If you want to grow your healthcare practice, you need to genuinely connect with your community. To achieve a truly meaningful connection with your patient community, and all the new potential patients therein, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of who it is – exactly – that you are trying to engage with. This article outlines the process of developing patient personas, which can be an immensely powerful tool for physicians, administrators, and healthcare marketers seeking to better engage with their specific patient communities. However, before delving into this topic, it is important to dissect the term “healthcare marketing.”
When we talking about “marketing” with regard to the provision of healthcare, we’re not talking about a teleological endpoint being a “selling” of anything, not even healthcare; rather, we are looking to build a bridge, a connection, a bond wherein a physician can forge a meaningful and impactful relationship with a patient. Spawning from this type of authentic connection are the evergreen results that naturally come with retaining existing patients and organically growing a loyal patient base that advocates for your practice to their friends and family members… the “side-effect” of meaningfully connecting with your patients is growth!
And so “marketing” in healthcare is about relationship-building. And a practice’s digital presence is best positioned to yield growth when its online content serves to deepen such relations with its patients while providing them with what they are seeking: digestible information, reassurance, comfort, and hope that they can truly trust in you.
What We Want As A Medical Practice?
And what we’re looking to do as a medical practice is not so different at all, it is, in fact, just the flip-side of the coin: our foremost priority is to establish ourselves as the reliable and dependable source of healthcare information and treatment for our existing and prospective patients. We aspire to be the go-to destination for their healthcare needs. However, for us to effectively connect with potential patients, we need to maximize our online visibility, because the reality is that we are living in a “digital-first” era, and this is where patients will be looking to find us. Therefore, it is imperative that we comprehend their needs and preferences and actually demonstrate our comprehension via the content that we create and publish online. This approach is crucial for the growth of medical practices today.
Content That Resonates
Focusing solely on catering to the masses when creating your online content can lead to a disconnect from the unique needs and preferences of individuals. Rather than relying on a generalized approach which takes the average sum of all your patient populations and speaks to no one, directing efforts towards generating content for a specific persona can yield significant advantages. The potency of such an approach lies in its ability to create tailored content that resonates with the intended individual, ultimately yielding greater engagement and satisfaction across all individuals that can meaningfully relate to the content generated for the individual persona.
Let’s look at an example:
Rather than creating content for “female, age 65-80, single, income $35-$50K annual, 1-3 children,” we instead create content for:
Kathy, a 74-year-old part-time store clerk, works 3 days a week to make ends meet and supplement her retirement income, which includes the $1,478/month federal stipend that was transferred to her when her husband George passed away 3 years ago from a stroke. Kathy has 1 38-year-old daughter (who has 2 sons, ages 3 and 7) who lives 15 minutes away, and her daughter normally visits her once a week. She’s been coming to see Kathy a little more frequently as Kathy has been complaining of knee pain and stiffness and has been having a hard time moving furniture or lifting heavier grocery bags recently, especially in the mornings and after sitting for long periods of time. Kathy also has a 41-year-old son who lives across the country and comes to see Kathy (with his wife and 6-year-old daughter) over the holidays. Kathy very much enjoys playing bingo with her friends at the local senior center every weekend.
Isn’t Kathy’s persona palpable? Does it not facilitate the process of imagining relevant content that resonates with her specific needs? Content that is truly beneficial to her and for which she would extend her gratitude? Content that establishes a connection with her on a deeper level?
Concerns About Persona Building
A common concern among healthcare practice owners is the potential loss of a wider audience by solely catering to a specific persona. However, it is imperative to note that persona creation does not imply the neglect of other segments within the community. Instead, the aim should be to create a welcoming space that caters to different individuals’ interests and preferences. Targeting a mass demographic often results in generic content that fails to resonate with anyone, as no one is truly average of a specified demographic. It is therefore essential to ensure that your content is unique, authentic, and connects with your audience in a meaningful way, as this is what sets it apart from the noise of generic online content.
Defining The Patient Persona
The creation of a patient persona is an essential tool for healthcare practice owners in developing an ideal representation of their target patient population, with whom they want their marketing campaigns and content to resonate, often with respect to pulling-in folks that require treatment for high-value, high-success procedures or treatment protocols. Through the use of patient interviews, questionnaires, and analytics, practice owners and other healthcare professionals gather real-world data on patient demographics and online behavior, enabling them to make educated assumptions about personal histories, motivations, and concerns.
Yet, a persona is not simply a statistical representation of a population. Rather, it is a fictitious, yet highly informed, single individual. While geographic, demographic, sociocultural, and psychographic data serve as a foundation for persona creation, its true value lies in the rich and detailed insights it provides for tailored connectivity and resonance with the real-world people whose actual lives empathize with the life of the persona.
In practice, the creation of a patient persona proves to be a valuable asset for practice owners and other healthcare providers. With its ability to provide a more personalized and tailored approach to both effective patient-centered marketing and actual patient care delivery, crafting patient personas has become an indispensable tool in the modern healthcare landscape.
