Show Your Audience You Care
For humans, caring is the glue of society and personal relationships. If your marketing is all about value, price, customization, and service for the sake of transporting travelers, your marketing will likely miss the mark and make your brand irrelevant.
Have you wondered if your customers and target audience even care about your content and messages? Do they think you actually care about them as unique, real people? How do they feel about themselves when they see your company? Does your social and web content get the message of sincere caring across to them?
It may be that caring is more important than all the other digital marketing KPIs and objectives marketers obsess over. Sometimes, we must change what we think our priorities are, and see them anew. This post challenges conventional thinking about content strategy, sales and what customers really want. We explore caring and find practical ways to infuse your marketing with caring statements, values and actions.
What Do Customers Really Feel About Your Company?
After all that goes into a digital marketing effort, including the many objectives your content must achieve, you must still get a message of caring across. Because that may be all your audience hears.
People feel your energy long before they trust your words.
What I want to share with you here is that, we need to care about caring, because that attitude leaks into our content and copywriting. That’s the vibe readers sense from our content pieces, CTA’s and overall experience, whether it’s landing pages, blogs, emails, promotions, social posts or product pages. They absorb our message of caring so it should be gently and intelligently infused into the content.
Caring is the currency of the real transaction with customers, fans, supporters, coworkers and clients. As we explore here, it’s caring that opens up the relationship with customers and makes everything else possible. I should note too, that caring isnt’ something the big OTA’s or Agentic AI driven travel startups do well. Caring is a benefit that can give your small travel agency an authentic edge.
No need for marketing buzzwords and objectives — caring is a powerful emotional benefit we can deliver regardless of anything else. When you care, their demand for product perfection disappears.
If we feel authentic, sincere interest and joy in the topic and about the reader’s experience and resulting lifestyle, they become drawn in — their own self-caring is stimulated, which then stimulates purchase behavior. They’re feeling good and begin loosening up about your brand, message, and product.
A Psychology-of-Caring Framework
A new framework for caring in marketing is needed, because old framework’s don’t delve deeply enough to get at the root of it or the mechanics of why people care and how that is deactivated. Caring isn’t magic, but it is natural. Where caring goes awry, is when people stop caring about themselves. If we can activate their self-care, we can open them up to their full potential — and for us it means creating a new customer and a new sale.
In a nutshell then, if they can’t feel their own caring about the topic/issue/thing and how it enlivens them, they’re not going to read, comment, share and buy your products (e.g., a vacation). We need to make them feel good vibes, self-esteem, and comfort. If we’re successful with that, we won’t have to rely on high-pressure calls to action, persistent emails, and overemphasis of benefits and features. How we make them feel, shapes how they feel about us.
Kind of give and take isn’t it?
After all, they got our message — “we love our customers and you should follow through with a purchase (e.g., that extended trip to Europe or Australia).” All that matters is how we make readers feel about themselves and to take themselves and their wants seriously. A simple, focused solution — make your customer feel good about themselves.
let’s look at a couple of cases where “caring” is built into the brand, and one where it’s the centerpiece of a campaign:
- Brand built on caring — WestJet (Canada)
WestJet has long positioned itself around a “caring” culture (employee-owners, guest-first service) and promoted it in its WestJet Cares for Kids, donating more than 100,000 flights to partner charities since 2007. That community investment program is a visible proof-point of the brand promise stated on their website: “care from the heart.”
- Campaign centered on caring — KLM “Care Tag” (Netherlands)
KLM airlines ran a creative campaign giving visitors to Amsterdam a smart “Care Tag”—an audio luggage tag with offline GPS that shared location-based safety and courtesy tips recorded by KLM crew. It framed KLM as a carrier that “cares” for their customers beyond the flight, which earned them industry attention and awards. The device has an audio speaker and GPS locator to offer tips and guidance to travelers in their destination.
Their campaigns activated customer’s self-care by getting the message across to customers that they are worth caring about, beyond the airport.
Caring is the emotional engine that drives attention, trust, and engagement. If readers don’t care about your topic or you, they won’t care about what you’re selling. When you appreciate them and make them care about themselves and the people in their lives, they’re willing to listen, remember, engage, then buy or share.
The Question: Does Your Content Show You Care?
Back to the matter of showing how we care about them, our copywriting contains the authentic, positive, affirming voice that gains their trust, and opens them to their own self-caring. That’s the key process. And we weave it into the full content funnel so they keep getting the caring message — consistency that is authentic and which fortifies.
As a content creator and strategist, we need to show that we feel something authentic and powerful. This connects us to them. It’s the shared feelings and passion about traveling to a specific country doing a specific thing, and caring about that, that makes them feel you’re in sync with them. Relevance is important to trust and credibility.
As another example, if a Realtor follows this process, he or she will have built a personal positive vibe and connection with buyers and sellers. With their own self-care activated, they choose the Realtor in front of them. Stats show buyers and sellers hire the first agent they see online. They do that right after they experience this awakening, positive vibe about selling their home or buying one.
