How to offer your customers a tailored value proposition

Empathize and understand the customer allows us to not only develop a viable and profitable business, but also to offer a tailored value proposition and a personalized shopping experience. Today we are talking about a creative technique that is very useful in marketing to get closer to our users, the empathy map.Some questions we must answer to define and detail our value proposition are: What makes us unique? What are our values -qualitative and/or quantitative-? Why do some consumers choose us and why don't others? Do we have our competition identified? Is our product better than those on the market? What are the main difficulties and challenges we face as a brand or business? What do we want to achieve in the short, medium and long term?

A tool that helps us to better design the value proposition, to define the set of features, advantages and differences that define our product, as well as the communication channels with our customers, is the empathy map or Empathy Map.Developed by Xplane and increasingly used in companies, it allows us to analyze the customer through different levels of depth: to put ourselves in the consumer's shoes, to know what worries them, how they perceive the company, what their tastes and expectations are and even the way in which they want to receive the product (s).

Steps to design the empathy map

1- Identify the ideal customer

We need to spend time gathering information from our customers. La fidelity and trust What they deposit in our brand or business is one of the identifying factors of the ideal consumer, whom we can segment based on demographic, geographical, psychological, economic, and even behavioral criteria, detailing what habits and interests they have, the social networks they use and how often they interact. It will help you to read this article about 10 reasons why the customer is very important to your business.

2- Humanize the brand/product

The key is to show that we are not only concerned about numbers, but that We deal with people who have a name and surname, some tastes, a profession and, in short, some needs that we have to attend to. In this sense, it is important to know in advance who we are going to empathize with; also what our values are, what place we occupy in the world and the causes in which we want to get involved to contribute to a better world.

3- Put yourself in the shoes of consumers

The best marketing is knowing what is being said about us and from where. If we want to empathize successfully, we have to observe from the customer's point of view. By achieving that connection with our consumers, we can get closer to each other's mood, establish a personal bond, build long-term relationships, listen to them and address their needs.

4- Validate the conclusions

The final step is analyze the empathy map unique and differentiating, drawing the conclusions for that target that we have defined and understanding if we are on the right track. From there, we can achieve the objectives we had set for ourselves or rethink our entire marketing strategy.

The realization of the empathy map usually does not exceed 30 minutes and it is recommended to do it in a group or in teams, writing down the answers and conclusions for each of the blocks of questions on a template. A technique that can be complemented with customer interviews, focus groups, satisfaction surveys, product testing or through usability and user experience.And you, do you already know how to define your ideal customer?