Why empathy is the skill that will rescue content marketing

Of all the terrible marketing jargon out there (and WOW there’s a lot of it), “empathy-led marketing” is probably my least favorite. 

As Fio Dosetto, the Content Lead at Float, says: 

“Empathetic marketing is a bullsh*t label. It's just marketing. If it's not empathetic, you're doing it wrong.” 

So why am I here, talking about empathy in marketing, if it’s such a redundancy? 

Well, frankly, because so much B2B content seems to have been created without even a nod to empathy. Instead of thinking about the target audience—what they want, think, feel, need—too many content teams are thinking about frameworks, rankings, and numbers. 

The result? 

“In the rapidly changing world of B2B SaaS….” 

Or, as Brooklin Nash would say, “See also: water is wet.” 

But that kind of content won’t fly anymore. For one thing, the kind of SEO drivel that metrics-first mentality produces often won’t even rank well these days.

But, more importantly, even if it does get you leads, it’s unlikely to get you conversions and pipeline. In fact, there’s a good chance it will actively discourage your customers from buying from you. 70% of C-suite leaders say that a poorly executed piece of content made them question whether they should continue working with a current supplier, according to the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Study. 

So, what does good content look like these days? 

It’s content that puts empathy first. Empathy not just for your customers, but also the rest of the GTM team. It’s content that builds a long-term relationship with your market. 

Here’s how to create that kind of content.

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But first—a note about empathy

Because it’s an often misunderstood concept.

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Empathy isn’t about being nice, or trying to understand someone else’s feelings (that’s sympathy). Empathy is stepping into someone else’s shoes, and feeling what they feel. 

Research shows that empathy is at the heart of trust. If I believe that you understand and care about me, I am far more likely to listen to what you have to say.

Empathetic content doesn’t have to be a cheesy team video or a highly-produced customer story. It’s simply about turning your attention outwards—to the reader, to the rest of the GTM team, to the wider audience—and using what you hear to create the resources they really need, (and not the resources you want to create). 

For instance, you wouldn’t necessarily think of technical documentation as an example of empathetic content marketing. And yet, Fio recalls, at Postmark, they used their deep understanding of their highly technical market to create content that was “dry, to the point, super clear and very well structured.” 

The result? Their prospects and customers reached out repeatedly to thank them: “Great documentation, exactly what I wanted, none of the fluff that other people are giving me.” 

Here’s how to create that kind of content. 

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Step 1: Start by building empathy for your audience

We know why people read content marketing. They’re usually looking for information or entertainment. 

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But there’s something else underneath those two primary causes—the unspoken need to feel seen. We’re still human beings, even when we’re reading blogs about data integration. And, as human beings, we want to feel that we are understood, that our problems are shared, that we aren’t alone. 

So yeah, empathy matters—even in B2B content. To figure out what matters to your readers—what will make them feel seen—here are a few practical tips: 

Research like a product team 

An obvious place to start is by talking to customers—a practice that is startling uncommon for content teams, observes Fio. 

“In sports, you have to stretch, you have to warm up, or you’re going to hurt yourself. Why don’t you as a marketer have to spend time answering customer calls or interviewing customers as a thing that allows you not to hurt yourself later?” 

Yes, it’s time-consuming—but it’s also a fundamental part of the process of creating content that is relevant, useful, and effective. 

Fio’s solution is to think like a product team. Create “active feedback loops” that allow you to capture your customer’s interests, questions, feedback, problems, pain points, and challenges, and use them to inform your content strategy. 

At Beam, we call it the Connected Content Flywheel:

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You’ll also need to line up incentives with behavior. “I think there is a pressure to show outputs, and maybe the emphasis is on outputs rather than outcomes right now,” says Fio. If content teams are still being pushed toward deliverables as a measure of productivity, then nobody’s going to make time for customer interviews. 

Even if you don’t have time to interview customers or prospects, there are still tricks for understanding what your target customers really want to learn about. For example, try: 

• Giving your content writers access to customer quarterly business reviews (QBRs)

• Giving your content teams access to common support ticket issues. Many companies have built processes that involve labels or pattern tracking systems to help content teams and developers work alongside each other. Together, they see where additional customer documentation or appropriate links need to be added.

• Spending time in user groups, online forums or your own community. Andy Przystanski, the Content Marketing Lead at Lattice, says his team are “avid lurkers of Lattice's online Slack community, Resources for Humans, and always have a pulse on what People teams are grappling with week to week. If you have an equivalent community you can tap into, take full advantage of that.”

Think like a sales rep

While you analyze like a product developer, Eric Doty, the Content Lead at Dock, suggests that content marketers could also learn a thing or two from Sales. Salespeople are particularly good at “thinking about the customer’s emotions, pains, and struggles—because that’s what caused you to search for a solution.” 

B2B marketers tend to forget about emotional resonance “because they're so focused on ROI and tactics,” says Eric. 

He suggests dialing in on your audience’s emotions before you start writing. Let’s say you’re writing about sales proposal strategies. The typical B2B blog will “say something like, “‘It’s very important to have a sales proposal strategy,’ and then make arguments for why you should have a strategy behind your sales proposals.” 

“But that’s not how people think or work,” says Eric. “The way to get someone's attention is to say, ‘Remember that last time you tried to make a sales proposal in a Word document, and it was all janky, and your designer wouldn't get back to you, and then your buyer wanted the proposal faster than you could make it?’ If you understand the pain points that someone's going through, you can make a way more emotionally resonant argument.” 

To get to the pain points, think like a sales rep. Listen in on sales calls and see what customers say. Or, failing that, read your competitors’ negative reviews and make a note of the complaints, the wording, the problems people failed to solve. Then use those pain points and frustrations to add emotional punch to your content. 

