How to Resonate with Your Audience (Viscerality Part 1)

Will anyone ever truly remember you?

It’s a raw question, and contrary to what it might seem, I am not asking it because I am hoping to induce some sort of existential panic. But, as deep as it might cut, I still have to ask: will anyone ever actually remember who you are?

I am not talking about family or friends. Most of us have people in our inner circles who will remember us. That doesn’t make you exceptional. That doesn’t make you stand out.

I am asking if you have ever had a big enough impact on someone’s psyche that, decades later, they would be able to recall who you were, what you do, and what you’ve accomplished. 

Be honest with yourself. After all, the answer may be yes. As a medical professional, it is entirely possible that you’ve performed some kind of service or procedure that fundamentally changed someone’s life, and it is entirely possible that the same person may remember you for decades to come.

But what about people you haven’t interacted with? The hundreds or thousands of potential patients who have been introduced to your practice in some way, but forgot everything about you the moment they scrolled down a few inches on their screen?

Memorability isn’t just about scratching your need to feel fulfilled; memorability is what separates the average and the adequate from the remarkable. It is what compels practices to find success in a market that only becomes more saturated by the hour. 

Here’s the catch, though: if you want to have any chance of being remarkable, you have to understand what makes something truly memorable. How do you take the momentary opportunity you have with someone in the world and turn that into something that impacts them on such a deep level that their brain tags the experience as something worthy of keeping?

The answer? Viscerality. You simply cannot be memorable if your content and marketing aren’t visceral, and the first tenet of creating a visceral experience for your audience is to make sure it has emotional resonance.

What Is Emotional Resonance?

Emotional resonance is everything. It’s a hard concept to define. It’s a vibe. Something you feel deep inside your core that triggers synapses you might have even long forgotten about. 

It’s also the mechanism behind every truly great marketing campaign that has existed throughout history.

The presence of emotional resonance is the reason you remember commercials by Nike or the Olympics and characters like Don Draper, and, at the same time, the absence of emotional resonance is why you don’t remember commercials about prescription drugs or characters like Emily Cooper. 

But emotional resonance isn’t easy to achieve. Rooms of highly intelligent and creative minds working for the world’s most innovative entities can spend months coming up with one truly great, resonating concept… and still somehow miss the mark. 

So, for that reason, I am not going to bullshit you. Emotionally resonant content is what you should be striving to achieve, but it is single-handedly going to be one of the most difficult initiatives you ever make when it comes to your practice’s marketing. 

Luckily, I have some guidance for you: a secret weapon that will guarantee that every component of your marketing is visceral and, by extension, memorable. It’s a highly secretive tool that many people never learned or have simply forgotten about. It should be commonplace but becomes even more of a lost art as years pass…

…empathy.

Empathy Drives Emotional Resonance

Empathy (for the uninitiated) refers simply to the ability to understand and recognize the feelings of another person. Take it a step further, though, and it is also the willingness to consider how you would personally want to be interacted with if you were in said person’s situation.

Why is this trait valuable for a provider or medical professional? 

Because, ultimately, your ability to successfully find patients is directly correlated to how well you understand all the different components of their personalities: motivations, fears, aspirations, objections, lifestyles, etc. 

(This phenomenon is why patient personas, unique profiles developed for each primary type of audience member,  are so critical to your practice’s success.)

And how well you can understand and treat your audience is, you guessed it, directly tied to how empathetic of a person you are. It’s not just about your accolades or where you studied for medical school. It’s about resonating with people and understanding why they come to you in the first place.

Power Makes You Less Empathetic 

According to mountains of data, doctors and medical professionals are considered to be one of the most respected professions in modern-day society. 

Scientists, farmers, firefighters, teachers, nurses, military — no one ranks quite as high as doctors do when it comes to the amount of career-driven prestige granted by the general population. 

And, look, it makes sense. It takes years of studying, education, training, and hard work to become a medical professional, especially a specialized and highly trained one. It is also an extremely stressful job and one that is abundantly necessary for every single person living. 

So, you know, the power and the clout given to providers makes sense. 

But there is an inherent problem with this: Power is a natural byproduct of your status as a medical professional, and it works directly against you if you don’t work purposefully against it. 

There is a sea of data that shows power:

• Decreases empathic concern
• Reduces interpersonal sensitivity
• Reduces individual compassion 

If you couple that with the very normal phenomenon of desensitization (someone else’s lifelong struggle becoming your daily routine), then you have a very dangerous concoction of circumstances that are all pulling you from becoming less empathetic the more experienced you become. 

So, it is vital that you are aware of that power creep and that you are proactive about working toward remaining and growing as an empathetic individual. 

How Do You Grow Empathy?

It’s easy, really. If you look up the spiritual power of crystals, you’ll find that there are a host of options that help you ground your energies and make you more sensitive to others, like moonstone, rose quartz, green aventurine, tourmaline, lepidolite, green agate, amazonite, incrediblite…

Just fuckin’ with you. 😉

Human empathy is actually an intensely studied emotion by academics. Brene Brown, a decorated scholar and a research professor at the University of Houston, has worked to develop four key actions that anyone can take to be a more empathetic person. 

She calls them the 4 Dimensions of Empathy:

1. Perspective taking
2. Refraining from judgment
3. Recognizing emotion
4. Validating emotion

These are great for anyone, but they are incredibly useful for medical professionals who want to understand how to create content and marketing strategies that will resonate with their target audiences.

