As children, we always loved a good story. Told well, with a relatable character, stories have helped humans to create better connections since the dawn of time. So, it stands to reason that this same approach would work to engage your own target audience.

Marketing and communications should never be about simply flogging your product – consumers are smart. They want to hear brand stories; they want to know what a brand is doing the behind the scenes for CSR; they want to feel a personal connection to the brand. In the long run, a well-crafted brand and marketing story will not only be memorable but hook your audience in for the long run. So, what makes one story good, and another great?

Surprising as it may seem, adding a sincere dose of empathy to your storytelling across your brand narrative is what will stay with your audience and keep them coming back. This is because of genuine interest in how your story evolves while building genuine brand loyalty in the process. Without it, regardless of how great a success story you may have, consumers are still likely to lose interest and stop caring.

Putting empathy into your messaging doesn’t have to be complicated either. In fact, in the age of digital disruption, you’re better positioned than ever to drive the right message across to your target market. Whether you carefully curate your brand’s ‘About’ page, create an entire video or a detailed blog entry or a quick social media post, you have the tools and the resources to make people care about the story and draw them in. Empathy is one of your most powerful marketing tools!

Whether you’re creating a video, a blog post, or something as seemingly small as a social media post, you need empathy to be able to show your brand’s personality and invite your audience in. Emotions play an important role in creating memories, activating several areas of the brain at once while sending out a dose of dopamine. This is why you want your content to resonate with your audience on an emotional and psychological level.

There are two key ways you can achieve this: you can position your brand as the hero in the market OR you can place your customers in the hero role with your brand offering support. By controlling the narrative in this way, your brand will stand out in the market and separate itself from your competitors. Hook your customers on your story and you won’t need to chase them – they’ll come to you.

Now, this is all well and good if you have a consumer brand. Consumer brands seem to be in a position to be fun, quirky and engage with consumers on a one-to-one level. A simple look at Wendy’s Twitter feed shows this to be true.

But what if you’re a B2B brand? B2Bs are considered the “grown up brands” where everything is serious and you always have to come across as “professional,” whatever that means in this day and age. The perception for B2B brands is that emotions simply shouldn’t come into them.

However, the people behind a B2B buyer’s purchasing decision still operate with emotions and morals. Let’s talk about how you can break the mould and add a dash of empathy to your B2B marketing strategy.

First, you have to understand your customer. You have to know who you’re talking to so you can communicate with them properly and figure out which emotions are driving their buying decisions. Artificial Intelligence is coming along in leaps and bounds to make precise and relevant data collection and analysis, so looking closer at business intelligence applications could really help your brand.

Next, you need to define your customer. After creating the consumer persona, you need to focus on defining the driving force behind your customers’ emotions – you need to discover their pain points and how they feel because of them. This will help you when creating your content. A customer that is pressed for time will need a solution for streamlining. A customer that is overwhelmed will need something simplified.

By creating empathetic content, your customers will relate to your brand because you’ve demonstrated that you understand everything they’re going through and that not only can you help, but you want to. If you can deliver a message that says you have a solution to a client’s problem, your customers are going to warm to you.

A company blog is a great place to start. This creates a space to share information where your customers can comment and engage and suggest topics for you to cover in the future while you share valuable insight into their needs.

Finally, while empathy marketing may not be too simple in the B2B space, it’s worth taking the time to understand how to use it in your chosen field. By putting in the effort to do so, you’re going to get your brand’s message across to your customers effectively. Because they will not only care about your narrative, they are more likely to share it too. It really is worth your while to create content that will put your brand on show in the most impactful way.