What is an empathy map? The most important thing in business is knowing your customer. Understanding who they are, what they need and what they prefer. The solution you offer to their problem is a core piece of making your business thrive. To really get to know your customer in depth and grow your sales, today we’re going to show you a handy tool that’ll help you do exactly that — the empathy map.

You might be wondering, what is an empathy map? It’s a tool developed by Xplane that helps us better understand our customer. How? By getting a deeper sense of who they are — and also of their environment and their own unique view of the world and their needs.

Empathy map: 6 key parameters

To build that map, we need a few prep steps first. Specifically, 4 questions to answer:

What do they see?

In other words, what is their environment like, what does it look like, who are their friends, what other options does the market offer them, and so on.

What do they say and do?

What’s the attitude of your audience, how do they behave, what are their preferences, and so on.

What do they hear?

What the people around them are saying (family, friends, bosses, influencers in their circle…). Which channels do they get their information from, and so on.

What do they think and feel?

What really matters to them, their preferences, desires, worries, aspirations, and so on.
From those four questions, you can pull out two more:

Fears

What efforts they’re making: the barriers and obstacles they need to clear to get what they want, and what risks they have to take on. In short, the fears they carry and may run into along the way.

Motivations

What the outcomes look like: we’re talking about the benefits they expect to get. What are their real needs, how do they measure success, what does it depend on and how could they actually reach their goals.

We’ve already managed to pull out these questions. We have the perfect empathy map built for our business. But how do we make the most of it?

Now it’s time to map out the path for meeting your customers’ needs. Just remember — this map only helps you understand your customer better, it’s no miracle worker.

Segment

We need to segment. That is, clearly identify who our customer is. We’ll do it the traditional way (demographic, socio-economic, social class, tastes and so on). In the end, we’ll have a clear-cut audience to target. And that way we’ll focus our efforts on that ideal group.

Personify

Once we have an audience segment, we need to start treating them as people. That means giving our customer a face, a name and a life. We’ll do this by asking what their name is, where they live, what they do for a living. We’ll create a real person (also known as a buyer persona) who ticks all the key boxes of our target.

Empathy

Once those two pillars are solid, we get to the part that holds the whole map together: empathy. Now it’s about “putting yourself in your customer’s shoes”, asking a series of meaningful questions to get to know them better.

Put it to the test

Last — and what we think matters most — is to validate everything you’ve built and put into motion in the empathy map. Get out there and check that what you’ve created actually holds up. This “test” is what tells you whether you’ve really got to know your customer. Whether you’ve truly figured out what motivates them to trust your business.

Once you’re at this point, you’ll know much more about who you’re talking to — and you’ll know your next campaigns aren’t going to miss the mark. So, are you up for building your own empathy map and getting closer to your audience? Tell us how it goes.