HOW TO CREATE AN EMPATHY MAP AND WRITE STELLAR ARTICLES

Any business runs on the virtue of management; and clientele. In order to be successful and procure rapid growth, you need to know your target audience. Getting a rough idea about your client base is not enough. You need a deeper insight into their real personality to create content that can empathize with your audience. To do that, empathy mapping is an indispensable process. 

No matter how confident you are about your customer perception, there’s always a void between the reality of your target audience and their depiction as a loyal customer of your company. In order to fill this gap, it is best to take a deep dive into their lives. If possible, question your existing clients. Of course, that may not be the most convenient option of all. Another way is to brainstorm and create an empathy map. 

Similar to the buyer’s persona, an empathy map is a way to condense the personality and needs of your target audience. This map will aid your team while creating content or developing new marketing strategies.

What Is An Empathy Map

An empathy map is a chart divided into sections that help the marketing team to analyze the company's target audience. It is an avatar or a representation of your clientele. When the company plans on renewing digital marketing strategy or content writing, this map will come in handy in understanding the consumer base better and targeting them.

An empathy map consists of categories for different traits of your customers. It may include, but not limited to,

• Think

• See

• Do

• Feel

These categories can be further divided into subcategories if needed.

A whiteboard, paper, or notes app- anything which has ample space to take notes can be used for this process. The workspace is split into separate quadrants or columns with the keyword. The team then adds in relevant terms based on customer responses as well as a brainstorm to add in their own ideas.

Once the brainstorming process is over, the team can use the information to carve out a figuratively accurate representation of the target customers.

How To Create An Empathy Map

Empathy map requires a team of marketing professionals who have a good understanding of the customer base and are capable of brainstorming for the ideation process.

Here’s how you can create an empathy map for your company.

Gather Resources

Before you start off with creating an empathy map, you should gather all the data available. The data should focus on your current clientele, and if possible, potential customers. As a qualitative approach, the primary resources should include qualitative data. The data may be gathered from these sources

• Customer survey reports

• Sales reports

• Frontline product delivery

• Diary study

You will also need to gather the materials for empathy mapping. Whiteboard, sticky notes, markers, pens, etc- you should have everything on hand.

Fix The Persona

Analyze the current demographics and psychographics of your company. Evaluate the qualitative details of your existing clientele. This will help you structure a tentative persona that your map will be directed to. You can also use your existing buyer’s persona but tally it with the latest demographics.

For instance, an ideal persona for a marketing company may look something like this- ‘32-year-old Samuel Jhonson is a business owner in San Francisco. He lives with his wife and has two school-going children. His annual earnings are around $500,000. He is a bibliophile and likes spending time with his friends.’ Your empathy map can target this persona. Don’t forget that the persona is merely a representation of the majority. Your target consumer will have a mixture of males and females belonging to different age groups, localities, interests, etc. However, while creating a persona, consider the predominant traits.

Ask Questions

Once you have your persona ready to guide your empathy map, you can start off with the brainstorming. Think of the questions relevant to your persona to form its personality as a real person. 

What do they think?

The choice of your customer is based on his thoughts. What does the customer think on a normal day? His ideas, his dreams, why he does something? What is his perspective for a particular thing

What do they see?

On a daily basis, what are the things that catch the eyes of your consumer? What are the things that he seeks for intentionally? What attracts his attention on the road? What does he see often in the office?

What do they hear?

Who influences the thoughts of your consumer? Which media do they use to get information? Who do they trust?

What do they feel?

Their emotions, worries, and happiness. What makes them feel a certain way?

Ideation

You have your questions on the table. Now the team starts brainstorming to find answers to every question. Make sure the team thinks like a regular person and not a beneficiary or stakeholder of the company. This process should be judgment-free and reflect individuality. The best results will come with a relaxed environment and ample time in hand. 

Each individual should have a pen or marker to note every point that comes in their mind. You can use color-coded sticky notes to add answers to each quadrant.

Synthesize The Map

After the brainstorming session, the team should use the notes to draft and finalize the empathy map. Here are the things you should be looking for

• Patterns; Try to find out similar answers. Suppose, if many people noted a similar ‘Happiness’, you can converge it under one head. Similarly, find patterns in every quadrant.

• Relevance: You should prioritize the answers relevant to your brand. For a restaurant owner, the fact that the customer enjoys trying different delicacies is more important than enjoys knitting. Do you see the point?

• Develop realistic personality: While drafting, try to include multiple relevant features from every quadrant to make the persona more like a real person. I mean, I doubt if there’s a person who has zero worries or nothing makes them happy.

Congratulations, you now have an empathy map for reference. Now whenever you decide to write content, you can use this map to write exactly what your target consumer wants to hear.

Creating an empathy map is necessary to step into the consumer’s shoes and comprehend them better. The success of a company greatly lies in the business-consumer relationship. To build an ever-lasting relationship with a loyal customer base, follow this process, and get yourself a well-sketched empathy map.

To learn more about marketing tactics and content curation, follow our blog!