How to Recruit Top Talent Using an Inbound Framework

Inbound marketing is all about building a relationship with prospects before they make a purchase. So what is inbound recruitment?

Like inbound marketing, inbound recruitment relies on attracting candidates with blog posts, social media, videos, and webinars. Potential future employees can learn about your brand from this content before a position even opens.

Once there’s a job that’s a good fit, engaged candidates that already know about your company apply for positions. Find out how this recruiting strategy combines the best marketing principles and recruiting methods to help attract top talent.

Table of Contents

What is inbound recruitment?
Inbound Recruiting vs. Outbound Recruiting
The Benefits of Inbound Recruiting
How to Get Started With Inbound Recruiting
Inbound Recruiting Best Practices

What is inbound recruitment?

Inbound recruiting is a mix of recruitment marketing and employer branding. The methodology involves building your employer’s brand to boost its appeal to potential applicants.

This type of recruiting helps increase your chances of attracting top job seekers to your organization while increasing the number of applications.

Inbound recruiting involves four critical steps:

Attracting and sourcing top industry talent using content marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and social media.
Converting the talent into applicants.
Hiring the right candidate.
Regularly engaging with the applicants and motivating them.

Companies like Beamery have already been using the process to attract the right talent, enhance the candidate’s experience, and promote the brand.

Inbound Recruiting vs. Outbound Recruiting

Inbound and outbound recruiting are typically used together when companies search for talent. These two methodologies offer distinct approaches that go hand-in-hand. Here are the big differences you need to know.

Different Candidate Journey Stages

Inbound recruiting is a passive approach that relies on talent finding your business or an open position. The methodology prioritizes employer branding, and recruitment marketing efforts in hopes talent will apply for vacancies.

The stages of the candidate journey are awareness, consideration, and interest.

Outbound recruiting is a proactive approach to talent acquisition. Instead of waiting for candidates to find you, you go out and find them. The goal is to find talent, jump into the application stage, and offer a job.

Duration

Inbound recruiting is a long-term solution that will help advance your hiring strategy.

This strategy aims to create an employer brand that grows a pool of talented applicants. While inbound recruiting requires time, the quality and cost of hiring improve dramatically.

Outbound recruiting is a short-term hiring resolution because you only need it when the need arises. The strategy makes it easy and fast to bring in a new hire.

Perspective on Pain Points

Inbound marketing helps customers figure out their pain points by reading relevant content.

Some recruitment pain points include a bad cultural fit or a lower-than-desired salary. Candidates discover a pain point by reading your blog, employee testimonials, and company news.

Outbound recruiting allows the recruiter to find a candidate that might be a good fit. The recruiter then calls the candidates to find out if there’s a pain point. Unfortunately, most candidates don’t know if they have a pain point or won’t admit to one.

The Benefits of Inbound Recruiting

Both recruitment approaches are different, but one offers specific benefits for the recruiter or hiring manager.

LinkedIn research shows that a massive 70% of the workforceis passively looking for a job, while only 30% are active. Therefore, your success as a recruiter depends on bringing in passive talent.

Here are more reasons inbound recruiting is an excellent choice.

There’s less upfront effort.

Using the inbound recruiting framework means you don’t spend many hours communicating with each candidate. You also do not require strong scouting skills.

However, an inbound framework requires some investment. This is especially true if you’re engaged in a long-term campaign. You must develop and improve brand messaging, place ads, and create an online application platform.

You can access a wide talent pool.

Inbound recruiting allows you to sample a larger pool of candidates. Well-known brands attract hundreds, if not thousands, of people interested in working for them.

Adopting an inbound framework gives you a wide range to choose from and more opportunities to find the ideal employee.

Effects are lasting.

Setting up your inbound recruiting strategy will bring you candidates for as long as it’s running. The long-term nature of this strategy means you have new people always coming in.

Many people will be interested and ready to work whenever you have an open position. You don’t have to start from scratch when a position opens up.

You’ll have a wide range of communication channels.

