Michael Epps Utley 
Most people learn about empathy early in life.
So, why does so little marketing reflect an empathetic understanding of consumers?
This guide explains how to bring empathy into your marketing to make it more engaging and effective.
What Is Empathy?
Let’s begin by aligning on a definition of empathy.
Most people are taught that empathy is the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes. However, that isn’t quite adequate — it makes it seem like you can drop yourself into another person’s sneakers and instantly understand everything about them.
Empathy is more akin to walking beside someone until your shoes begin to feel like theirs. Genuine empathy requires ongoing communication and deep understanding.
If you want to insert empathy into your marketing, you must walk beside your customers until you truly understand them.
The Limits of the Marketing Funnel
Unfortunately, the traditional marketing funnel doesn’t allow you to walk beside your customers (that isn’t the focus, anyway). Instead, you push them down a single marketing path, whether it’s right for them or not.
People today are independent thinkers and have countless online shopping options. If you force them down a single marketing path they aren’t comfortable with, they’re likely to rebel and turn to a more flexible and empathetic competitor.
Adding Empathy to Marketing
Here are four proven ways to inject empathy into your marketing efforts.
1. Don’t Focus Exclusively on the Marketing Funnel
Use the marketing funnel as a foundation, then build on it. Overlay the funnel with more realistic, never-in-a-straight-line customer journeys.
By figuring out how consumers interact with your business and similar ones, you’re less likely to alienate prospective customers who won’t follow an arbitrary marketing path or timeframe. This exercise forces you to consider long-term reality instead of fast, short-term profits. It also helps prevent marketing from being limited to playing a sales-enablement role (as opposed to building a high-quality brand).
2. Understand Customer Preferences
Remember, your goal is to walk beside your buyers over time. Your social media accounts have years — or even decades — of highly personal information about your consumers.
Take time to understand the kinds of posts, images, messages, content themes, and content types people respond to and ignore. It is a great way to walk with your followers and build empathy with them.
3. Build Community
Build a sense of community on your social media sites. Leverage empathy to deliver delight and value your followers can’t live without or find elsewhere (as covered earlier, monitor performance to see what resonates).
Also, take steps to move your social followers to owned platforms like forums and email. This will provide you with additional data about consumer interests and preferences so you can continue creating more empathetic marketing experiences that people will want to engage with.
There is an additional benefit of building community and leveraging owned media channels. Historically, social media platforms lose users to upstart operators. Think about the migration of users from Facebook to Instagram. Doing these things will help ensure you can continue marketing to prospective and current buyers no matter what happens next in social media.
4. Show, Don’t Tell or Sell
Consistently demonstrate to consumers that you know and understand them. Never make the common mistake of telling or selling to them. Your content must prove that you empathize with them and engage in a dialogue with them. This is where TikTok’s guidance makes sense: Make TikToks, not ads.
The best way to show you empathize with consumers in your marketing is through brand storytelling. Create authentic content they want to engage with. Comment and interact with your audiences through social listening. Doing that helps build an affinity for your brand.
Always remember that it is not about you and your business; it’s all about them — the customer — and how your brand is there to support them.
Adding Empathy to Marketing: The Final Word
When you view the marketing funnel as a foundation on which to build your marketing plan and not an end in and of itself, you can more easily look at the consumer experience through the lens of empathy. You support consumers by walking alongside them as they make their buying journey, not pushing them through a predetermined one they may not feel comfortable with. By valuing genuine emotional connections and building a community, you help consumers see themselves in your brand and understand how it fits into their lives.
