30 Jun 2025

To build credibility with your audience, show some empathy

Four people speaking to each other over table with drinks and mobile devices.

Written by Rob O’Regan

There’s an endless buzz about how marketing teams are or should be using ChatGPT or other generative AI platforms to create content. A 2024 SAS study found that 34% of marketers were already using GenAI tools to generate copy – and 82% planned to use the technology for creating content within the next 12 months.

While GenAI can help B2B marketers in several compelling ways, turning content creation over to the bots won’t address a longstanding challenge: creating thought leadership content that is compelling enough to attract and, more importantly, engage potential customers. In the Content Marketing Institute’s latest B2B Content Marketing report, marketers’ top 2 content creation challenges are 1) creating content that prompts a conversion or other action, and 2) differentiating their content. Both speak to the quality of the content assets they’re producing. Now, with GenAI poised to dramatically increase both the volume and velocity of new content, the percentage of indistinguishable messaging will continue to rise.

That’s why the GenAI movement should serve as a wake-up call for marketing teams to raise the bar on the quality and uniqueness of their content. High-quality thought leadership content – let’s just call it good storytelling – is the best way to build brand credibility and authority in a crowded market.

The empathy factor

How do you become a good storyteller? Start with your audience. Establishing brand credibility with prospective customers begins with a very human-like quality: showing empathy. In a B2B context, empathy means understanding people’s work roles and acknowledging the challenges they face in their day-to-day jobs. Regardless of whether your company sells to IT professionals, sales and marketing teams, HR executives, supply-chain operations leaders, or other functional groups, it’s important to view the world from their perspective to create an informed content strategy that will resonate with them.

Content created through the lens of your target segments – focusing on their specific needs and challenges – will build trust in your brand, because it shows that you’ve taken the time to understand them. This is by no means a new concept, but marketers too often forget to include this critical perspective in their content marketing campaigns, focusing instead on product features and other inside-out messaging.

GenAI for persona development

Using audience insights to create robust target personas is one area where GenAI can help in a significant way. Large language models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini can serve as a super-efficient research assistant, quickly gathering information and insights about a target audience using the collective intelligence of the web. You can even role-play with them: Try prompting the chatbot to be a software engineer for a midsized financial services company, asking a series of questions about their job, day-to-day activities, top challenges, and how they consume information.

David Daniels at BrainKraft has an excellent tutorial on using GenAI for persona development, including a detailed prompt you can use to accelerate your work.

These public LLMs are evolving quickly – if you’re not using them every day, you’ll be surprised at the rapidly improving quality of their output.

Deeper insights with proprietary research

What’s missing from these GenAI outputs are additional insights culled from your company’s first-party data, including website analytics, transactional data, customer-service interactions, and surveys. Layering this data into your personas provides a deeper layer of insights that are unique to your organization.

For content marketers, proprietary research is a particularly effective tool for deep audience insights, because the exclusive survey data serves as a foundation for creating reports, blog posts, infographics, or other assets. Audiences appreciate getting access to peer-driven insights to benchmark themselves against.

How does all this information tie back to good storytelling? Simply, these insights allow you to create a narrative from the audience’s perspective. Showing empathy for their challenges, along with problem-solving guidance, will help your brand establish credibility. From this base of authority, you can start to layer in your brand’s value proposition and connect the dots between audience needs and your solutions.

In this new era of AI-driven content, human creators still play a critical role: crafting great stories, told through the lens of your target personas. This approach will enable your brand to rise above the growing pile of me-too messaging and stand out in an increasingly cluttered landscape.