Social networks are a vital resource for potential candidates. You can find people who know your business through what they share, and you can track their profiles as well.

An inbound recruiting strategy efficiently uses channels such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These platforms can help you segment the audience, creating a satisfactory experience for candidates and your company.

How to Get Started With Inbound Recruiting

Creating a repeatable inbound recruiting strategy includes understanding your ideal employees and increasing brand awareness and conversion opportunities.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting started today.

1. Create candidate personas.

Buyer personas are an integral targeted marketing strategy. A buyer persona gives you a picture of the ideal client, so you have the information required to create an effective plan.

You also need to do the same when recruiting talent. Know who you want when there’s an opening. The persona looks into what the hire will look like beyond the job title and description.

Next, develop ways to attract your ideal employee and the content they might find useful. So, how do you do this?

Here’s a simple formula that can help create your ideal candidate persona.

Review the current processes.Confirm if you’re attracting quality talent, how you connect with relevant candidates, and the social media platform you use.
Define the company culture. How are you helping employees succeed? What skills are valuable to you? What personal traits are critical? A survey of employees and other stakeholders in the hiring process can help you get this information.
Create a personal narrative.Use your new company culture script to create the ideal candidate’s persona. Each new role requires a different persona, but all have some common traits.
Create content relevant to the persona. It’s time to consider each persona’s unique requirements, values, and challenges to find the content type that’s best for them.
Share the content. Look for forums where your persona hangs out and share new content. The platform depends on what you are looking for, from Instagram to online programming forums.

Candidate-specific content provides an inside look at your business, its culture, and its mission to attract high-quality leads to your site.

2. Prospect and fill the funnel.

The modern sales team depends on the steady stream of leads from the marketing department. The relationship is a foundation for online businesses generating customers and revenues.

Your sales team requires an influx of leads, and the marketers fill the funnel’s top with interested people. However, the pipeline is also an effective tool for effective recruiting.

Modern candidates are interested in where they apply. Your job is to attract them and make them interested in learning more about your brand. Start a relationship with each candidate who hasn’t applied to build a pipeline that offers the same predictability as sales.

For example, you can invite candidates to a scheduled Google Hangout with your team members. For example, one company hosts a monthly Google Hangout of engineering candidates and the head of engineering.

Candidates can ask questions within the 30 minutes and get insights into what it means to work with the company. They also feel like they are getting special treatment. The strategy has worked to increase application rates and talent quality.

3. Have opportunities for micro-conversions.

Many people coming to the career page on your website are not ready to apply — at least not yet. Applying for a position is an enormous investment. Some candidates want to know about your organization and learn about opportunities relevant to them.

Make sure the information is ready and available for consumption. Consider presenting related blog content, providing opportunities to sign-up for the latest info on future openings, and pointing prospects to more company resources.

A good example is the Lockheed Martin Talent Network. The parent company is a global security, aerospace, defense, and advanced technologies player.

Their talent network offers candidates a chance to join their community — even when they’re not ready to apply.

With the portal, Lockheed Martin has access to an extensive talent pool. Potential candidates submit their contact information, areas of interest, and desired geographic location. This strategy allows the company to pick the right prospects for positions.

4. Turn leads into applicants.

Once you have captured the candidates’ contact information, you need to sell your organization to them and convince them to apply.

Email marketing is 40 to 45 times more effective than Twitter and Facebook, making it an effective tool for customer acquisition.

Timing your email right is ideal for nurturing new hire leads. Use emails to keep candidates updated on new opportunities that match their skills, relevant events, and important company news.

However, make sure you have targeted communication. For instance, sales candidates should get updates about the sales department.

Here are some effective message examples that will work.

Share newsworthy information. Let your customers know when your company appears on the news or releases a new product. After all, the best talent wants to work at an organization perceived as a success.
Share your company culture. An appealing company culture is a motivating factor for many candidates and one of the biggest reasons to want to apply. Many prospects see your culture and brand as a critical consideration.

