Healthcare Marketing: Understanding Personas and User Segmentation

Healthcare Marketing: Understanding Personas and User Segmentation|Healthcare Marketing: Understanding Personas and User Segmentation

Healthcare marketing can be complicated. While many healthcare marketers aim to educate consumers and offer solutions, they oftentimes share overly complex, irrelevant and impersonal information. In an attempt to creatively connect with their entire consumer base, they end up connecting with no one. Seasoned marketers know that even the most creative, inspiring healthcare marketing content can’t serve every consumer. Their needs are simply too diverse to distill into singular marketing pathways.

The Difficulties of Healthcare Marketing

Today’s healthcare consumer is searching for help. Help finding the information they need, the best care they can find, and services to keep them healthy. From a marketing perspective, the difficulty is providing consumers with the help they need and evolving alongside consumers as their needs change. One key strategy that can enable your business to meet your consumers’ multiple needs is a shift in perspective.

When developing healthcare marketing content, widen your focus to the entire patient journey through your organization. Step back for a moment and consider where and when you are reaching your target audience, and how you can help them at every point in their journey. Are you speaking primarily to consumers who are already patients, or who are already in need of critical or acute care? If so, consider how your campaign strategy might expand to reach consumers at multiple touchpoints, even before they need direct patient care. For example, you could develop a marketing campaign to target low-acuity consumers who are still shopping around for a healthcare provider. You could also direct attention to typical consumer frustration points like real-time appointment scheduling or directions to the nearest care provider locations, and then create marketing content that helps these consumers feel seen and heard at every point in the patient lifecycle.

The Role of Personas and User Segmentation in Healthcare Marketing

Because we understand that every marketing decision needs to be supported by consumer data, (human)x develops personas and utilizes user segmentation to inform our personalized, human-first approach to healthcare marketing. Through the development of personas and user segmentation, (human)x helps our healthcare clients serve the most relevant information to the right individuals at the right time.

Personas are user profiles that represent groups of people within a target audience. They are developed to give businesses insight into user demographics, behaviors and perspectives. Personas help marketers step outside their internal brand perspective and recognize that different people have different needs and expectations. Persona development enables healthcare marketers to generate content that connects with end users on a personal level by understanding and empathizing with their needs and problems. In a similar fashion, user segmentation is another tool that allows for more connected healthcare marketing. It categorizes a consumer base into groups of individuals with similar behaviors to allow marketers to more fully understand how and why consumers do what they do. User segmentation provides marketers with a simpler framework to build relevant content.

When Premier Health, the largest healthcare provider in Central and Southern Ohio, needed to better connect with customers through their website, they reached out to Leap’s team of experts to solve their problem: too much website content and too little focus on consumer experience. To create a consumer journey worthy of the Premier Health name, (human)x conducted more than a dozen stakeholder interviews, hosted eight local focus groups and utilized additional regional surveys to uncover a series of unique user personas. By creating a fresh Premier Health website and smooth UX that was customized to their consumers’ needs at every point in their patient journey, (human)x gave Premier Health a 110% increase in organic website traffic and a 22% increase in Find-A-Doctor conversions.

Gathering Persona and User Segmentation Data

Taking time to gather persona and user segmentation data may seem like an unnecessary slowdown in your marketing campaign process but attempting to create effective marketing content that isn’t supported by data is a waste of time, talent and budget. The (human)x team uses proven research methodologies to provide insight into consumer motivation and behavior, as well as the competitive landscape.

Even if your internal marketing team doesn’t have access to detailed research methods, keep in mind that you have likely already collected a large amount of consumer data that can be repurposed to generate personas. Partnering with multiple teams within your business could yield surprisingly helpful results. Consider reaching out to your internal IT team to gather any existing data they may have collected. Your marketing team can even use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) data to examine your target audience’s needs from different perspectives and create more detailed user personas.

Regardless of your industry or target audience, data should always be a core component of any marketing campaign strategy. Leveraging persona and user segmentation will enable your business to develop a strong healthcare marketing plan that combines your marketing team’s creativity with tangible consumer data. Not only can this data be used to determine content that will reach these target demographics, but it can also be analyzed and adopted on a broader scale to create a consistent, repeatable method of creating healthcare marketing content. Are you searching for new ways to develop targeted healthcare marketing content? (human)x has the team, the tools and the expertise you need to develop a great campaign strategy and connect with consumers today.