We live in an age of automated scripted responses. Customer service isn’t what it used to be. If you dialed for help nowadays, you’d get more or less an automated cookie cutter response to press 1, press 2, press 3, press the # sign, or dial 0 to talk to a customer service representative. If you are lucky, you get to talk to a real in-house customer service representative. If not, you get redirected to a call center agent from another side of the globe with a ready-made spiel to “answer” all your questions and “help” you with all your concerns. We’ve somehow lost that human touch in the midst of all this great technology.

Even web content can seem cold and clinical – distant, especially when the only end goal is to increase traffic and page rankings. Keyword stuffing. Readers are smart enough to sense whether you are truly serving their needs or you are simply dishing out self-serving, ego-centric content.

Ever read a status, a tweet, an update, or a headline, that made you click the link to read more? Irresistible. Something must have struck a chord – an emotion, a memory, a feeling, an idea, or maybe an experience that resonated with you or even provoked you, that made you connect with whatever you were reading.

This is the kind of response you want from your audience. It’s the first step. Your goal is to take them beyond being engaged. You want your readers to be involved – to be in dialogue with you. To see you as a reliable, relatable persona they can depend on. An authority figure – reachable, available.

What is empathy in relation to content marketing?

A formal definition of Empathy is the ability to identify and understand another’s situation, feelings and motives. It’s our capacity to recognize the concerns other people have. Empathy means: “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes” or “seeing things through someone else’s eyes.”
(source: Mindtools.com)

People need to KNOW they are important. They need to FEEL they are important. They need to know that you are listening to them, and that they are not just merely some page view statistic to help you rank. They need to know that you know how it feels like to walk in their shoes. Once they know that you are listening to them, then they will pay attention. They will listen. They will subscribe. They will buy. Empathy with your audience is the impetus that will determine whether your readers will come back again and again.

Think about how popular brands like Nike, Dove, or Volvo “speak” to their audience through their ads. Nike inspires. Dove boosts self-esteem. Volvo is all about safety. These brands add that human factor in their messages that people can connect to. These brands have successful messages that make their audience feel that they are THE priority.

Seth Godin put it so succinctly in his blog,

The simplest customer service frustration question of all:

“Why isn’t this as important to you as it is to me?”

All brands have a commercial agenda. However, your goal is to make your brand have a “heart”, so to speak. Empathy. It sounds like some amateur psychological runaround BUT it is the missing ingredient you need to add to the whole content strategy. True, content is king, truer still, the audience, is its ever demanding queen.

Website owners are constantly looking for that one SEO formula or template that will assure them of that coveted top spot on the search engine pages. Many webmasters have retracted from their black hat ways and are cleaning up their acts – deleting link building campaigns, url redirects, keyword stuffing, etc. – and are turning to more Google-friendly methods to avoid being penalized. One of the many SEO strategies that people are investing in is CONTENT – good, relevant, easily crawlable content. But is it THE magic SEO formula that people are looking for?

Imagine ordering a decadent looking 3-tier specialty cake baked by Cake Boss Buddy Valastro himself – intricately designed and made with absolutely the finest ingredients. It’s got everything in it to definitely make it a conversation piece among the guests. But, what if someone forgets to display this wonderfully made cake and it stays in the kitchen where no one gets to see it except the kitchen staff. No doubt it’s a wonderful and probably the best tasting cake your guests will ever taste but unless they see it, admire it, slice it, taste it – they will never know what they are missing. Same thing goes with your wonderful, relevant, crawlable, well-written content. Out of sight, out of mind.

But hey, you can have your cake and probably eat it too if you take a wholistic approach to SEO. Yes, by all means, go ahead and build relevant, optimized, searchable great content. But don’t stop there. Make sure that you get it out there and give your audience a taste of it. Get people engaged enough to share it, link to it, and make them want to come back for more. Use and maximize social media. Add that tested and reliable SEO plugin. Market your brand. Plan your public relations campaign. Grow your audience. Junk those outdated SEO concepts. Analyze and study your statistics. Realize that it’s not a one-time event but it’s something that needs to be maintained constantly. SEO is not a one-template fits all type of thing. It is anything and everything that contributes to your website’s visibility and helps you land on that top page in the SERPS.

For more on this topic, check out this helpful article on Moz.com.