So, top talent considers nurturing emails more valuable than providing a bunch of job links.

5. Optimize and iterate your efforts.

Test multiple ways to connect, and experiment with diverse career page designs to attract top talent. The process requires leaning on marketing software or Google Analyticsto track how prospects find your content.

For instance, LinkedIn makes it easy to dig into the data and see if candidates click through to your website and convert into new leads or applicants. Use an analytics platform to see which content is more effective at turning your prospects into applicants.

Use the information to improve on your less effective content for better results. Also, ask applicants how they found your company and why they apply. Get this information through a short application form or during the first interview.

The key to optimizing your inbound recruiting strategy is identifying a repeatable model. When you find content types that help you connect with talented prospects, produce more of it.

Inbound Recruiting Best Practices

Fortunately, there are things you can do to make your inbound recruiting strategy more effective.

Monitor performance of job postings.

Most job hunters use Google to search for open positions, but only 0.78% of them click on the second page of results. So, you must follow SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) best practices to appear on the first page.

Quality candidates will not see your posts if you are not showing up. An applicant tracking system can monitor the total job seeker views to help improve your SEO and SEM tactics.

Be patient.

Building a strong recruitment network takes years. It will take time for your business to create a site that attracts quality candidates.

Creating and dumping a lot of content on the internet in one day does not mean candidates will roll in the next. Quality content takes time to build and bring in talent.

Make the application simple.

Application abandonment is a major undetected leak when recruiting, but many companies ignore it. Your application process should be a tool, not an obstacle. You must know where in the process candidates abandon applying.

Some automated applicant tracking systems have built-in abandonment reports that will help you identify the problem. Other niche applications allow companies to track a candidate’s experience. Remove the issue immediately, so it doesn’t trip future applicants.

Create a strong social media presence.

Some candidates never consult Google when looking for information about a business. Instead, they will turn to social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or TikTok.

However, each platform attracts different prospects. TikTok is a good place for entry-level positions, while LinkedIn and Facebook are attractive to more experienced talent. Therefore, consider employing a multi-channel strategy.

Ready to Recruit Top Talent?

Your inbound recruiting strategy is your company’s direct reflection of its culture, so tell an authentic story about what is happening behind the scenes. The strategy gives you access to many candidates and attracts people who may ignore the recruiter’s call.

The inbound framework isn’t much different from what you use to attract clients. Translate marketing tactics to bring in top talent.

Start with engaging content and personalized content to build a pool of quality candidates today and become the most attractive employer brand on the market.

How to Perfect Personalized Marketing with the Help of Your Data Warehouse

Today, the bar for personalized customer engagement is higher than ever.

As a marketer, you know that customer data is key to delivering personalized experiences that drive growth. A whopping 82% of marketers say having high-quality data on their target audience is important to succeeding in their role – but more than half of them say they’re missing key information.

Data silos are one of the biggest hurdles that prevent businesses from delivering personalized, data-driven experiences to their customers. Only 27% of marketers say their marketing data is fully integrated with their systems and tools, resulting in fragmented and inconsistent outreach.

The good news is: It’s possible to unify your data and make it actionable in one place. One key technology for effective data activation? The cloud data warehouse.

In this blog, we’ll discuss a strategy to get first-party data out of the data warehouse and into your CRM, so you can leverage it for more effective marketing.

Data warehouses allow marketing teams to consolidate data from multiple platforms including advertising channels like Google and Facebook, analytics platforms like Mixpanel and Google Analytics, and CRM systems like HubSpot and Salesforce. Even better, both first-party and third-party customer data can be unified in the warehouse.

The most popular cloud data warehouses include:

Snowflake Data Cloud
Databricks (often referred to as a data lakehouse)
Google BigQuery
Amazon Redshift
Azure Synapse

How Data Activation Provides a Single Source of Truth

Unifying all of your customer data points (that you’ve collected through tools like HubSpot, Google Analytics,or Zendesk) into a customer 360 profile enables you to have a holistic understanding of your target audience.

