Edition 4: How to Build Stronger Relationships With Potential Customers Through Empathy Stories
In order to make it obvious your company is the best potential option for your ideal clients, you have to show them you understand their unique situation.
People start to listen when they know that you understand where they are:
It’s certainly not easy to meet your ideal customer or clients where they are on their journey. To do so, it requires a helluva lot of legwork - namely in having conversations with the people in that group so you aren’t making assumptions about who they are.
But when you make a commitment to having those conversations consistently, you’ll not only learn more about where these folks are, but also what it means about the way they’re living their lives, the problems they’re having, what’s keeping them up at night, and how you can help.
Then you can begin to tell stories about your product or service that are rooted in empathy, and show these people that you’re ready to work with them on the path toward a solution.
💡 1 Big Content Idea: Ensure Your Content Has An ‘Empathetic Foundation’
It’s cliche, maybe, but people only care about you if they know you care. Some of the best marketing campaigns you’ll find - and the content that makes up the backbone of these campaigns - focuses on a mutual understanding of what’s standing in the way of your potential customer having a better life.
When you consistently share this story you build two things with this group of people:
1. A shared ‘enemy’
2. A common goal
As a startup founder, for example, it’s likely that you started your company due to seeing a hole or gap in your chosen niche which you could exploit, but also due to some degree to personal experience.
Something happened in your life which helped you develop a deep interest in the problem that you’re looking to solve, or you experienced something that led to a ‘light bulb’ moment. When that thing happened you knew building a company to solve the problem wasn’t just interesting to you, it was a non-negotiable.
When you have conversations with your ideal clients and develop a deep understanding of that ‘non-negotiable’ in their lives, and what you can do to join the fight against your ‘shared enemy’ you start to build an emotional bond.
And let’s face it, people buy through emotion and to shift emotions.
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🪓 2 Actions to Take: Target the ‘Shared Enemy’ and Lead Your Customers Into Battle
When you’ve established a baseline of empathy with your customer’s unique situation, next you should:
Target the ‘shared enemy’
Lead your customers into battle
Targeting the Shared Enemy
Your ideal customer’s enemy is the source of their pain or frustration. For the sake of example, let’s say you have a pet travel company. You help your customers get their pets from Point A to Point B though chartered flights or other transportation which protects their pets and gives them peace of mind on long trips.
You built this company because you were always traveling, and the few times you put your precious pups in a cargo hold in crates, you were about to pull your hair out.
The shared enemy here with your customers is that scary, uncertain experience your pets can encounter. There’s a ton of emotion to play on here, right?
So your responsibility, from a marketing perspective, is to lead your customers into battle to vanquish that enemy.
How do you do that?
By painting a picture of what this path to a better life looks like in everything that you create and you promote to draw them closer.
Lead Your Customers Into Battle
The shared enemy you’re fighting with your customers in this scenario is fear, discomfort and anxiety.
All of your marketing efforts, therefore, should lean on how you help your customers to vanquish each of these through a more secure, more predictable, even a luxury travel experience for their pets.
Each piece of content should use language that paints a picture of the polar opposite of the shared enemy that you’re fighting. The opposite of fear being calm, the opposite of discomfort being comfort, the opposite of anxiety being certainty, and so on.
When you can meet your customers where they are - sitting with their frustrations - show them that you understand and deeply empathize, and then show them a path to the other side where the enemy no longer exists, you move from becoming ‘an’ option to the option.
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💻 3 Cool Resources to Check Out
Here are three tools that we use daily in our work as fractional content strategists that are worth checking out:
Figma- Figma is a first-class visualization tool no matter what type of project you’re working on. As you’re sketching out your visual - and as you sketch out project workflows in the future - Figma makes it very easy to create a visualization out of an idea.
Hotjar - Hotjar helps you eliminate much of the guessing game surrounding how people interact with your website. When you add Hotjar to any website, it creates heat and click maps of how people interact with your site so you can find out what’s working and what isn’t.
Answer the Public - Answer the Public helps you to do extensive research on your ideal clients - or your client’s ideal clients (I know, meta) - so you can fine-tune your writing and marketing materials to answer the questions that people want answered.
How We Help Our Clients
Our company, Zanate Ventures, is a content studio based in Austin, Texas. Our goal is to help companies tell a better company story through fractional content strategy services including, but not limited to:
Website content refreshes - to the customer’s transformation
Content strategy - focused on repeatable systems and processes
Marketing funnel development leveraging:
Social media
Blog content
Email marketing & outreach
Press mentions, appearances, and exposure
We offer several levels of engagement, but everything kicks off with a 30-Day Diagnostic period to identify the quickest wins and long-term plays that will help energize your company’s story.
Interested to learn more?
Book a 30-minute discovery call here:
See you on Thursday August 1st for Edition 5!
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Love the idea of working with the client to vanquish the enemy - assuming the enemy is a problem, not a person of course.