4 Steps to Build Empathy for Your Audience and Create Better Content
Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema
Your product or service can’t be everything to everyone. As a marketer, when you cast a wider net, you waste precious resources, such as time and budgets, that could have been better spent elsewhere. For that reason, you focus on target audiences, which are the people likely to need and want your products and services.
Sometimes, however, marketers don’t know a lot about their audience and build content based on shallow information. Take these following examples:
You are a writing school that is targeting aspiring writers from beginner to advanced level
You a tech company for a networking app, and you are targeting people who want to make new friends
In both scenarios, you don’t have enough information yet to create an effective content strategy.
When you create content around such basic information, you risk producing messaging that doesn’t resonate. To a further extreme, it could turn prospective customers off from wanting to engage with your brand.
For that reason, you must dig deep to understand your audience’s needs, challenges, and behaviors so that you’re prepared to create content that will earn their trust and delight them.
How do you go about better understanding them? You build empathy.
To become empathetic, you need to be able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes. When you do this, you gain a more meaningful understanding of your audience and, in turn, better equip yourself to develop the type of content that will make a difference.
Here are four steps to help you build empathy for your audience so that you can create better content.
1. Conduct Primary Research
Primary research involves conducting research first hand to learn more about your audience. Here are a few methods:
Interviews
An interview is a one-on-one discussion with someone from your target audience.
As the interviewer, you’ll need to come prepared with a list of questions that will help you achieve your research goals. You’ll also want to be cognizant of how you lead the session. Interviewees should feel like they’re having a conversation as opposed to being interrogated.
Focus Group
A focus group typically includes 6-10 members of your target audience and is led by a moderator. Because there are multiple people involved, it should be expected that the participants will engage and influence one another.
As a moderator, you’ll not only need to come to the session with a list of questions to lead the conversation, you’ll need to be prepared to keep things on track.
Surveys
Through a survey, you aim to reach a large group of people from your target audience. It can often be a quick and affordable way to gather data. In general, you should include enough people to make the results statistically significant.
A survey can be conducted online or in person.
2. Conduct Secondary Research
Secondary research is the collection of existing research. If you’ve ever written a term paper, this one probably feels familiar. Here are a few methods:
Social Media
Through social media, you can find out what your target audience has to say about the problems your product or service solves. Depending on who your audience is, some sites will be more relevant than others.
Places to research may include Reddit threads, YouTube comment threads, Facebook groups, and Twitter feeds.
Newsletters
Through newsletters, you can find out how other companies are speaking to your target audience and observe any important topics they address. Consider the types of newsletters members of your audience would sign up for, and subscribe as well to learn from that content.
Articles
Whether found online, in newspapers, in magazines, or in trade journals, articles can be a great way to better understand your audience and learn how publishers and other companies are addressing their needs.
3. Create an Empathy Map
With the information in hand from your primary and secondary research, you’ll be ready to synthesize the data and create an empathy map.
Each empathy map you create is used to humanize a segment of your audience and understand their points of view. The different areas of a map include:
Seeing – What is happening in their environment?
Hearing – What influences are around them?
Doing – What actions do they take and how?
Feeling – What is their emotional state?
Pains – What obstacles do they face?
Gains – How do they view success?
Pro tip: A whiteboard and sticky notes are a great way to initially organize your empathy map.
Remember the writing school example? Here’s an example of an empathy map for one of those segments:
4. Create Personas
A persona is a segment within your target audience, treated as a fictionalized character. Its purpose is to help you define the segment’s behaviors.
Personas usually include:
A bio with a backstory
Goals and needs
Frustrations and fears
More information can be included to help flesh out each character.
Remember the meeting app example? Here’s an example of a persona:
Note that there is no set rule on how many empathy maps and personas you should have. It all depends on your business and the types of people you service.
Continue Empathy Building
When following these steps, treat them like you might your hair when washing it: rinse and repeat.
Overtime, your research may become outdated, and the needs of your audience may change. Also, as your business begins to offer new products and services, you may need to reevaluate and learn the new offerings can tie into the audience’s challenges, needs, and behaviors.