Reaching Your Prospect Through Empathy

Ask yourself is copywriting an art or a science? For many professionals, it seems to be a career-long journey coupled with the educational trip of a lifetime.
Stop for a minute, though and forget the research and the “book learning”. You are simply a person marketing something to other people. Put your books aside and sit quietly. Listen to yourself, your words and your feelings as you develop a marketing piece and strategy.
You can learn a great deal about your customer or prospect if you adopt an attitude of empathy. Use your imagination to attempt to understand the readers and get in touch with their wants and needs.
Being empathetic can help you create powerful copy.
Your target audience, those who will be reading the copy you are about to write, wants to be understood and appreciated. Your understanding of them has to be honest. It is this understanding and honesty that, when woven into your copy, captures your prospect. Carefully done, empathic copy will get your audience to relax and trust you. They feel that you understand them and their world.
For a brief moment in time, you and your copy have become a part of their lives. You have fulfilled your goal of creating a relationship with them. Your copy, your goods and services will stay in their mind. When they need your goods or services, the buying decision may already be made in your favor.
How do you use empathy in your copy?
For some individuals, being empathetic is easy. For others, it is a struggle. Add to that working on a deadline and it is easy to understand how this important technique can be pushed aside. When you intentionally write with empathy, you not only put yourself in the reader’s position, you allow yourself to become vulnerable, to feel what someone else feels.
Just imagine what it would be like to write copy about speech impediments, such as stuttering.
To you put yourself in the place of someone who stutters, you must allow yourself to image what it would be like to stutter. You have to be able to feel the frustration and embarrassment that the stutterer feels. You have to feel the frustration and isolation that someone who has difficultly expressing themselves must feel. You have to put yourself into this person’s position and understand the impact the stuttering has on all areas of life.
Can you imagine? Once you have had the experience of imaging what the reader’s life is like, then you can start to write. You know what they are feeling and you want to help. You have a product or a service that will help them solve their problems. Any person would be grateful to meet someone who understands their problem – someone who listens to them, who can lean in and explain how a product or service can help them.
You can use empathy to build trust, create relationships and take down barriers. Empathy can make people want to do business with you.
One word of caution: empathy is best when it is used with honesty and integrity. If your attempt at using empathy comes across as if you are simply playing a game, your readers will quickly pick up on that and the power of empathy will be lost.