I’ve seen Realtors dance around this idea of showing caring, and they were on the right track. They needed to show more authentic demonstrations of caring situations, responses and outcomes, and their content should allude to it frequently. The reader usually won’t click the blue text link, but the message is delivered — the Realtor cares about the customer.
How Do We Make Readers Care About Themselves?
This is the key question. And you’ll feel good when you answer it.
When I’m struggling with attracting a client or reaching potential employers on Linkedin, it’s because I can’t make them care enough about themselves and their feelings of deserving big success. Frequently, clients say no when they don’t care about their success. They don’t have it fixed in their minds, and they’re obsessed with daily issues/crises. Getting them to care about themselves and their future is critical to creating a new client.
Because if they don’t care, there will be no engagement, contact or hiring. If I can’t make them feel good about leveraging digital marketing, including increasing their SEO/Content budget, reaching new audiences, keeping current customers loyal and committing to content marketing, I’ve failed in the most basic sense. Now you know a lot about my story.
Their business and my opportunity exist only if they care about what they’re doing. The first job then, is to build content and messaging that makes them feel good about the preeminence online that they deserve. First, I have to prove I care about their business and customers.
Rakuten Travel – “Book Your Break” / Mindful Travel to Japan
Rakuten Travel launched a campaign “Book Your Break with Rakuten Travel” in Singapor. The core message was that travel is self-care — travel isn’t just sightseeing, it’s a moment of rejuvenation and wellbeing.
The Caring Activation Model
To move people toward engagement or purchase, we must first awaken their sense of self-caring. Only when they emotionally reconnect with their own worth, goals, and aspirations will they be open to caring about our message, our brand, or our solution.
When they encounter our content, two things must happen simultaneously:
- They feel cared for — they sense authenticity, empathy, and relevance from us.
- They begin caring for themselves again — they sense possibility, desire, and self-worth and they begin seeing their path ahead — perhaps taking that bucket list trip!
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Demonstrate Caring in Action
People believe what they see demonstrated, not what they’re told.
We need to create and tell great stories where your care for clients produced meaningful results. Let the emotional aftermath — relief, confidence, success — come through. This proves that your caring isn’t sentimental; it’s effective and purposeful.
Example:
“Last spring, a small travel company we worked with was struggling to connect emotionally with their audience. We helped them rediscover their brand’s story [something they cared about] — and within weeks, their customers began sharing how inspired they felt again.”
- Create Emotional Associations
Show connections to people they already love or admire, which is so important to their own caring and hope.
Use stories or analogies that feature people or relationships they care about — mentors, family, peers, or clients.
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Be Authentically Distinct
Real caring is believable only when it’s personal and specific.
Try to reveal your human side — your opinions, your sense of humor, your emotional honesty which they can trust. Authentic marketers express their values openly. When you let your beliefs and preferences surface naturally, it builds trust and establishes moral clarity — they feel like they know you — and what your brand stands for. Suspicions, doubts subside.
- Mirror Their Vocabulary and Rhythm
Language is emotional resonance.
When you echo your customer’s phrasing, tone, and mental metaphors, they feel seen, respected and understood.
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Speak with the Voice of the Trusted Authority
Caring without context or aim feels sentimental. Caring with direction leads to something more powerful like a conversation or purchase (e.g., a call to a travel advisor or a Realtor professional).
We want to be the significant voice that connects to them and moves them toward the self-caring spark we are reigniting. That authority voice is like a friend or parent who understands and allows them to experience their own natural wisdom. Authority simply means someone/brand voice they can respect — who validates what they want to do.
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Share Stories of Relevance
People care when they see themselves in the story and they like how it makes them feel.
Tell stories that reflect moments in their professional or personal lives. These micro-stories mirror their lived experience, deepening empathy and their intent to live their lives to the fullest (e.g., booking a vacation or moving forward on selling their home and moving into a better one that fits for them).
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Use Positive Emotional Vocabulary
Love, joy, hope, and appreciation — these words tune their emotional field.
We should use positive emotional language to help the reader reconnect to the feeling of being alive and capable. It’s not about sugary optimism; it’s creating a realistic path to care about themselves or their business (or health or home and family) and care more about that. We’re building the emotional impulse to help them make the choice that’s right for them.
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Share Memories
Memories prove depth — that you’ve cared over time up to the present. History increases credibility.
Recalling experiences (your own or your clients’) adds emotional gravity, flair, and in your own inimitable style such that it is believable. These stories have sensory wording that connects to stronger emotions and memories.
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Show Proof of Caring
Create subtle signals of genuine care to establish credibility and trust. Be into the topics they are fascinated with or need answers for.
Show the quiet evidence from customers: gratitude messages, amazement, surprise, small gestures, or testimonials focusing on emotional outcomes.
Caring is a Powerful Influence
Back to our content strategy, messaging, and brand values, we now have a new priority of making prospects/customers care deeply about themselves. That is job one. The entire relationship sits on that platform of self-care.
Empowered with audience profiles, content engagement analytics, and insights from salespeople, we might power up the usual content strategy to give your brand a lift and make customers love you.
Contact Gord (416 998 6246) for more innovative ideas on making your brand/company relevant and valued.
