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How to bring empathy to your customer experience strategy

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How to bring empathy to your customer experience strategy

“You have two assets without which you cannot have a business – customers and employees,” said Natalie Petouhoff. “Yet they’re not on the balance sheet and we don’t design experiences to maximize their potential.”

Dr. Petouhoff works on customer experience business and value consulting, as well as sales enablement, with the executive team at Genesys, a cloud CX platform. Her new book, co-written with Genesys CEO and Chairman Tony Bates, argues that empathy is key to solving CX and EX (employee experience) challenges.

Empathy in Action, available next month from IdeaPress, is not a quick-read-and-discard effort. It’s a substantial volume which bolsters cheerleading for empathetic marketing with detailed advice on how to push a business up the maturity curve, from transactional marketing, through interaction and engagement, to empathy. The book shows how to remove “blind spots,” how to increase customer and employee lifetime value, and how to focus on empathy-based business value — increasing financial success by focusing on the customer and employee; putting them, indeed, on the balance sheet.

How to bring empathy to your customer experience strategy

A history of efficiency

It almost goes without saying that the history of business is not a history of empathy but a history of efficiency. “What businesses have done – and this historical footprint goes back to the first industrial revolution – is focus on efficiency, to the cost of the employee and the customer,” said Petouhoff. “Henry Ford made one model, right? There was no choice or personalization. We’ve kind of carried that forward, this historical footprint of efficiency and effectiveness at all costs.”

While everyone is talking about CX (and increasingly about EX too), the promise hasn’t yet delivered. “Part of the reason it hasn’t delivered is the perspective from which we create those experiences. We’re all customers and employees and we’ve all had those experiences that make us stop and say, ‘What on earth are they thinking? This is horrible.’ The point of the book is to say, stop doing that – it doesn’t make any sense.” Employees are voting with their feet right now. Customers, Petouhoff observes, “are voting with their mouse.”

“Most of us have taken a very business-centric point of view about how to create an experience, whether it’s for the customer or the employee,” Petouhoff said. Businesses continue to focus on offering products and services, often commoditized, rather than great experiences. There are exceptions, of course: “You look at businesses like Airbnb, Netflix or Tesla – they’ve created the experience economy. We all expect great experiences and yet it’s so interesting how difficult it is for companies to get out of their own way.”

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The true meaning of empathy

In order to understand the concept of empathetic experiences, it’s first necessary to understand empathy. Don’t confuse it with sympathy. Sympathy is about feeling sorry for someone else’s misfortune. Empathy is about stepping into their shoes. You can be sympathetic without being empathetic (“I’m sorry for what you’re going through — I can’t imagine what it’s like”).

In other words, empathy doesn’t reduce to caring and compassion. “The word ’empathy’ to us means taking a look at something from another person’s point of view,” said Petouhoff — and the book underlines this: “It is the conscious decision to focus on the needs of another person from their point of view, not yours. For a business it means that all of its people, processes, strategies, leadership and technologies are aligned around its customers’ and employees’ point of view — not the company’s” (page 301).

And yes, getting to that point requires some serious transformation.

Getting into the empathy business

One bitter pill brands need to swallow involves shifting their focus from cutting costs to increasing revenue. Both are routes to growing profits, but the former often comes with customer attrition — and, more now than ever before, employee attrition. Other blind spots include prioritizing investors over customers, failing to invest in the technology that can deliver personalized experiences at scale, failure to leverage data effectively, static business plans and equally static management style.

A useful model to start thinking about what needs to change is Petouhoff and Bates’s “Force-Multiplier Flywheel.” Somewhat reminiscent of HubSpot’s flywheel model, proposed as an alternative to the traditional funnel, this version incorporates detailed advice on how to drive empathy. The four segments of the ever-spinning wheel are labeled Listen, Understand and Predict, Act and Learn. The inputs to Listen are a set of empathy-based business values — empathy-based corporate value, empathy-based culture, empathy-based leadership and empathy-based technology — and the output from the flywheel should be ongoing empathy-based disruption.

There’s a further model which, in turn, supports the way a brand can refine and develop the flywheel. This one is called the OODA Loop and it’s based on a strategy developed for training fighter pilots. OODA — observe, orient, decide and act. Most of those categories should be self-explanatory, but “orient” in this context refers to benchmarking your current customer and employee experiences against those of your competitors.

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One increasingly obvious component of empathetic customer experiences is a sense of community, something B2C brands can build, of course, through social media channels, but also something of growing importance in a B2B space that is more and more about long-term customer relationships and helping to solve customers’ problems. “I’m working on a community here at Genesys called Beyond – it’s in its infancy right now,” said Petouhoff. “We have content for managers and agents, but my next act at Genesys is to build that online community with thought leadership and content, a place where people can come and learn.”

Read next: Why community could be the next big thing in marketing

The pandemic as context

Among the countless other things the pandemic has accelerated during the last two years is a sense that marketing needs to be empathetic, that it needs to speak — in an appropriate tone — to people’s needs and concerns; that it doesn’t exist just to push a lead down the funnel in the direction of a sale. In other words, transformational tops transactional, and even in the B2B space buyers are looking for relevant and empathetic engagement, not just a sales call.

Read next: What a long strange year in digital marketing

Bates and Petouhoff could not have foreseen this when they set out on their journey. “I was hired in October 2019, ” she said. “I met Tony and started talking to him about ‘I would really like to write a book that would change business forever.’” Bates asked her what that would look like. “Empathy — whether you’re in a relationship, whether you’re a friend, whether you’re a business — it creates trust and it creates loyalty. Now here comes 2020. Maybe we got lucky, I don’t know.”

About The Author

The holiday season is upon us
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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