A customer 360 profile refers to having a 360 degree view of your customer’s information and behavior. This might include company data, purchase history, support interactions, and even engagement with your website, app, or social media accounts.

Fortunately, many companies have already employed data teams to consolidate customer 360 data in a central place: the data warehouse.

In the past, the warehouse was limited to technical users who knew SQL. Accessing customer data was a battle between Go-to-Market and IT teams, resulting in reduced agility and low autonomy for business teams.

Enter data activation: a way to bridge the gap between data and marketing.

Data activation platforms like Census provide warehouse-native no-code tools that enable marketers to unlock data directly from the warehouse – all without needing to know SQL.

This makes it easier for marketers to use customer 360 data to personalize recommendations and customize promotions.

Leveraging the same data infrastructure across the organization improves efficiency and team collaboration, because marketers now work with the same source of truth as data and IT teams. You can be confident that your data is fresh and trustworthy because it’s approved and maintained by the data team.

Activating the data warehouse for customer segmentation

Collecting data is useless without action. Let’s talk about how to actually use your customer data to drive more effective engagement.

Customer segmentation is key to reaching the right customers at the right time with the most relevant information.

This way, you can better understand your customers and meet their unique needs at every stage of the customer journey.

For instance, you would want to send different and targeted messages to:

Users who are on a free trial of your product, versus users on your highest paid plans
VIP customers who have purchased multiple times, versus visitors who just signed up for your mailing list
Companies that have 50 user seats versus companies who have 2 user seats

Data activation platforms like the Census Audience Hub help you build dynamic audience segments with your unified customer 360 profiles.

Any user, regardless of technical skill level, can easily create, explore, and manage audiences — then send them to your CRM for targeted outreach.

Success stories from Clockwise and Prolific: Using first-party data for better personalization

Clockwise and Prolific are two companies that activate their first-party data to deliver personalized, cross-channel experiences. Both companies use Census to power HubSpot with relevant, real-time data.

Clockwise

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Clockwise is a SaaS productivity tool that helps busy professionals manage their meeting scheduling and find more time for uninterrupted flow.

They needed a better way to get product usage and engagement data in front of their go-to-market teams. By setting up real-time data syncing, the business operations team was able to:

Reduce time to stand up segmentation growth experiments from weeks to hours
Enable more personalized onboarding communications with granular user segmentation
Provide self-service access to real time product engagement data

Read the case study here.

Prolific

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Prolific simplifies online data collection by connecting researchers with the study participants they need, quickly.

Their newly-minted sales team was eager for data on their customers and prospects. After connecting their data warehouse to HubSpot, their salespeople now have important context for every sales interaction — without ever leaving HubSpot.

Prolific used Census’s data activation platform to:

Build Customer 360 profiles in HubSpot with complete product behavior data
Automate sales workflows based on product usage and segmentation data
Identify purchase intent and personalize messages

Read the case study here.

Key learnings from Clockwise and Prolific: Building a robust and scalable data foundation makes first-party data more valuable and usable. But collecting data is just the beginning. The real value is in activating data to drive business decisions and revenue.

Key Takeaways

Accessing and leveraging customer data is crucial for marketers who want to deliver personalized experiences that drive growth.

By integrating your data warehouse with your CRM, you can unlock new insights and create a central repository of customer data that can be used to power all of your marketing efforts.

Our three key takeaways from this article are:

Data Activation is crucial. It connects your data infrastructure to your marketing efforts, making you more data-driven than ever.
Real-time segmentation is key to personalization. To target accurately, go for a solution that updates audiences continuously and makes your data available seamlessly.
Your martech stack should embrace data. Choose a customer engagement platform that integrates with your tech stack, instead of using siloed tools.

To exceed customer expectations, empower your marketing, engineering, and IT teams to activate a 360° view of customer data.

Mastering the Art of Social Media Marketing

Identifying Your Audience & Crafting an Effective Social Media Message

When crafting an effective social media message, it is important to identify your target audience. Depending on the platform, the audience can vary greatly, so it is essential to determine who you are trying to reach. Once you have identified your audience, you can craft a message that speaks to them directly.

