picture, if you want to remain relevant, past COVID, going to 2021 and beyond and beyond, you have to think a little bit more about how you are ethically marketing because even if we go deeper into what the audience is demandingโyounger people, this next-generationโthey want to know if a company is being sustainable, for example.
For example, PatagoniaโIโll throw that brand out thereโdoes a great job at marketing their communication on where they stand, not just in sustainability, but also across the boardโtheir stands on feminism, equality, and age gap. These things are becoming more important to younger generation audiences. Weโre seeing it at B2C. B2B is always a little bit behind, but I think itโs definitely going to come. This is really where having a moral and ethical stance in your marketing is going to be important for you to remain relevant in the future.
Ben: I think that makes sense. I think that we can establish, as marketers, as communications professionalsโwhatever specific title any of us might haveโbeing empathetic with your audience (obviously) is an essential but perhaps overlooked component of actually meaningfully connecting with your audience or with your customers. Itโs very important.
As we all see, sometimes brands donโt get it right and they donโt get it right because itโs not easy. What are some of the possible negative consequences for brands missing the mark or getting this wrong? In terms of now (the pandemic), weโve all heard a billion ads just generically reminding us of the โunprecedentedโ nature of the times that weโre in. That is a copy-paste boilerplate at this point. Beyond being just annoying, I think itโs more damaging than that at this point. That doesnโt feel authentic, like this car company doesnโt care about me. Theyโre just trying to make it look as though theyโre acknowledging the situation.
In your view, what are the possible negative outcomes if you try to appear empathetic but youโre very transparently not being empathetic at all?
Megan: I really think you hit the mark, actually, and what you said. When you fail to do the right messaging, right now, this empathetic approach or you use the same cookie-cutter structure of a sentence in messaging, youโre not going to stand out and itโs not going to feel authentic and youโre not connecting specifically towards your audience.
If they see the same content, tonality, structure across different companies, how does that feel authentic? How do they feel like they are actually being spoken to as a person or even as a community as a whole? Who are your customers? Your customers are your best friends, theyโre the ones who are buying from you and you want to keep buying from you. You should be adjusting (at least) that messaging to their voice and their needs.
That goes into the other thing. I think this tonality, this structure that a lot of companies are hitting the mark because itโs so generic and itโs not specific. Your audience is screaming out, we all are worried about the same things, but depending on your specific audience, there might be specific needs. That comes from talking to your sales team. What are the things that people worried about now?
In B2B, itโs the bottom line. Am I going to make all my revenue targets? Am I going to do these? Iโm worried about losing my job. Thatโs actually where it gets a little bit more emotional in B2B. I might be losing my job soon. These types of things. Or on a CEO level, how am I going to connect my team remotely?
Reevaluating, talking to your audience, to your sales team, to these people, to understand where their current needs and the emotions that they have at this point, and then adjusting all your marking to fit that.
Ben: If youโre still wondering why this is so important, consider the cost of not infusing your marketing messaging with genuine empathy for your customers’ pain points. Youโre not going to fully understand what problems they are trying to solve, what motivates them to find a solution, or even be able to identify and accurately articulate how exactly you solve those problems or how you could motivate them to make a purchase.
Youโre also liable to come across as a little bit tone-deaf. If youโve ever seen a brand just get roasted for an inappropriate social media post that was trying to show how much a company cares about a given issue or circumstance, or if youโve ever rolled your eyes at a TV commercial from a brand claiming to care about you in a way that is obviously a little disingenuous.
To take an example that I saw a lot of the spring where car dealerships trying to tell people, like now is the time to buy or now is the time to get where youโre going when everybody was staying home early in the pandemic. Maybe that wasnโt the best messaging to go with. Wasnโt really empathetic with my situation, I can say that for sure. But if youโve ever seen anything like that and youโve seen first-hand what no-empathetic marketing looks like, itโs not good and you donโt want that to be you. Now, back to Megan.
Ben: If there are downsides to not getting this right, there must also be upsides for really understanding this well and executing on this idea in a way that is genuinely effective. Looking at the same questions just through a different lens a little bit here, what are the potential benefits to really infusing your marketing messaging with more empathy for your customers?
Megan: How to be more empathetic with your customers. Whatโs the practical takeaway? The practical takeaway, I already mentioned one. Connecting not only to your audience but to your team, and the key people in your teams that are connected to your audience.
