Everyone is ruthless. Find the opportunities within the kindness.
Inspiration is a great way to discover what other people are doing and to generate some ideas about how your brand can participate in a market. But it’s a terrible funnel of competition, resulting in a tunnel-vision that everyone doubles-down into. Each competitor tries to squeeze the other out, saying they are “more this” or “better at that.” It’s competitive, aggressive, and in the end will hardly benefit everyone who is participating - likely only favoring the one standout.
Digital marketing tools are designed for this type of marketer behavior. They identify competitors, point out gaps in our marketing framework, our SEO strategies, our paid media coverage. They push us to compete against what is happening already.
But there’s another way. While everyone dives into the rabbit hole of direct competition and focusing on what each other are doing, there’s a chance to look in another direction and better understand your community and customers. You can use kindness to generate empathy, a greater understanding, a nurtured curiosity. This will deliver insights that your competitors aren’t considering, and will likely not be on their radar until it’s too late.
And that’s kindness.
The reality of modern business
Digital marketing is ruthless. It’s backbone is metrics, its inboxes are filled with reports delivered from Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Ads, PowerBI, and they all tell you what your competition is doing and what you can do to increase your visibility and performance. There’s a constant reminder that there is more of your competition you can scrape away, out-market into oblivion.
Everyone in marketing feels this pressure to be “ruthless,” to find a way to beat the competition. We hear from our clients and managers that the competition is doing building a YouTube channel, so that’s what we should do, too. Our inboxes are flooded with forwarded newsletters, well-crafted for our competitor’s audience. We’re told that’s the standard, and we need to beat that.
But that behavior misses the entire point of marketing. Instead of keeping a close eye on the competition, we should be keeping our attention on our customers, our clients, our community. We need to be curious about their experiences, what they are looking for, what they’re struggling with and missing. And that’s what we can deliver.
The Hidden Power of Kindness
Kindness is often equated with weakness.
That’s fucking hogwash.
Kindness is incredibly difficult. It’s nuanced, complicated, and involves a relationship with understanding. You can’t fake kindness (at least in the long-term).
Finding opportunities through kindness
With kindness as the north star, the entire customer journey takes on a new perspective. Customer service becomes a priority. Understanding how customers are struggling prior to finding your business because critical to how you deliver your product and service post-sale. The content you create gets written for how to meet the needs, versus telling them what they need.
When you’re focusing on the needs of your customers, not just how to quickly push them through your sales cycle, you can identify and understand why they might get stuck in the journey. With this new information and a genuine curiosity, you can develop a service design that delights instead of frustrates.
Practical Applications for Digital Marketing
Customer-first content strategies
When you sit down and think about what content to create, you no longer need to copy what another company is putting out there. Instead, think about your customers and what they need. Identify their pain-points and how your business can help them.
That’s the basis for your content plan, for your experience design. You can be kind, step in, help them figure out how to be successful.
Honest social media engagement
Honesty and social media may not feel like they go together, but it can be one of the most effective ways to create a long-lasting relationship. If you truly understand your customers, have empathy for where they are, and find ways to engage with them in a supporting way, you are able to move beyond the post-and-pray-for-viral strategy. Instead, your social plan becomes obvious and helpful.
Building community over competition
You’re likely not the only person in your industry, neighborhood or city. And that’s fantastic. This doens’t have to be a zero-sum game.
You can align your marketing efforts to support others you have a connection to, and in turn it’ll suport and align with your business goals. Think of it as a rising tide lifting all ships. If you’re able to drive more awareness and interest in your neighborhood, you’re going to build the potential customer base. They may not go to your business the first time, but they start to know it exists. When they’re ready, you’re higher in their mind.
Celebrate your community. Share their wins. Support each other.
Implementing a Kindness-First Digital Marketing Strategy
The change to a kindness-first digital marketing strategy isn’t about flipping a switch and changing all of your efforts. It takes time, intention, and a commitment to understanding your customer over the long-term.
Use these steps to get started on implementing a kindness-first digital marketing strategy:
Revisit and update your customer journey map, focusing on the current situation but oriented around your customer, not your business
Add frustration markers and delight markers along the journey map to identify how well things are going right now
List your assumptions and hypotheses about how users find themselves with either frustration or delight
Generate a list of ideas for each step of the journey that you assume and hypothesize will generate an improvement towards kindness, delight, and business outcomes
Talk with your customers and validate your assumptions and hypotheses
Begin implementing, testing, and learning
Repeat
Your marketing success metrics don’t change with a kindness focus. They remain the same, such as leads or sales. But your avenue to getting there will vary widely from that of your competitors, and that will be the difference that keeps generating marketing success metrics and repeat customers.
Kindness can be your strategy
If you want to reframe your digital marketing efforts on kindness, we’d love to help.