When creating a social media message, it is important to be concise and to the point. Keep your message short and clear so that your audience can quickly understand the purpose of your post. It is also important to use language that resonates with your audience. Speak to them in a way that they will find interesting and relevant.

When it comes to tone, it is important to be formal and professional. Keep the tone of your message conversational, but not overly casual. You want to come across as knowledgeable and trustworthy.

Finally, make sure your message is engaging. Ask questions or provide an incentive for your audience to interact with your post. Use visuals, if appropriate, to draw attention to your message.

By carefully considering your audience and crafting an effective social media message, you stand a greater chance of reaching your desired outcome.

The Benefits of Investing in Social Media Ads

Investing in social media ads can be a great way to promote your business and reach potential customers. In today’s digital age, social media platforms are increasingly becoming a powerful tool for marketing. Here are some of the benefits of investing in social media ads:

1. Increase Reach: Social media ads have the potential to increase the reach of your business and brand. Ads can be targeted to specific demographics, allowing you to target your ads to the audience that is most likely to be interested in your product or service.

2. Cost-Efficient: Compared to traditional forms of advertising, investing in social media ads can be a cost-effective way to reach potential customers. Social media ads are generally cheaper than other types of advertising, such as print or radio ads.

3. High Engagement: Social media platforms are known for their high levels of engagement. Ads can be tailored to a specific audience, which can lead to more successful campaigns.

4. Increased Brand Awareness: Investing in social media ads can be a great way to increase brand awareness. Ads can be used to create a buzz about your business and help you reach a wider audience.

5. Flexibility: Social media ads offer a great deal of flexibility in terms of targeting, budget, and duration. This allows you to customize your campaigns to meet your specific needs.

Overall, investing in social media ads can be a great way to promote your business and reach a

How to Monitor & Measure Your Social Media Performance

Monitoring and measuring social media performance is an important part of any successful digital marketing strategy. Keeping track of the performance of your social media campaigns allows you to identify what is working and what isn’t, and make changes to ensure your campaigns are as effective as possible. Here are some tips for monitoring and measuring your social media performance:

1. Set clear goals – Before you start monitoring and measuring the performance of your social media campaigns, it is important to have clear objectives in mind. What do you want to achieve? Identifying specific goals will help you focus on the metrics that really matter and make it easier to evaluate the success of your campaigns.

2. Measure engagement – Engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks, are a great way to measure the success of your social media campaigns. By tracking the level of engagement your posts receive, you can get a better understanding of how your audience responds to your content.

3. Analyze website traffic – Analyzing website traffic is a great way to measure how effective your social media campaigns are at driving visitors to your website. Tracking the source of your website traffic can help you identify which social media platforms are performing best and which ones are generating the most traffic.

4. Track conversions – Tracking conversions is a great way to measure how effective your social media campaigns are at driving sales or leads. You can track conversions by setting up conversion goals in Google Analytics or using other tracking tools.

Leveraging Influencers for Maximum Social Media Reach

Influencer marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to reach their target audience and expand their social media reach. Leveraging influencers for maximum social media reach requires a well-thought-out strategy to ensure success.

When selecting an influencer to work with, it’s important to identify influencers who have an active and engaged following. This will ensure that your sponsored content will be seen by relevant individuals and can be shared to their own networks. Research the influencer’s audience and look for those who have a large audience with a high level of engagement.

Develop a plan for the influencer to share your content. Create content that reflects the influencer’s interests and appeals to their audience. Ensure that you provide the influencer with enough content that they can post on a regular basis. Clarify the expectations of the partnership and how often the influencer should post your content.

Be sure to measure the success of your collaboration. Track the performance of the influencer’s posts to determine whether the strategy was successful. Analyze the engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares, to assess the reach of the content.

