The Best Marketing Strategies Come From Deep Customer Empathy
Before anyone buys anything, they typically interact with the brand multiple times. These moments are called touchpoints. Touchpoints matter because people rarely transition from awareness to purchase in a single step. They need to see signals to guide them to action.
Considerations before buying:
- Does this product or service have real tangible value that can be felt or measured?
- Does this product or service provide psychological satisfaction through its use or ownership?
A touchpoint can be a TikTok video, a blog post, a review, a website, a storefront sign, a sales email, or even a post from another customer. Many legacy businesses leave these moments up to chance. Growth-focused businesses work to control as many touchpoints as possible and use them to tell a story to a specific audience.
It can be difficult to identify exactly which touchpoint tipped the scales in favor of the business. It can take seasons to truly understand the impact of a marketing campaign. In the short term the focus has to be on a relentless consistency of message.
When we think about the campaign components, it helps to consider the consumer perspective first. Often, founders want to tell their story, but those messages get lost quickly if the core value proposition isn’t apparent. Real and tangible value considerations are things like cost, literal utility, etc.
- If I’m buying a car, it should drive
- If I’m buying a winter jacket, it should keep me warm
- If I’m buying a healthy snack, it should be composed of healthy ingredients
- If I’m buying a chocolate bar, it should satisfy my appetite for chocolate (It should also probably be real chocolate).
Psychological satisfaction can be wide-ranging and might be experienced differently across gender, geography, generation, etc. This is why it’s so important to niche down and identify the appropriate audience. If done correctly, it’s exponentially easier to craft a compelling and coherent marketing strategy.
- If I’m buying a car and I want to reduce my environmental impact, then I’m in the market for an EV or hybrid with ethical manufacturing standards.
- If I’m buying a winter jacket and I need to feel like my dollars are supporting good in the world, then I’m in the market for union-made merchandise.
- If US deregulation has transformed food into poison, and I want to buy snacks for my kids, then I’m in the market for snacks that only use organic ingredients.
- If I’m concerned with exploitation and child labor, then I’m in the market for chocolate that is sourced ethically and pays fair wages to farmers.
It is far more effective to craft the full marketing funnel if we walk through the customer’s mind first. The website, organic content video, LinkedIn articles, and Instagram stories must all work together to tell the same story.
Your marketing strategy should never distill down into a virality slot machine.