3 Empathetic Marketing: How To Connect With Your Customers with Michael Brenner, CEO

Summary: Have you made empathetic marketing part of your strategy in 2017?<br> If not, you should. Let me explain.<br> I interviewed Michael Brenner (<a href="https://twitter.com/brennermichael">@BrennerMichael</a>) the CEO of <a href="https://marketinginsidergroup.com/">MarketingInsiderGroup.com</a>. Michael has received recognition across the Internet for his knowledge and role in shaping content marketing as we know it today. He’s a sought-after keynote speaker and co-author of The Content Formula. I’m excited to bring his thoughts on empathy to you.<br> Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication.<br> <br> Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background?<br> Michael: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be with you today and looking forward to talking about empathy, which I think is so important in today’s landscape. As we get older,  I’ve needed to summarize my career much more quickly than I used to. But a 20 plus year career in sales and marketing, and leadership roles in various kinds of companies, large and small. Most recently, about ten years ago, was hired by SAP as their first head of digital marketing.  I became their first VP of Global Content Marketing, and mainly helped them modernize the digital marketing approaches that they were taking. Very much taking an empathetic approach like we’re going to discuss.<br> There’s such a need, I think, for brands to understand.  They want to do it I think but struggle with how to get it done and how to change the culture inside their organizations. That’s where I’m focused now. I built Marketing Insider Group, primarily, as kind of a one-man agency for now, but with the point that I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve been inside corporate marketing departments. I understand the politics and the culture challenge that marketers face today, and now I’m dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, as many brands, as many marketers as I can, to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers.<br> Brian: That’s fantastic. I came across your <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-empathy-counter-intuitive-secret-success-michael-brenner">article on LinkedIn</a>, and several people forwarded it to me and said, “Brian you should check this out for your book.”<br> What inspired you to start writing and talking about empathy recently?<br> What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives – I have a good story I think we could maybe get to it a little bit later on – but a typical conversation for me might involve, “Hey. This digital world and content marketing, and creating content for customers – we think we get it. Now we need to figure out how to do it.”<br> Often, I find someone in a position of power (with their arms folded) asking challenging questions like, “Well, how’s this going to help us sell more stuff?” I co-authored a book called The Content Formula, to specifically address this sort of results-based question, which was, how do you show ROI from this approach? In the book, I talk about how you can show a better return on investment with marketing that focuses on delivering content people want.<br> Even after all those sorts of financial objections are removed, I still found that there was resistance inside a lot of companies. I think we can talk about this in a little bit more depth as well, but there’s a natural instinct inside a business to want to promote itself. That’s counter-intuitive. That’s why I came to this kind of realization that the missing element, and you’ve been talking about this for a long time, is empathy. It’s missing inside corporate cultures and structures.<br> Empathy is the most counter-intuitive secret to success....