By carefully selecting the right influencer and developing a cohesive strategy, businesses can leverage influencers to maximize their social media reach.

Strategies for Developing a Winning Social Media Content Calendar

1. Identify Your Objectives: Before creating a content calendar, it is important to define the purpose of your social media presence. Define the goals you want to achieve by engaging with your audience on social media.

2. Analyze Your Audience: Knowing who your target audience is and what they are interested in will help you create content that is relevant and engaging. Research your audience and analyze their behaviour to create a content calendar tailored to their needs.

3. Develop Your Content Strategy: Once you have identified your objectives and analysed your target audience, it is time to create a content strategy. Consider the type of content you will post, how often you will post it, and the platforms you will use to reach your audience.

4. Plan Your Content: Use a spreadsheet or template to plan the content you will post in advance. Schedule posts for specific days and times to maximize engagement and ensure consistency.

5. Monitor Performance: Be sure to track the performance of your content to see what is resonating with your audience. Use data to refine your content calendar and ensure your content is reaching and engaging your target audience.

6. Keep It Fresh: Don’t be afraid to experiment with new content and ideas. Keep your content fresh and relevant by incorporating new topics and strategies into your calendar.

By following these steps, you can create an effective and engaging social media content calendar that will help you reach your goals and engage

The Complete Guide to Empathetic Marketing

Successful empathetic marketing is about connecting your audience and your brand. That doesn’t mean just throwing ads at your audience. It means creating truly valuable assets — content that serves customers’ needs and addresses their most significant pain points.

This type of content is much easier to create when it’s informed and driven by empathy. When you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can more easily acknowledge struggles and think critically about the best solutions.

Below, let’s go over why empathetic marketing is such a powerful strategy for businesses of all types and sizes, tips for infusing more empathy into your marketing, and a few real-life examples of empathetic marketing in practice.

Table of Contents

The Benefits of Empathetic Marketing
Tips for Empathetic Marketing
Empathetic Marketing Examples

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The Benefits of Empathetic Marketing

As Dr. Brené Brown notes, “Empathy is feeling with people.”

Showing empathy in your marketing helps build trust between your brand and your customers. And during a time when more consumers are losing confidence in brands, brand trust is a major win if you can achieve it.

A 2022 PwC survey found that only 30% of consumers have a high level of trust in companies.

If you can get on the other side, however, you may be on your way to becoming one of the most trusted brands by consumers.

All it takes is a more insightful perspective on where your customer is coming from, their needs, and how your brand can help them meet their goals.

Tips for Empathetic Marketing

You know you want to infuse more empathy into your marketing, but how exactly can you do that? Here are the best tips to remember if you want to be an empathetic marketer.

Put the customer at the forefront.

Empathetic marketing starts and ends with your customer, so it only makes sense to put their wants and needs at the forefront.

Empathy is about understanding something from another’s perspective by seeing something through their eyes. To empathize with customers, imagine their experience with your brand. Look at your product or service from their viewpoint, and think about each step they may take.

Better yet, you can follow real-life customer journeys to see their actions when shopping on your site or digesting your content.

To truly understand your customers’ experiences with your brand, take time to dive into each step of their journey so you can better understand what they may want or need during each stage.

Be open to feedback.

Operating in a vacuum is easy because that’s how they’ve always been done. But to truly practice empathy in your marketing, you have to bring your customers into the planning aspect so you can hear directly from them.

They can share what they want to see from your brand or what should be changed.

To collect feedback from your audience, go directly to the source. Run a survey or host a focus group to learn exactly what your customers’ challenges are, what they need, and how they view your brand.

These insights can help you better understand how your product or service plays a role in helping your customers navigate their challenges or achieve their goals.

Your customers will tell you if the messaging doesn’t land. Be open to shifting your approach if that’s what it takes for your message to resonate.

Always be listening.

While you should always collect direct feedback from your customers and audience, gathering insights that they don’t personally share with you is essential. People tend to be more honest when they aren’t talking directly to a brand or think the brand won’t see their comments.

