Some people are naturally empathic. They easily understand another's point of view. They immediately intuit what another might be feeling in any situation.

Is that you? Congrats, you! You're ahead of the game.

The rest of us have to work a little more intentionally to get into another's mindset.

“Good writing (and therefore crafting good experiences) requires us to understand and have empathy for our audience, their situation, their needs and goals,” says content strategist Jonathon Colman. “The best content experiences are pitched perfectly in the sweet spot, the nexus of all those human factors.”

In other words, empathy for the customer experience should be at the root of all of our content, because having a sense of the people you are writing for and a deep understanding of their problems is key to honing our craft.

Content created only to further a search engine ranking is a massive waste of time and effort. It's also a wasted opportunity. It's far better, long-term, to create useful content that solves customer problems, shoulders their burdens, eases their pain, enriches their lives, creates a connection between you two.

This was true when we wrote Content Rules a decade ago. But recent and various Google updates have seemed to finally make it permanent and official. (High-fives all around!)

That means we should meet people where they are, with a spirit of generosity and benevolence.

We should help them find answers to the problems they have.

We should make sure they see themselves mirrored in our writing.

All of your content—your product pages, landing pages, customer support text, About Us pages, all of it—“needs to use language to support people's needs and goals,” Colman told me.

“And each of those experiences requires very thoughtful writing that's appropriate to what the audience needs from us in those situations. A listicle of 14 Cats Who Look Just Like Elvis just ain't gonna work when someone needs to figure out how our products work.”

So how do you know what people need?

That's where enormous, mammoth, almost pathological empathy comes in. Start by getting to know your customers.

“It's hard to have real empathy for real people's experiences if we don't really get to know the people themselves,” Colman said. “Not just in aggregate, not just as a collection of Web analytics data, search queries, or spreadsheets … I mean the real deal: actually talking with them. Or, better still: listening to them.”

Empathy—like writing—isn't a gift. It's a discipline. It takes some intentional effort and diligence to develop enormous empathy so that you can apply it to your writing.

“You're not engaging in a one-time action,” Colman says. “You're building a long-term relationship.”

Here are some first steps toward building pathological empathy for our customers, prospects, readers:

1. Spend time with your customers or prospects. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? But it's surprising how few marketers actually interact with their customers; often, only customer service or sales teams do.

   Listen to customer service inquiries. Monitor the chatbot. Watch how customers behave. See what problems they have. Look for patterns.

2. Understand their habitat. A focus group in a generic conference room or user experience testing in a lab isn't ideal. It's better to visit people who use your products or services at their homes or at work or while they're waiting in line for coffee.

   “This will give you an entirely new understanding of what people need from you and your content,” Colman says. “You can't develop empathy without context.”

3. Ask why. Never assume you know why people do what they do.

   “You might be great at using analytics systems to measure every nuance of a person's behavior on your site or in your app,” Colman says. “But analytics only tell us what people did, not why they did it.

   “So ask. And then ask again. And keep asking until you understand the bigger picture of what people value and what they need from you.”

4. Share stories, not just stats. Many of us have access to dashboards filled with metrics and data.

   Data is useful. But it comes to life when you marry it with feedback from the people who use your site or your products.

   You can build aggregate metrics around this feedback—like sentiment, length, complaints per hour, and so on … “It's even more powerful to display people's actual comments,” Colman says. “Follow that up by building rapid workflows to solve problems and you're putting empathy into action!”

5. Use customer-centric language. Regularly replace I or we with you to shift the focus to the customer's point of view.

   As in:

   Instead of (company-centric): The #1 video platform for virtual conferences.

   Say this (customer-centric): Create virtual events that feel like a Netflix show. (via Goldcast)

   Instead of: Point-of-sale solutions for restaurants of all sizes.

   Say this: Built to make your restaurant better. (via Toast)

6. Aim to deliver an “It’s-me!” Minute. Does your reader feel seen? Recognized? Understood?

   Let's look at a Services page for a Virtual Assistant company.

   This is okay: Outsource your long to-do list to a Virtual Assistant.

   This is way better: You spend evenings and weekends answering emails instead of enjoying your free time. You're here because something needs to change. (via Don't Panic Management)

   The former is okay—the reference to the “long to-do list” is relatable. But the latter takes empathy a step further—slipping on the skin of the reader, packing an emotional wallop for overwhelmed entrepreneurs.

   So the question for you: Are you holding up a mirror to your reader, beaming their reflection back to them?

* * *

Pathological Empathy in Action

Pathological empathy is critical for sales copy, home pages, or marketing landing pages—all places where we need to be very specific about what our value offers to our customers—and not just what the offer is, says Nadia Eghbal, co-founder of online cooking school Feast (now Foodist Kitchen).

“Your customers don't buy your product to do your company a favor,” Eghbal said. “They're doing it because your product makes their lives better. So if you want to sell something, you need to explain how you're helping them.”

Feast shifted from company-centric to customer-centric writing on its home page:

Company-centric: A Better Way to Learn How to Cook.

• This statement was too nonspecific, Nadia said. Better in what way? And according to whom?

Customer-centric: Learn to cook without recipes in 30 days.

• Ah. Much stronger. A clear explanation of the benefits. And an appeal to a buyer's aspirational future self.

That shift in messaging cooked up (ha!) a tenfold increase in sales. And it delivered soul-filling anecdotal evidence, too.

“We regularly get emails from people along the lines of ‘Wow, everything on your home page describes me to a T!'—which suggests we're resonating with customers in the right way,” she said. ⇦ (That's an It's-me Minute. Right there.)

The best way to keep people engaged is to talk about them. Not you.