How To Use Empathy In Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
June 23, 2023
Social media marketing can be an effective way to connect with new customers, retain existing customers and grow brand awareness. But how do you create a social media marketing strategy that hits all these goals?
The backbone of any successful marketing campaign is understanding your customers’ needs, wants, fears and desires. This is what makes empathy so important when developing your social media marketing strategy. Truly knowing your customers can help you fine-tune your message so that your social posts speak to your audience in an authentic way.
Think about it — what makes you stop scrolling through your social media feed? It’s probably something that speaks to how you’re feeling, and you probably connect with the post in some form or fashion.
So how do you make empathy a part of your social media strategy? Here are a couple of tips on how to get started:
Create buyer personas
A buyer persona is “a research-based profile that depicts a target customer. Buyer personas describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face and how they make decisions.” (Social Media Today)
You can piece together your buyer personas through in-person interviews, online surveys,and data from marketing tools. For example, you can configure Google Analytics to record demographics and interests data so you can better understand the users coming to your website.
While you’ll want to answer the basic demographic questions, like age, location, gender, etc, your buyer persona research should also address the following questions:
- What do your customers care about?
- What are their other interests and hobbies?
- What other companies or brands do they trust and why?
- How do they decide whether or not to buy from a company?
- What causes do they care about?
- What do they do on a typical day?
- What are some common stressors/struggles do they encounter?
While creating buyer personas can take considerable time and effort, it’s arguably the most important first step of creating an empathy-based social media marketing strategy. The information you uncover will help you choose the most effective social platforms to advertise on and can inform your overall social content strategy.
Create empathy-driven content
Now that you have your buyer persona research, now’s the time to create content that empathizes with your customer. This content may be different from what you’ve written in the past, so it may take some getting used to! Here are a few tips and tricks to keep in mind:
#1. Think about the desired emotion
Before you create your content, think about the goal of the content and what emotion the viewer should feel after looking at it. Content can be nostalgic, happy, inspiring or even cause fearful emotions.
#2. Don’t be afraid of using different types of content
How are you going to evoke the emotion you chose in step one? Will it be through storytelling in a video, an educational infographic or customer testimonials? Content could be in the form of videos, blog posts, white papers or infographics, all of which you could link to on your social media profiles.
#3. Don’t push sales
Empathetic content shouldn’t be sales-driven. If it is, your viewers may see through it and not connect with the content as much as they would have.
Instead, the content’s goal should be to increase your brand trustworthiness, strengthen your relationship with customers and/or promote thought leadership.
Learn how empathetic social media marketing can grow your business
Showing empathy in your social media marketing can make your brand feel more human, increase brand loyalty, and help you connect with your brand’s online community.
At Marketing 360®, we offer social media marketing services that can help inspire and motivate your audience. Learn more about our social media marketing services and see our plans and pricing.
Originally published on 4/23/20
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