Write like a human being 

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: most B2B content is spectacularly boring. And that’s not just disrespectful to your readers—it’s counterproductive. Boring content isn’t memorable, and it’s sure not thought provoking. It isn’t shareable. It’s white noise. 

Your target market is smart. And busy. If you’d like them to stop what they’re doing and listen to you, then you damn well better give them something worth listening to. 

 To do that: 

• Stop waffling. Remove all generic statements. Shave off redundancies. Avoid telling them what they already know. 

• Be direct. Call a spade a spade, not a legacy gardening implement. Don’t try to sound “professional”—you’ll sound pompous. Just say the thing already. 

• Be unique. Compare two unrelated concepts. Draw an unexpected parallel. Throw in an odd metaphor or two. 

• Find the human angle. Tell a great story. Be funny, or rude, or personal. Give them something to relate to. 

• Include expertise. Share the insights that only you know. Interview experts. Surface relevant data.

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Step 2: Move on to building empathy for your GTM colleagues 

Our recent research report found that nearly half (43%) of the GTM (non-content) respondents we surveyed said they only collaborated on content occasionally or rarely. And worse, half of those who have been involved in content said it wasn’t a good experience.

It’s time to listen to our teammates more closely.

“Marketing is a team sport,” says Gail Marie, former Head of Content/Marketing at Sphere. Yet too many content teams are operating in a silo, creating content without a nod to what’s happening in Product, or what’s needed in Sales. 

This isn’t about positioning the content team as an internal service provider. Content teams aren’t there to be order takers. But they do need to be strategic partners. “I’m a big believer that your work is only as strong as your cross-functional bonds,” says Chelsea Castle, Head of Content at Close. 

Here’s how to create better content by being empathetic to the needs and priorities of the rest of the GTM team: 

Involve the GTM team earlier in the creation process

Our survey found that 95% of GTM folks think their involvement in content marketing would make it more relevant and effective. 

They’re keen to partner with content—but many of us are bringing other teams in too late for a true collaboration, says Gail. Instead of asking GTM team members to approve a draft we’ve already written, she suggests we “involve them before that draft was ever written or the brief was even made or the video was ever shot, where you get their help conceptually or with an idea and supporting arguments.” 

It may not be easy to do, but it’s simple, says Gail: “If you're going to write about the product, get the product team involved. If you're going to write about something the customer is concerned about, talk to the salespeople who talk to the customers.” 

For instance, when the Beam team takes on a new client, they don’t start with a list of topics to write about. Instead, they start with talking to the rest of the team: 

• Marketing, including content, product, and brand/demand gen
• Sales 
• Customer Support 
• Leadership

Those interviews, together with pain points, buyer personas, and product information, form the basis of their content strategy. 

In addition to bringing the GTM team in earlier, it’s a good idea to create systems that make collaboration part of the standard operating procedure. For example: 

• Use a shared platform to gather ideas from the rest of the GTM team.

Chelsea created a CMS spreadsheet to collect input from Sales, as it was their preferred communication tool. She recommends asking yourself, “How can I make it easy for [the rest of the GTM team] to tell me ideas, asks, questions, or needs?”

• Try the RACI framework to formalize your collaboration

Gail is a fan of the RACI matrix, where you decide who is “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed” about your content plans. “It just reminds me that like, okay, I'm accountable for this piece of content, but a person who reports to me is responsible for it and I need to keep this person informed and I can consult this person. Ultimately, we're all in it together.” 

Measure awareness and revenue (not just leads) 

Our recent report, Closing the Content Gap, shows that most content marketers today are measuring success in terms of leads and conversions. Prioritizing those measures drives content marketers to create shallow, unempathetic content—hello, gated e-books and keyword-stuffed SEO material shape-shifted from competitors. 

But our report found that the rest of the GTM function thought content success should be measured in terms of revenue and brand awareness, not just leads and conversions. They need content that can help raise brand awareness, flag up product developments, and deepen the relationship with the market. 

As Lauren Lang, the Content Lead at Uplevel, wrote recently: “Content is the strategic heartbeat of marketing: campaigns don’t exist, sales falter, and brand awareness dies without it. Content marketers need to broaden their perspective and step into that strategic power.” 

To better meet the needs of the wider GTM function, switch from just measuring your content by leads and conversions (or, even worse, rankings and deliverables) to include brand awareness and pipeline metrics as well. Metrics to explore include: 

• Branded search 
• Quality metrics, like time on page or time viewing 
• Referral traffic from podcasts or guest posts
• Social media mentions, followers, engagement and referrals
• Content mentions during sales calls
• Content sourced pipeline
• Content-influenced pipeline

As Fio puts it, “So I measure revenue, I measure sign-ups, and then I also like to measure some qualitative things: Did people like it? Did people use it? Did people scroll to look down the page? Did they stay on it? There are quality signals that I would probably never report to the CEO, like the fact that six people gave me a heart emoji on a piece of content, but to me it's a sign that our content resonated in the right way. And then if that correlates with sign-ups and revenue and growth, we're doing the right thing.”

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Empathy is what builds trust with your readers and your team

Content marketing has been having a mid-life crisis lately. 

Between last year’s budget cuts, Google’s update shenanigans, and (whisper it) Gen-AI hype, content marketers are left looking for what’s next. 

But we’d argue that we’d be best served by getting back to the root of what sent many of us into content in the first place—our ability to tune into the needs of others, and then use our creativity and insight to build helpful, meaningful resources that respond to those needs. 

Over time, helping people answer authentic questions and making them feel seen in real ways will build trust. And we know that trust is essential for that final purchase.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot that content marketing was supposed to be both marketing and content. It was supposed to be for people, not just for the SERPS. 

So let’s fix that, shall we? 

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