Creating meaningful digital stories that have impact on the target group requires understanding of the target group’s real-life challenges and needs. It is also important to be able to describe a typical member of the chosen target group. This target persona helps us to plan how to approach the target group, with what message and on what channels.
We need to create empathy and understanding to imagine what it is like to talk with the target persona in real life. For this purpose, we use empathy mapping when studying the needs of our digital storytelling (DST) target audiences.
Get to know the target audience of your story
Empathy mapping must go together with careful background research into the digital storytelling challenge and related target group needs. First, we must define a clear focus and set objectives for our background research: what sort of research is needed and what do we want to do with the findings? The next step is to understand how we can gather relevant background information from people belonging to our target group.
The first step is to describe our typical customer persona through demographic factors such as age, gender, place of residence, and occupation. Next, we combine this information with psychographic factors such as hobbies and interests. With all this information, we already know something about our target persona. However, we do not yet know why our target persona behaves in a certain way or how to affect their behaviour with our digital storytelling. To this end, we can use this Empathy Map by Gamestorming.
Empathise with the target audience of your story
Empathy mapping makes our target persona come alive. With the help of an empathy map, you get to know the background story of your target persona, which helps you explain reasons behind their thinking and behaviour.
Using the empathy map is easy. Just apply the questions in the empathy map to the target persona’s situation and needs in view of making the change that your digital story is trying to achieve. Most empathy map templates divide the mapping process into 6 steps:
- Who are we empathizing with?
- What do they need to do?
- What do they see?
- What do they say
- What do they do?
- What do they hear?
Each step has a set of sub-questions to guide you forward and to help you avoid too general answers or descriptions. You can focus your attention on matters that are relevant to your DST goals. When going through the map, use your imagination and empathy and answer the guiding questions as if you were the target persona. If you have time, you can also use target group interviews to validate your insights.
Apply key insights to your story planning
After going through the 6 steps above, summarize your insights by answering these concluding questions:
- What are the bottlenecks stopping the target persona from making the intended change?
- What are the drivers inspiring the target persona towards making the intended change?
These two questions help you summarize the key factors that influence the target persona’s decision-making.
After identifying and analysing the most important drivers and bottlenecks in the target audience’s decision-making, try to identify the most powerful issue that affects the persona’s behaviour. Then try to figure out what kind of a story is needed to tackle just that issue, to trigger a pivotal change or spark a realization. Target audience insight is at the core of digital storytelling and it must be built and developed throughout the creative planning process.
Text: Tarja Autio & Päivi Penttilä, Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, Finland
Image: Päivi Penttilä, Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, Finland