Pay attention to the overall sentiment when your brand is mentioned online to see the general feelings towards your company, whether positive or negative.

Tune into your customers’ conversations, the feedback they’re sharing about their experience, and their general sentiment about your brand. You can do this by monitoring social media comments, checking out reviews on your site, or tracking reviews on third-party sites.

Be genuine.

Understanding your audience and their various needs is essential to empathetic marketing. The last thing you want is to break their trust. Being fake or putting on a persona is the quickest way to do that.

Whenever you share content or conduct outreach, be genuine in your approach. Transparency goes a long way in being authentic, so always lead with empathy if you want your content or messaging to resonate.

Provide your customer with the right content.

After all of the listening and empathizing you’ve done, it would be a shame not to put that learning into practice. And yet, some brands continue to share content their audience isn’t interested in. This is the last thing you want to do.

If you want your marketing approach to resonate with your customers, delivering the content you promised them is essential.

After running surveys or focus groups, explore how you can adjust your product, messaging, or communication channels to better meet the needs of your most loyal customers.

Empathetic Marketing Examples

Now that you know what empathetic marketing is and how to incorporate it into your strategy, let’s walk through eight brands that nail empathetic content marketing across various media.

LUSH

With the tagline, “Fresh, handmade cosmetics,” LUSH is a beauty brand that is all about natural products.

As such, we see its radical transparency in the “How It’s Made“ video series, where LUSH goes behind the scenes of some of its most popular products.

Each episode features actual LUSH employees in the “kitchen,” narrating how the products are made. Lush visuals (pun intended) showcase just how natural the ingredients are.

You see mounds of fresh fruits, tea infusions, and salt swirled together to become the product you know and love. It’s equal parts interesting and educational.

Why This Works

LUSH customers want to buy beauty products that are truly natural. They care about using fresh, organic, and ethically sourced ingredients — hence why the videos feature colorful, close-up shots of freshly-squeezed pineapple and jackfruit juices to drive that point home.

Taking customers inside the factory and showing them every part of the process — with a human face — assures them that they can consume these products with peace of mind.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Talent Solutions provides HR professionals the tools they need to improve recruitment, employee engagement, and career development practices within their organization.

LinkedIn Talent creates helpful content on a dedicated blog to supplement these tools. The blog offers tips that address the challenges of the talent industry. LinkedIn also develops reports offering deeper insight into different industry sectors, such as this Workplace Learning Report.

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Why This Works

One effective empathy marketing tactic is education. LinkedIn wants to empower its audience to do work and hire better (and use its product to do so).

This report is just one tool that offers its audience deeper insight into the industry while positioning the brand as a powerful resource.

Through offerings like this, customers learn that they can rely on LinkedIn as a trusted source to guide them in the right direction, and LinkedIn can continue to provide solutions through its product offerings. It’s a win-win all around.

The Home Depot

The Home Depot is a home and garden supply store that caters to all types of builders and DIY-ers — whether you’re a construction worker building a gazebo or a homemaker experimenting with gardening.

In other words, their content must cater to various demographics.

Home Depot is all about DIY, so its marketing focuses on what its supplies can help you do.

This “How to Plant a Wildflower Garden with Seeds” guide teaches consumers to grow their own wildflower garden using seeds, common flower types to plant, and what supplies they need. It even outlines the difficulty level and estimated time to complete the project.

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Why This Works

As one of the most trusted brands by consumers, Home Depot knows its customers rely on the store to supply them with DIY tools and navigate these hands-on projects — with a little encouragement along the way.

This quick guide delivers on these needs and inspires customers to take action.

Extra

We’ve seen just about every twist on gum marketing: sexy encounters, romantic trysts, and more. Extra is pushing past that narrative.

The brand realizes that gum is a seemingly mundane product, but its omnipresence means it’s there for many of life’s little moments.

Hence, the #ChewItBeforeYouDoIt campaign is all about taking a moment to chew a piece of gum before doing, saying, or acting during your daily life. Extra suggests that doing so can be the difference between a good moment and an awkward experience.

