Digital Marketing with Feelings?

Empathy is a powerful human ability. Being able to understand one's and share the feelings of another allows people to literally feel each other's pain and joy. This ability allows humans to have a shared experience where another person's experience becomes our own. This feeling, in turn, allows us to create a bond that can happen instantaneously with even someone or something. And, in marketing, creating a bond with your customer is one of the highest degrees of service an organisation could have.

Start by Getting into Customer's Mindsets
In order to put yourself in your customer's shoes, it can be helpful to make assumptions on the type of person that would want to use you products or services. Write down an abstraction of who they are, what they do, where are they from, and what their interests are.

If you want to be specific on your customer's personas, head over to your site's Google Analytics for data on what age range your customers are and where are they from. There will be useful data also on the type of devices they use, what their interests are and data on what day or time they usually purchase on your site. All this information can help you build the personalities of your customers and, ultimately, connect with them on an emotional level.

Seek out Pain Points
The best place to practice empathy with your customers is knowing what they are frustrated with. Find out what their difficulties are in terms of services in your industry or field. You can look through online community chatrooms, Q&A sites, review sites and also visit your competitor's Facebook pages to find out what kinds of difficulties your target market encounters daily.

If you have a chance to collect info or interview customers that have issues with your services, make time to document and study all those instances. It is very critical to have an insight on what their possible pain points are on your own products and services. This will allow you a greater understanding of how you can improve your offerings.
If you are not in the position to make the necessary changes to your company's products, services or policies based on these insights, communicating that you understand your customer's predicaments will help put your organisation in a better light. Knowing where they are emotionally especially with their difficulties will give you key insight on what to communicate and how to communicate.

Share their happiness
While happiness cannot be easily quantified and scaled as a metric, it is an infectious emotion. It can not only create customers but can also multiply your loyal ones. Reviews are a goldmine of information on what makes your clients angry but also provide insight on what makes them happy. You can use these happy comments and insights are jump-off points to your marketing. Use them as ideas for advertisements or simply showcase them as reviews on your website.

Sharing happiness works two-fold. Communicating positive feedback not only increases your organisation's credibility to your customers but to also your own employees.

Real World Examples

Empathy in a Facebook:

Empathy in a 404 error page:

Empathy in a Video Message:

Emotional Connection as End Goal

Whether you provide a corporate online service or a brick and mortar product, your organisation makes emotional connections. At NetFusion Techonology, we often ask questions like: "How are you employing empathy to market your company? What emotional blind spots are you missing?"

Remember that what you offers should be about THEM. Make sure to let your audience know that you UNDERSTAND their pain and happiness.

Sources:

https://moz.com/blog/personas-understanding-the-person-behind-the-visit

http://lifehacker.com/why-empathy-is-your-most-important-skill-and-how-to-pr-1505011685

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241356

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