In general, marketers should be more connected to our audience in one-to-one, getting on sales calls with the sales teams, having been in the conversation with those people, understanding what is happening. But if you canโt do that, if youโre busy with issues, meeting up with the sales team on a weekly basis to understand and hear the patterns of things of how the market is changing. I think thatโs one practical step. Just being connected to the marketing team, keeping this conversation going between marketing and sales, hopping on sales calls, if you can, is always ideal. Really talking to your audience.
What are the things you can do in marketing? For example, LinkedIn has a great pool feature. Social media provides us a great outlet to engage and connect with our audience and to get their feedback. I do believe, especially in the B2B world, if you ask for peopleโs feedback, they will definitely give it to you.
If you ask these types of questions in an open way, I think thatโs key in this whole empathy matter is how you present the questions, how you present the information. Itโs not a yes or no question; itโs open-ended. The way that youโre messaging your content on LinkedIn in these pools is open-ended questions. Something thatโs specific towards the pain and the points of your audience. Iโm not going to put an example in there because thatโs specific to you and your situation, but making the question open enough to where you can start a conversation with the people on LinkedIn.
Ben: I really love that point of making it specific and just not wanting to throw out a generic example. Thatโs exactly what people need versus just looking at what other brands are doing and copying the same message because you feel like thatโs what youโre supposed to do. Treating it like a line item in a creative brief instead of an actual, sincere desire to actually address those pinpoints. I think thatโs fantastic.
The last question Iโll throw your wayโwe talked about this before the interview here a little bitโwhatโs an example of a brand that you really feel understands this concept well and really embodies empathetic marketing messaging in a way that our listeners could go out and they could check them out and be like, oh, I see what theyโre talking about here?
Megan: This is a great example question. This is where my living in Germany rubs off on me, this cultural aspect as nope, no company is perfect. Iโm going to give you two examples, but take it with a grain of salt. A B2C example, Iโve already mentioned them. I would say Patagonia. I think we all heard about Patagonia, weโve read many articles, but they really are hitting the mark across the board on not just how theyโve approached COVID, but also how they approached different important pieces that are developing in our societyโpolitics, society, feminism, on the Black Lives Matter movement, these things. Understanding how theyโre approaching, how theyโre adjusting that messaging, even how their CEO is leveraging his personal brands in the marketing aspect to push that empathetic marketing and that messaging. Thatโs a great example.
On the B2B side, Slack is a great example of COVID in general and how Slack has overnight adjusted pretty much their messaging on how their platform can be now used for remote teams. It was always for teams. It was always about collaborating and bringing people together. It felt like overnight, they went to now we are the platform for remote teams, now weโre connecting you as a CEO or connecting your team from all over the world because weโve been pulled apart by COVID. Slack is whatโs bringing us together. I think those two on B2B and B2C are definitely hitting the mark you can learn from.
Ben: Very cool. I would agree. I think both of those companies are really great examples that our listeners are probably already familiar with, but maybe theyโll want to go take a little closer look at each of those companies and really dissect what theyโre doing in this area. As I said, that was the last question I had. This has been a really great conversation. Before I let you go, I just like to give you the opportunity, if thereโs anything that you think is really important in this topic that you havenโt had an opportunity to bring up, is there anything else? Any parting thoughts you like to leave our audience with?
Megan: I think my parting thoughts would be going back to the basics because we donโt really touch on that yet. We talked a lot about COVID and how empathy, marketing, and all thatโs playing into it, but this is a long term thing. In general, youโre marketing should be empathetic. Gave you lots of practical examples, but even before you get to actually putting an action, you have to understand your audience.
How do you do that? You do it through the most basic buyer personas. Iโm bringing it up because people are still not doing it. I guess thatโs one of my big takeaways is you need to be doing the intelligence gathering, the understanding of your audience for your marketing in general. Itโs going to help you with COVID, itโs going to help you to stay relevant in 2021 and beyond everything. Understanding your audience, doing the investigation and like work. Thatโs not just you and marking, looking through the data on your site, itโs also talking to people. Thatโs where empathy marketing is going to come in. Talking to people, talking to sales teams, talking to your customers.
The post Empathy Is More than Emotion: How to Infuse The Basics of Human Relatability Into Your Content Strategy With Metgan Thudium From MTC โ The Content Agency [AMP 212] appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.