How Establishing Empathy in Your Marketing Helps Build Trust Before You Meet
In a business as competitive as real estate, most agents are taught that success is a all about volume.
They’re told that the way to get more leads is to constantly hustle by knocking on on more doors and making more cold calls than their competition do; and while that might work for some, there’s a much better way that allows you to get higher quality leads that already trust you and your brand before you even meet them; and at he heart of that is establishing empathy in your marketing strategy.
But empathy in marketing isn’t just some soft skill to learn – it’s the core of a successful inbound marketing strategy.
Empathy in marketing is where you show that you actually care about the people interacting with your brand by providing the information they need, even if it doesn’t immediately result in a transaction; and it’s especially effective now as people are becoming more and more skeptical of sales tactics.
By being empathetic in your marketing, you create an opportunity to build real trust with your target audience before you even have your first meeting with them.
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Using Familiarity in Your Marketing Strategy to Get More Business
- Planning a Real Estate Lead Flow Through Inbound Marketing
The Philosophy of Empathy vs. The Pressure of Outbound
To understand why empathy works in marketing, all you have to do is look at the traditional outbound marketing model that most agents do.
Outbound marketing, like cold calling, door-knocking, and mass postcard campaigns, is considered to be a cold reach out. Essentially, you’re trying to create interest where it might not exist, and because a lot of people often tend to find these marketing efforts intrusive, using them runs the risk of starting your marketing relationship with someone in a negative way.
But by its design, inbound marketing is different because it’s rooted in empathy (at least if you do it correctly) as it’s known for attracting people by building meaningful, lasting connections through valuable content and resources.
When you lead with empathy, you aren’t trying to trick people into clicking a link – instead, you are empowering them.
Step 1: Defining Your Audience Through an Empathetic Lens
One thing’s for sure: you can’t be empathetic toward a generic lead that you know nothing about; you can only be empathetic toward someone whose specific situation you understand. That means that the first step in creating an empathy-based strategy is defining your target audience.
But to do this effectively, you have to go beyond general demographics like age or income and define every detail you can. Remember, your target audience is made up of three groups of people:
- People you work with now,
- People you want to work with in the future, and
- People you don’t want to work with it all.
And you have to define each in as much detail as you can in order to figure out not just how to be empathetic towards them, but also to do any marketing that will effectively appeal to anyone – you have to know who you’re creating your marketing for.
By narrowing your focus, your marketing stops sounding like a generic sales pitch and starts sounding more like a casual conversation where you have the chance to help someone.
Step 2: Identifying the Marketing Opportunities That Trigger Stress
Empathy is most powerful when it is applied to a specific marketing event, like a life trigger that causes someone to look for a real estate agent. These events are often stressful, emotional, life-changing, or sometimes all of them, but they’re also an opportunity for marketing (but not in a predatory way, but rather, a chance for you to help someone and begin earning their trust.
For example, just consider how an empathetic agent would approach these scenarios:
- The Upsizer” Their trigger might be a couple expecting a baby. They aren’t just “looking for a house”; they are looking for safety, better schools, and room for their family to grow.
- The Downsizer: Their trigger might be a child moving out for college. They are dealing with “empty nest” syndrome and the emotional weight of leaving a home filled with memories.
- The First-Time Buyer: Their trigger might be a promotion at work. They are excited but likely terrified of the financial complexity of their first transaction.
When you define these scenarios specifically, you get a clearer picture of what would make them reach out and look for help; and the best way to do that is to stop marketing your generic real estate services, and instead, and start marketing solutions for growing families, guidance for a new chapter in life, or anything else that directly resonates with them, helps them, and makes them notice that you care.
★ Want to learn more about this step? Have a look at this post called: Establishing a Behavioral Marketing Strategy.
Step 3: Building a Content Strategy That Empowers (and Helps)
Once you know the marketing events, the next step is for you to build your search strategy and your content strategy, around those marketing events, with the goal of targeting your audience at the right time and for the right reasons.
In short, your search strategy is where you plan for what your audience is searching for during their life trigger, and your content strategy is the published content that they’ll find in search, answers their questions, and sets the foundation for them beginning to trust you and your brand.
So what kind of content can you produce as part of your content strategy?
- You can write high-quality, long-form blog posts that answer their urgent questions.
- You can create downloadable resources or eBooks that solve their immediate problems.
- You can produce video content that work towards showcasing you as an authority on their topic.
- And a lot more…
For example, if you write a detailed guide titled “Everything you need to know about selling your house during a divorce,” you’re establishing yourself as an authority when someone finds it in search at a difficult time in their lives. In short, that you understand emotional complexities of their situation, and you can help them.
Truth be told, this is the biggest part of building your empathetic inbound marketing strategy. It’s also the most amount of work to do as your inbound marketing strategy is never done – you need to be continually refining your search strategy, building your content strategy, and then reviewing and adjusting your efforts, but when done correctly it’s absolutely worth the effort.
★ Want to learn more about building a content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating a Content Strategy Based On Emotional Search Intent (To Get Better Leads)
- The Benefits of Building a Long-Form Real Estate Content Strategy
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
Step 4: The Three Stages of the Empathetic, Inbound Journey
To build deep trust, your strategy should follow three main stages: Attract, Engage, and Delight.
1. The Attract Stage: In this stage, you encourage your audience to discover you by providing value. If you show up in search results and provide answers to their downsizing questions, they move from discovering you, to associating you with authority, to trusting you.
2. The Engage Stage: In this stage, you build the initial relationship. This can be done through automation, such as a chatbot that asks if they have specific questions about downsizing rather than just “general questions”.
3. The Delight Stage: This is where you make things personal. It’s about delivering the right information to the right person at the exact time they need it. For example, if a lead who has been reading your downsizing content visits your “About Us” page, you can trigger a customized email that explains your team’s specific experience in helping seniors.
★ Want to learn more about these three stages of the inbound journey? We go into it in more detail in this post called: The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents.
Get High-Quality Leads That Already Trust You
When you embrace an empathy-focused inbound marketing strategy, something magical happens: the leads that eventually reach out to you are no longer cold.
They become people who have been nurtured by your business, often in the background, for weeks or months, and they already trust you before the’ve even met you, and trust is one of the most important factors to build with your target audience.