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Why This Works

In many ways, gum is a product meant to enhance intimacy, making your breath fresh for more closeness. In our techno-connected world, those everyday moments of intimacy are often overlooked.

This campaign relates to regular moments we’ve all experienced and points out how something as simple as chewing gum can make a difference in your day.

Microsoft

Microsoft offers a range of products from Azure to Microsoft 365. Many of these products are generally used by developers to build their own platforms or tools. To make sure these developers are supported, Microsoft created communities.

These communities help developers connect and learn from one another and are organized into different product categories, such as Microsoft 365 or gaming. People can tailor their experience based on what topics they’re interested in.

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Why This Works

Developers are always seeking tips and tricks for using their go-to tools, and while there are many digital channels from which to learn, going straight to the source is always a great option.

Through interactive communities, Microsoft ensures developers can get the support and training they need to use its tools and even connect with others.

Michael’s

In a world where Pinterest dominates, Michael’s chain of craft stores is making a play to capture its own audience on its own properties. The brand provides craft tutorials and product features on a projects page on its website.

These projects offer step-by-step instructions on creating various crafts for beginners and advanced crafters alike.

Each project on the site also includes links to materials you may need that can be found in Michael’s online store. If you want more help with your craft, Michael’s even offers virtual and in-store classes for select projects.

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Why This Works

Crafting is an exciting hobby, but not without its own frustrations. Providing useful tips and hacks on how to do things better via a free publication helps readers do more of what they love with fewer headaches.

Additionally, fans get to share their enthusiasm through social by using the hashtag #MakeItWithMichaels, helping Michael’s extend its reach to a bigger crafting audience.

JetBlue

JetBlue is a brand known for superb customer service and humor. At this point, we know where it flies and we know its hook, so its marketing needs to extend beyond the services provided.

As such, JetBlue’s content focuses more on the world of flying and the experiences we all have.

JetBlue is a brand known for superb customer service and humor. At this point, we know where it flies and its hook, so its marketing needs to extend beyond the services provided.

As such, JetBlue’s content focuses more on the world of flying and the experiences we all have.

JetBlue addresses every type of customer who may fly on its planes, from families to pets to children. That’s one reason the airline launched JetBlue Jr., an educational video series for kids ages 7–10.

The videos go over all types of aviation topics, from vocabulary to physics, in an entertaining and digestible way for kids to learn.

Why This Works

If you’re a parent, you know how much of an undertaking it can be to fly with children.

Brand marketing isn’t often tailored to children, so it’s refreshing to see JetBlue consider all passengers and empathize with a parent’s desire to keep their kids entertained while traveling.

Girlfriend Collective

Girlfriend Collective is a sustainable clothing brand. While it has a devoted following, it’s always searching for ways to more deeply connect with its audience. The company’s email marketing channel is a fantastic outlet for that.

Girlfriend Collective uses email to share new products or upcoming launches. The brand also generally uses a targeted approach to help customers make purchasing decisions, sending more personalized emails.

One email from the brand was more personal than most and showed deep empathy and understanding for its audience.

Before Mother’s Day, Girlfriend Collective sent this email to customers, allowing them to opt out of receiving Mother’s Day promos.

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Why This Works

Holidays like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day can be emotional for many people for various reasons. Girlfriend Collective gave its audience a choice to opt out of seeing these potentially triggering emails, which not many brands take the opportunity to do.

This move demonstrates that Girlfriend Collective cares about its customers and sees them as humans.

Ready to Try It?

Approach the content you seek to create from a perspective that puts others’ wants, needs, and dreams before your own. That’s the smartest way to grow an audience.

In doing so, you’re showing people that you care about them as humans, first and foremost. People want to work with (B2B) or support (B2C) people that they like and companies that they believe “get” them.

You can always talk about your brand and what you’re peddling once a connection and a relationship are established. But if you do things right, people will be drawn to you, and you won’t ever have to toot your own horn.