Let’s break them down:

1. Perspective Taking

Perspective taking is the practice of suspending one's own concerns, motivations, and feelings to experience the world through someone else's lens. How is your procedure going to affect their confidence long term? Are they concerned about recovery and being able to continue providing for their family? Are they conflicted about spending resources on themselves? Are they afraid of surgery? Why do they want the procedure to begin with?

All of these are questions that can help you understand the perspective of potential patients. (And, in fact, many of these questions should have been covered when you were developing your Patient Personas. If you don’t have personas, you need to get started on that ASAP.)

2. Refraining from Judgment

Brown pinpoints judgment as antithetical to the practice of empathy. As she explains, judgment is often a psychological tool we use to protect ourselves from the pain others are feeling, and when you cast judgment on someone, you are discounting their feelings and experiences. Instead, you need to remain open to their perspective, taking in only their account of a situation without feeling compelled to bring in your own thoughts or feelings.

PSA: If you are getting defensive about the mere idea of refraining from judgment, I have news for you — you probably need to work on this dimension the most.

3. Recognizing Emotions

“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859

According to psychological data, there is a positive correlation between feeling empathic concern and being willing to help others. So, if you are looking to present yourself in a way that resonates with your audience and makes them feel as though you genuinely care about their outcomes, then you have to be able to recollect feelings you’ve had throughout your own life.

As Melli Obrien puts it: 

Recognizing the emotion means looking within yourself and remembering what it is like to have the feeling the other person seems to be feeling. It is a willingness to acknowledge fully what they are feeling and perhaps naming it.

If a patient comes to you and allows themselves to be vulnerable about their insecurities and appearance, you should understand just how deeply these kinds of feelings affect their lives. As we mentioned earlier, it might be just another day for you, but it is a moment of overwhelming significance for them. 

4. Validating Emotion

It’s the warcry of TikTok psychologists everywhere: it’s more important to validate someone’s emotion than anything else. Look, I am not going to get too deep into this one — I’ll leave the arguments about having feelings validated in everyday life to the couples out there — but, as a medical professional and businessperson, this is perhaps the most important part of the pie. 

It isn’t enough to just tell your potential patients you understand what they are going through; you need to tell them that they are in good company, that what they are feeling is normal and sensible, and that, more than anything, you are capable of working with them and their complicated emotions through the aesthetic process.

If they can come to understand that you are able to meet both those aesthetic and personal needs through the marketing and image that you present, then your empathy will have created a lasting — dare I say… visceral — connection. 

Don't Confuse Sympathy with Empathy

Even if you are the busiest man or woman alive, I highly recommend watching this 3-minute video on understanding the difference between sympathy and empathy:

Sympathy, as explained by Brene Brown in this talk, is not reciprocation or support. If you are sympathetic toward someone, you are allowing them to experience their emotions on their own. It is almost as if you are saying something straight from a Mean Girl’s sequel like, “Wow, that is so sad for you.”

Empathy, on the other hand, is getting into the trenches. It is leveling with your potential patients and audience and saying “Hey, I am here on this journey with you. I recognize and understand your emotions, and we will work through this entire process together,”

When you’ve achieved true empathy, your identity as a medical practice will intrinsically shift. You will know how to cater to your audience on a whole new level and will understand what makes them tick just as well as you know yourself. Your marketing will finally begin to achieve emotional resonance. And with resonance, comes viscerality. And with viscerality, come memorability. 

All good things if you are in the medical aesthetics business, right?

Examples of Truly Empathetic and Emotionally Resonant Content

Empathetic Website Content

Resurrect Skin M.D. is a good example of a practice that understands its audience well enough to be truly empathetic to their struggles and deliver content that becomes emotionally resonant. Here is a sample from their About page:

In our mission to bring your skin to life, we never lose sight of what’s really important: delivering high-quality services you can trust with care and compassion. We want to give you a truly exceptional experience that pampers you the way you deserve to be and leaves you feeling more comfortable, relaxed and beautiful than when you arrived.

Throughout it all, we strive to build lasting relationships with our patients. We aren’t interested in one-and-done treatments that will have no real, lasting impact on your appearance. Instead, we want to develop and design a personalized treatment plan that brings your skin to life and helps you keep it that way. You don’t go to the gym for a day and call it good, and we approach aesthetic skin care with the same mindset. This level of care is our art form.

They are hitting a few different themes here: high-quality results, care, compassion, and lasting relationships. They know their target demographic is probably looking for someone they can continually rely on to provide these themes, so they do the work to become empathetic and then deliver on those desires.

Empathetic Social Media

This is a simple post from Sapphire Advanced Aesthetics, but it does a great job of recognizing the concerns that their target audience is having and providing them with useful information that lets them know they aren’t alone in their struggles in more than one way. Firstly, it's a common problem, and lots of people are experiencing the same issue, and secondly, Sapphire is there to help them solve the problem.

Empathy Is Just the Beginning

In the next part of this series, we will explore the idea of authenticity and why crafting an authentic identity is critical to creating visceral content that grabs and holds the attention of your potential patients. As always, if you have any questions about the content, or would like to see us tackle some other subject matter for your benefit, feel free to reach out.