Digital Empathy Framework
Create empathic ads that reach your target audience
Create empathic ads that reach your target audience
One step deeper with digital empathy
People don't choose products or services solely for reasons of efficiency or effectiveness. They are much more likely to respond to emotional aspects and the feeling of being "understood." Also and especially in the digital world.
For good reason, "digital empathy" is the buzzword of the hour. The concept transfers core principles of empathy to technical designs to improve the user experience. Empathy is the psychological principle from which we as humans can empathize with the thoughts and emotions of our fellow human beings. We share the feelings of our counterparts by empathizing with them and responding accordingly.
Digital empathy in paid advertising: top performance with personas
Whether it's buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or applying for a job opening, ads that are meant to persuade users to make a decision must appeal to them on both a cognitive and emotional level and be an expression of authentic empathy for users. In short, they must be empathetic.
Digital empathy is based on a profound understanding of the target group, which can be addressed on two levels:
Emotional level - motives: What (common) interests do they have? What values are important to them?
Cognitive level - Situations: When do users come into contact with a company? In which circumstances is the touchpoint embedded? On what occasion are products or services of the company interesting?
In order to hit the right (empathic) trigger for the respective target group segment, our paid advertising experts create hypotheses on the individual situation (cognitive level) and motives (emotional level) of the target group. On this basis, we create detailed personas that serve as the basis for personalized performance ads. We expand and refine our hypotheses for persona development until you reach the desired target group in the best possible way.
Our goal here is to create ads that, when properly aligned with your target groups, convey the maximum positive feeling about your brand to users. Likeability is half the battle when it comes to brand building, and it's even more than half the battle when it comes to creating digital empathy.
Your users, much like your real-life neighbors, want to build a relationship. They want to know that you care about them, understand them, and value their perspective. It doesn't matter if you're a lifestyle brand selling a product, a new consumer tech startup, or a company about to go public.
If you're personable and your branding is in a personable format, you can shine with your digital products, outshine your competition, and offer your customers more than the competition.
Case Study DeinDesign: Emotional customer language based on persona
DeinDesign produces individual cases for electronic devices such as smartphones or laptops that can be easily customized or completely designed by the customer. One of the hypothetical target personas developed by our experts looks like this:
A - S - C - E
The goal of ad placement based on the Digital Empathy Framework is to precisely match the intersection of identified personas and the targeting options of the respective advertising platform. In this way, wastage is effectively avoided. The maturity model of digital ad placement used by our experts illustrates the degree to which personalized addressing, continuous optimization, and process automation ultimately intertwine in empathic ads.
We draw on a variety of tools to create personas that best reflect your target group segments. For example, we use the motive compass developed by Dirk W. Eilert from facial expression resonance to trace emotional signals from users back to explicit motives. The clear motive system makes modern findings from psychology and brain research usable for persona development and enables us to reliably interpret human motivations behind their behavior. Just like the LUXXprofile personality profile, which can be used to work out highly nuanced personas.
