A short while back, Adobe sponsored a webinar on infusing empathy into demand generation marketing. It was enlightening.
Design and marketing should always be positioned in a problem/solution mindset. While not solipsistic, your audience is still consumed with solving their own immediate problems and, by extension, the problems their company faces.
As marketers, we understand this mindset, and it shows in the websites we design, the banners we launch, and the collateral we develop. But when it comes to demand gen, the prerogative shifts and the focus on driving leads can muddy the message of what we’re genuinely trying to achieve: being the correct answer to the customer’s problem at the right time.
In reality, every touchpoint in a demand generation campaign should answer the following questions: What’s my target audience’s immediate problem? How are they feeling during this moment of their journey? How is this touchpoint addressing and relieving their issue?
Via Brian Carroll, Founder & CEO | markempa
Only through this lens can the design and messaging of your nurture emails, banners, landing pages, and paid social advertising evolve into a cohesive and stronger journey that motivates the users to convert.
Persona Development
Of course, to understand your audience’s mindset, you must first understand your audience. By building comprehensive personas, you can understand the anxieties that keep your audience up at night, the digital spaces they inhabit, and the valuable keywords they search on.
From there, you can start outlining your target audience’s unique emotional and psychological drivers for purchasing. When combined with empathy, you get a robust messaging structure focused on being helpful to the audience rather than just trying to sell them on your “thing,” whether that’s SAAS, a widget, or even an e-bike.
You may even want to consider creating an empathy map, typically used in UX design, to better adapt your customers’ perspectives into your thinking when designing and writing copy for your demand gen journey.
Empathy Marketing in Practice
It’s all very well, and it’s good to say you’re planning on factoring in empathy in your process. But how does this frame of mind translate into accurate, actionable items?
Well, it starts with how you approach the strategy behind your demand gen journey. Just because a user downloads a white paper does not mean they are ready to sign up for a demo of your solution. Instead, you must look at every piece of content in your campaign and ask yourself what immediate problem your audience is trying to solve and what concerns they may have when thinking about taking the next step. As the webinar suggests, you must be an empathy sherpa to guide them through this journey.
Using the email example from the webinar, this correspondence was written in a sales-first-driven narrative, trying to create a sense of urgency and ease to get the user to register for their free software. It’s relevant but not empathetic.
This second email example, instead, comes from a place of understanding the audience’s apprehension about registering for another tool. It addresses their anxiety and answers it to relieve their worry.
This humanized approach to marketing brings personalization into your marketing efforts and is more effective in driving leads and conversions, as seen in the email example from the webinar.
Moving Forward with Empathy
Beginning your journey toward infusing empathy into your demand generation programs can feel overwhelming, but it all comes down to process and mindset. Start by evaluating your current campaigns from the perspective of your target audiences. Consider A/B testing minor adjustments to your emails and landing pages that align more with how your audience feels during different parts of your customer journey. Measure and compare every adjustment. You’ll find leading with empathy more effective when connecting with your prospects and future customers.
Want to infuse empathy into your demand gen campaign? Contact Overdrive Interactive today to see how we can improve your customer journey to drive leads and improve ROI.
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