Empathy Mapping: A Consequential Ingredient of Your Content Strategy

by Melissa Calvert, Guest Contributor, Digital Marketing

Photo by Nicola Fioravanti on Unsplash

When we talk about empathy in our marketing and content strategy, it refers to visualizing users' attitudes and behaviors to help organizations and businesses understand end-users more adequately. 

Empathy mapping, for instance, uses customer or user personas to jot down what users say, think, feel and do in regards to offered services and products.

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According to a recent study published by Brand Genetics, only 30% of marketers are found to be proficient with respect to experiencing the world from a consumer's perspective. Furthermore, the deficit of empathy in brands cost businesses over $300 million in revenue every year. 

In light of this information, let's take a quick look at some of the ways through which you can implement empathy into your content strategy. 

Empathy Mapping & Content Strategy 
Six ways you can add empathy mapping in your content strategy:

1.  Assimilating & Utilizing Data
Probably the first thing any company or brand should do is to develop user personas. This will help you focus on specific lifestyles and demographics that define your ideal customers. Next up, you should follow up with defining the scope and goals for your empathy map. 

However, it is when you gather materials and perform research that will effectively assist you in assimilating data that can be later utilized to incorporate within your strategy. 

To gather data, you might be required to conduct user interviews, perform field studies or surveys, and use analytical tools to evaluate user comments and reviews online. The idea is to gather as many insights as possible to help fuel your future decision-making ability. 

2.  Crafting New Offers

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Once you have collected data and analyzed it properly with the help of various evaluations and cross-checks by various participants within your company, it is time to draw out inferences. This will be able to provide you with clear indications as to what needs to be changed or improved upon. 

Those companies that can discover their shortcomings can remove redundancies in their business processes and enhance their offerings for the end-user. Hence you might come across the possibility of introducing a new service or product where you take into consideration what you have learned and acquired. 

3.  Developing Customer Personas
Customer personas are the central and integral part of your empathy maps, which is why it is safe to say that they need your devotion and commitment the most. Customer personas can greatly improve your conversion rates. 

Through customer personas, you can identify customers that are going to stick with your business for lifelong and become a driving force for your business. To create a customer persona, you need to know your targeted audiences' geographical location, age groups, income class, and even marital status at times. 

However, customer personas can even go deeper such as does your customer live in an apartment, house, or rented property, what career paths they are following, and where do they spend their income the most. Lastly, you need to have ample space to integrate individual interests, hobbies, and behaviors.    
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4.  Identifying Pain Points & Solutions
Empathy is all about the ability to feel compassionate towards others, and for businesses, it is quickly becoming an obligation to know users and customers intimately. This will help marketers identify their pain points and find reasonable solutions for them that can effectively reduce their dissonance. 

The empathy maps offer you seven factors that can help you discover more about your customers:

1. Who are we empathizing with?
2. What do they need to do?
3. What do they see?
4. What do they hear?
5. What do they say?
6. What do they do?
7. What do they think and feel?

Answering these questions will allow you to comprehend what kind of journey each customer goes through to reach out and use your offered products and services. This will definitely provide you with a lot of shortcomings in between, such as loopholes that can be removed to improve their experiences. 

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5.  Launching a New Product or Service
Rambling over the significance of creating and constructing would only be considered as chitchatting and babbling. The work here needs to be done, and that happens when you launch a new service or product. 

All of this brainstorming will empower you to pitch the right product to the right consumer in a manner that is most relevant to them and offers maximum utility. 

Insights will help fuel your design, strategies, and marketing mix that you need to implement to reach out to interested members of the audience. This might involve taking customers on an emotional journey with the right use of words, background chimes, graphics, and visuals. 

However, if you are busy and need assistance for composing appealing content, then dissertation help platforms can enable you to save time and focus on more important agendas.  

6.  Personalized Messaging 
Through empathy in your marketing mix, brands can achieve the ability to incorporate personalization into their messages. You can hone your skills and deploy various tactics to tackle issues and concerns of users with surgical precision. Thus your ability to hit key elements and points through your promotions and messages rises greatly. 

As an organization, you implement empathy to create a soft corner in your customers' hearts where you can have the ability to melt away stubborn manners and make them an instant fan of your products and services. Speak their language and deliver power statements that pique their interests. 

Conclusion 
It is extremely important that you review your methodology in a periodic manner to ensure that you are carrying out practices in the right manner. 

As a consequential ingredient of your content strategy, empathy can quickly help you to earn favors from the audience. They are able to relate to your offered services, and hence this able to foster familiarity for your brands and products. 

To conclude this post, I would like to share with you a quote from American film critic Roger Ebert, who once said, "I believe empathy is an essential quality of civilization."

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About the author:

Melissa Calvert currently works as a Digital Marketing Analyst and Content Curator at Crowd Writer. This is where students can acquire assistance from professional dissertation writers. During her free time, she likes to surf online, looking for inspirational stories, and feeling grateful for things that life has provided for her. 

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