Why is Empathy Important for your Business Relationships?

It takes a lot of creativity to build and strengthen the digital presence of a brand, but above all, it needs a lot of dedication to give good customer service and taking care of your clients. To take marketing and sales to a whole new level, we must put ourselves in other people´s position and understand their particular way of seeing their needs, challenges and business goals.

Marketing and sales professionals are developing a great sense of empathy as a result of the need of contacting others, getting to know them, meeting their needs and listening to them with real interest that leads to understanding what they need to succeed in their business. Building a sustainable relationship with a client requires the understanding of the existing connection between consumer’s interests and the properties of the product you are offering. Hence, a communication strategy must be developed considering this principle.

Having in mind that most purchasing decisions are based on creating an emotional connection with the consumer, empathy is the central element to influence people’s feelings,emotions and decisions towards a product. 

What are the benefits of applying empathy in business?

It also has an impact on productivity, creativity and innovation. Employers with solid soft skills are more efficient and are generally able to solve problems in a more integral way.

Through empathy, a company´s vision is transmitted to employees, allowing them to feel integrated and part of a joint mission. Therefore, a good business leader should be able to share the company´s goals and success with employees generating a culture of understanding and cooperation in the work environment.

There is a complex process to find the right channels and adequate tone to interact with the audience is not just a more emotional but a personal level. Campaigns built with empathy shared ideas and that seeks to relieve a pain point that your customer might have, will make your business relationships feel identified with the brand. When you put yourself in other people´s situations it is easier to generate new ideas based on their needs and adding real value to their experience.

Using empathy to detect the stages of the customer´s journey, can provide very powerful information.

To build a sustainable relationship with the client we must be able to understand the phases that he is living in his mind and emotions around his need or problem and the relation with the interactions and contact with the product or service. Additionally, we can take advantage of social networks to guide them through their customer’s journey and earn their trust and preferences.

An empathy map is a tool to analyse your target audience and optimise your digital marketing strategy and content development based on the results. To structure an empathy map, we need to ask a few questions about our target audience :

What does your target audience feel, see or hear? 

What does your target audience say and do?

What does your target audience face as challenges?

The main idea is to monitor and classify all the interactions with the customer during its journey, keeping in mind all the elements that have an impact, such as: the timeline from the first contact, the clients’ positive, negative or neutral reactions, and the moments of interaction between the client and the company and how this happens.

Advantages of creating a digital empathy strategy

• Marketing professionals will benefit from learning how to reach additional niches, more easily
• They will be able to create a differential value proposition for the product/service by associating the brand with a lifestyle or personality or even better, associating your brand as a trusted solution to their pain points.
• With an emphatic connection is not complicated to justify in the consumer’s mind why your product is better and therefore validate the purchase.
• Communication and feedback with customers will improve.
• There is a big influence of word of mouth promotion so having an empathic relationship with your audience will multiply the positive impact of your brand becoming a positive reference in the market.

To build solid relationships  between your company and your clients, you must foster great internal communication, the development of soft skills in your staff and a complete change of mindset towards more human interaction. Improving the work environment and the relationship between departments will help the whole team to be more emphatic with each other, with the customers and their needs. This will improve the flow of information between Marketing and Sales. Eventually, the environment in the company should be cooperative and all the business areas should be committed to listening to the market using the newest technological tools available.

Marketing and sales professionals should approach customers effectively understanding the market challenges and trends, generating and optimising campaigns, educating the audience and generating a real valuable purchasing experience. Always promote the balance between human emotions and the company´s interest, since this is the path to achieve sustainable relations and success in business.

Try implementing your own empathy map with your clients and keep strengthening your team´s soft skills to build valuable relationships in the business environment.