Imagine you are going to a networking meeting, it’s your first time. You have your sales pitch at the ready. When you get to the event you grab a coffee and scan the room... someone immediately approaches you and starts talking. They introduce themselves and begin to talk about what they do, about their business, how they can help you.. and ask if you need their services? You are about to reply when someone else joins your group, they say hello and ask if it’s your first visit, ask if you are local, and how you discovered the group. They talk about first time nerves - how they felt, how having your own business can mean you don’t always network or have a chance to get out... you laugh for a while together speaking about life, relax and then eventually start to talk about your businesses, and challenges at the moment. 

Pricing. The age-old dilemma of knowing what to charge for your services. You could try an internet search but it’ll more likely result in confusion, not to mention comparison and overwhelm looking at your competitors. These aren’t helpful feelings at all. When it comes to pricing, you need to have the opposite: you want confidence and clarity in your services to set a price that’s fair for both parties.

All businesses have faced the challenge of dealing with change in a climate of uncertainty over the past few months. Significant change that impacts all areas of our lives brings changes in consumer thinking, motivations and behaviour, an area that I have been researching over lockdown with very valuable results.

As humans, we make the majority of our based on our emotions driven by the ancient, subconscious ‘reptilian’ part of our brain.  Even though we may consider ourselves as logical, modern and advanced in many ways, we are hard-wired to make these emotional connections: it’s in our DNA. 

So marketing in a way that taps into real human emotion is crucial to make a genuine connection and build trust with customers and clients.

An empathy-led approach puts the needs of your customers at the heart of your business. We all need to know our customers in order to create products and services they’ll actually buy. So it doesn’t start with the product or service, it starts with the customer.