Just like calling someone’s name often makes them look your way, there’s hardly a better way for brands to secure attention than by tying their messaging to human truths. Some of the best conversions happen when businesses step into their customers’ shoes. A story lands when audiences can glaringly see themselves in the narrative through a graphic representation of their lived circumstances. Brands that know what customers are grappling with will always outperform self-centred competitors.
Empathy storytelling targets human connections in public relations by deliberately making stakeholders heroes or protagonists of the plot. It subjects the brand or organisation to playing a supporting role in the lives, struggles, wins, and aspirations of audiences. It’s a strategy that puts the people first in order to win them over. Understanding and embodying the emotions, objections, and motivations behind a potential patronage is what separates the storytelling that gets read from the one that converts.
The best messaging isn’t built around businesses but inspires a dialogue about people, problems, and change. This is what will turn audiences into advocates. A post that engineers 100 genuine discussions is often more valuable than one that reaches 100,000 people and is forgotten the next day. Empathy storytelling is like human-interest journalism that funnels into conversations people actually want to join.
Factoring In the Critical ICP Framework
ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. It involves getting a 360-degree picture of your archetypal audience so you can speak to them with empathy and effectively assuage their pain points. ICP makes for laser-focused messaging so that the writer can turn from a generic, scattered narrative into personalised storytelling that cuts through the noise. When you speak directly to an ICP’s specific problems and goals, your storytelling becomes significantly more persuasive.
The framework guarantees better word choice by enabling the storyteller to ditch corporate-speak and industry jargon, embracing vocabulary and tone that resonate with the reader. Businesses are prone to describing their products in argot, while customers express their problems in simple, emotional terms. The closer your messaging is to your audience’s language, the easier it is for them to feel understood and trust what you’re selling. Before delving into storytelling, the ICP framework should be used to flesh out the following:
Desires: What is the ideal customer’s end goal? What, in specific terms, are they trying to achieve?
Problems and Pain Points: What is standing in their way? Why are current solutions failing them? Taking note of negative 3-star reviews of your competitors on Amazon or Alibaba gets you the exact phrasing that will make your storytelling convert.
Voice of Customer (VoC): Great messaging usually sounds like the customer wrote it themselves. What are the exact words they use to describe their frustrations? You can analyse Amazon reviews, stalk Reddit threads, support tickets and YouTube comments to pull phrases that will make your reader be like, “You’ve got me there!”
Rehashing customers’ vocabulary and phrases is the ultimate hack for high-converting storytelling that feels deeply personalised. Finding and using the exact words people use to describe their problems will make your content land more naturally and relatably.
The Situational Theory of Publics
Empathy storytelling will miss the mark without audience segmentation or stakeholder mapping. Enter the Situational theory, which hypothesises problem recognition, constraint identification, involvement, and information seeking as the four determinants of how people react to an issue or an organisation.
This model helps the storyteller achieve empathy by identifying and segmenting publics, understanding their needs and preferences, so that communication with them can be meaningful. The following is how situational theory segments publics based on their levels of problem recognition and information seeking:
All of this can be deciphered from community discussions, forums and social media comment sections where patterns can be gleaned when similar questions and objections appear repeatedly. From the derivable insights, you can then use empathy storytelling to either increase the problem recognition of latent publics or reduce the constraint identification of aware publics.
