Empathy Mapping 101: How do we make the customer’s journey better? (Review)
I’m in favor of marketing as a set of user-oriented studies. I learned new things about CXL’s Growth marketing course, which I am currently attending. I knew before that companies classified their users with segmented groups called personas and made campaigns by blending these classes and data. This is the first time I’ve encountered something called “empathy mapping” in this course. I did some research on it and wanted to share it here.
First of all, I would like to say that before going into the depths of a subject, it is necessary to have a very good understanding of the basics. In other words, in addition to knowing the data collection and analysis tools in the deepest way, it is necessary to understand how to use this data after collecting it, where to use it and most importantly why it works. Empathy mapping is a very basic issue, but if this is overlooked, the collected data can turn into meaningless numbers. That’s why I want to elaborate on this issue a little.
Empathy Mapping
“An empathy map is a collaborative tool that teams can use to better understand their customers. It consists of an image of the customer surrounded by six sections.”
Empathy mapping, of course, is based on empathy, which is one of the core issues in marketing, it just makes it a little more systematic. You can think about what your customer or user likes, what they will be happy about, what kind of problems they have, where they have the most difficulty, and you can work accordingly.
There are 6 basic titles prepared by Paul Boag on empathy mapping. He wrote these titles on his blog with the following expressions:
• Think and feel. What matters to the user? What occupies her thinking? What worries and aspirations does she have?
• Hear. What are friends, family and other influencers saying to her that impacts her thinking?
• See. What things in her environment influence her? What competitors is she seeing? What is she seeing friends do?
• Say and do. What is her attitude towards others? What does she do in public? How has her behavior changed?
• Pain. What fears, frustrations or obstacles is she facing?
- Gain. What is she hoping to get? What does success look like?
As Paul Boag said, you can change the basic questions above and shape them into what you think will work best for your company. In marketing, nothing can be changed, no mold is indestructible. Empathy mapping is simply a tool used to create a user-centric marketing plan.
For example, you have new answers for questions in the “think and feel” stage. Based on the answers here, you can open your campaigns and do A/B testing. According to the result from here, you now have a new data. You can find even the question that your target audience pays the most attention to through these tests.
In addition, I should point out here: Advertising campaigns should not be measured only by costs per click or impression. If you use such a creative copy that everyone who sees it wants to click, it will be as if you are running a low CPC campaign on paper, but there will be no increase in conversion. That’s why it’s very important to follow what questions you reach and what the audience is doing on the way to conversion with tools like Hotjar.
Can these questions be supported by data?
The above questions seem somewhat subjective, meaning they are not based on a dataset. Just as you can’t measure empathy, I think you can’t measure many things in empathy mapping. So, it might be a good option to meet with the sales team and collect the most common problem, the answers people often give before purchasing the product. Talking to the support team to get answers to frequently asked questions, understanding where users/customers are stuck or needing help is also an option.
Along with questions like this, tools like Google Analytics are also invaluable. Now we live in a digital world and it is even possible to see which button you click on a website, from which page you go where and on which page you leave the website. If you have a team that analyzes clicks with Hotjar, and a team that tries to make almost any data meaningful with Tag Manager, the data here may be more valuable in questions you ask support and sales team.
People respond in public, one-on-one conversations, taking into account their social capital, so you may not get reliable answers from them. Here, you should figure out what’s going on with the tools that convert clicks on the site into meaningful data and act accordingly. Wouldn’t it be positive for the user to have the most searched topic on your site with a simple sentence on the relevant page?
Can we combine it with AARRR?
I mentioned AARRR in my previous article. To summarize briefly, AARRR is the abbreviation of the initials of the words acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue. In other words, it argues that it makes sense to acquire a user, do something you want on the site (for example, leave an e-mail), then visit the site again, invite his friends to the site because he is satisfied with you, and earn income with this system.
Combine
Now let’s combine these two issues. You have created a user type based on both quantitative and qualitative data. Now you know what this user wants, where they have problems, and they will be happy no matter what. After figuring out on which platform you will reach this user, you should update your site by estimating the user’s journey through the site. After this process, of course, the system may change, because users do not always advance the funnel in order, no matter what data you have. Growth-minded organizations should be able to change both the site and their marketing campaigns agile and periodically optimize them to bring them to the best possible level.
It is difficult to market a product that you would not prefer to live under the same conditions, and it is a more attractive challenge for some. Empathy mapping gives you the power to understand the user and create appropriate campaigns.
