Dear Marketer - It’s Actually Not All About You

The ability to empathize with customers is one of the most important skills in a marketer’s roster. If you cannot put yourself in their shoes then will never be able to correctly identify their pain points, challenges, or needs. You will never be able to talk to them in a genuine way. You doom yourself to irrelevance no matter how slick your message may be.

It seems obvious right? But when executing our daily tasks under deadline pressure, it can be easy to lose sight of this guiding principle because of the operating model of a business—which is invariably oriented to short term thinking.

As Jake Sorofman at Gartner writes, when we’re under the all-enveloping pressure of a quarter’s end, it can be easy to focus on ringing the bell for the company.

This can lead to decisions and behaviors that may help us to win the business, but miss the opportunity earn true customer loyalty and advocacy. It can also lead to a sort of self-involvement that infects and undermines the culture of the organization, causing us to see customers as a reflection of ourselves.

One way to avoid egocentric content marketing is to consistently complement our own created content with the wealth of knowledge the rest of the market has to offer. Curating other’s content forces us to absorb others’ viewpoints, while exposing your audience to a wide range of experts in your industry builds your credibility as an objective and fair-minded thought leader.