All good marketing starts with empathy for your audience.
It’s easy to nod along to this concept but harder to put it into practice.
This being the case, it’s no wonder so many podcasters, marketers, businesses, creators and artists have such a hard time capturing and holding the attention of a loyal audience.
Compared to your audience, you’re an expert. You’ve done the hard work to fight your way through the challenges they’re facing now, and have an incredible opportunity to help show them the way through to the other side.
The journey you guide them on may be trivial or it may be completely transformative. It doesn’t really matter. You have a group of people looking to get somewhere that you have the map to.
You know the pitfalls, the shortcuts, and the tough slogs with no other solution than to push through them.
But along with all your expertise comes the curse of knowledge.
From where you’re at now, the path your audience is on seems obvious. You may even find yourself exasperated with the mistakes they routinely make, the walls they bang their heads against.
Without empathy, you risk distancing yourself from the people you purport to be serving, and pretty soon find yourself with no one left to serve.
There are dozens of tried and true road maps to help people achieve almost anything, many of them available for free.
Your audience has already read them, they’re not looking to buy another map from someone waiting impatiently for them at the end of the journey.
They’re looking for a guide to walk with them every step along the journey. Who sees where they’re at, what they’re facing in the moment as individuals, and cares enough about their success to show up generously and patiently, without judgment to help.
You might personally be the guide, offering your time and attention, or you might create products or services that do the guiding for you.
Regardless, without empathy for your audience, without seeing them clearly as individuals with unique backgrounds, aspirations, and challenges, you have no hope of crafting a solution to their problem that truly serves them and their needs.
And without that, you’ll have a hard time building and retaining any audience at all.
It’s easy to grow jaded over an audience who just doesn’t seem to get it. Who keeps making the same mistakes over and over even after you’ve told them how solve the problem a thousand times.
You might have a product that you know will show them everything they need to know to get where they’re going, but no one buys.
You can blame them for being cheap, for being too proud to accept the help that’s right in front of them, for being ungrateful for everything you’ve done for them.
Or you can get curious, tap into your empathy, and really seek to understand who your audience is and what they most desperately need from you.
Showing up with empathy takes work, emotional labour, and authenticity.
You can’t fake or automate it.
But real, genuine empathy, and the products and solutions that come from really understanding the people you’re seeking to serve don’t go unnoticed.
Jeremy travels full-time, loves long-distance cycle touring, and will always look back on the day he finally saved up enough money to buy the Millennium Falcon Lego set as one of his proudest achievements. He believes that the way to grow sustainable businesses is by leading with heart, vulnerability, and helping your people be and become their best selves.
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