How Patient Persona Can Help with More Effective Marketing – Practice Builders

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How Patient Persona Can Help with More Effective
Marketing
You may have heard about patient personas, but do
you have any idea what they are? Lets say you
were involved in a process that included
gathering facts, asking pointed questions to
patients and using their answers to make a
determination. It sounds like you were making a
diagnosis. For healthcare marketing
professionals, a patient persona is a type of
diagnosis. Its also one thats equally critical
when identifying your most effective marketing
direction. In medical marketing today, patient
personas are being underutilized, largely due to
a lack of understanding about what they are and
how to create them. Doctors and other healthcare
providers who do medical marketing are often
hard-pressed to fill content gaps, create and
maintain their social media presence, refine
their digital marketing messages and build
greater patient satisfaction in healthcare.
Thats why creating and applying patient personas
has recently become a major theme at healthcare
conferences. Patient personas may very well be
that important next step for health practices,
hospitals and other healthcare organizations who
are looking to increase engagement and make more
informed marketing decisions. So, lets explore
what patient personas are and how to go about
developing themand how you can leverage more
effective marketing application to create more
favorable results. What Are Patient
Personas? There has been an overwhelming shift
towards the consumerization of healthcare. Today,
everyone from retailers to charitable
organizations, healthcare providers and
healthcare SEO services are using specialized
techniques to gain a better, more personal
understanding of their target audience. Many have
begun orchestrating that process with the use of
patient personas, which can be defined as
semi-fictional representations
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of your ideal customers based on research
conducted on your existing customer base and
overall target audience. Patient personas use
that feedback and metrics such as demographics,
buying patterns and behaviors, pain points and
marketing preferences along with patient needs
and objectives. Patient personas help you
characterize the types of patients you want most.
During this process, you will uncover both
positive and negative patient personas. Negative
patient personas describe patients who have less
appealing, more undesirable qualities. These can
include treatments that require equipment or
technology that you dont have or need care that
costs more than its value. One-time-only visitors
are another good example of negative patient
personas. Most healthcare marketing experts,
even those who serve specialized niches, are
bound to identify multiple patient personas, some
positive and some negative. This is to be
expected and is consistent with how
non-healthcare marketers characterize their
audiences. Yet, every patient profile is
valuable because it helps you gain marketing
intelligence, promote better communication and
uncover opportunities to deliver more
satisfactory services and greater overall patient
satisfaction in healthcare. Identify Patient
Personas Specific to Your Healthcare
Practice Technology has made it much easier for
healthcare marketers to gather and analyze data.
Today, clear and logical data sources are easily
within your reach and will include Website
interactions By analyzing data you collect from
current and prospective patients on your website,
you can gain excellent insights into what
patients are searching for, challenges they face,
and what they expect from you. Check your sites
search history to ensure that you are providing
interactive form fields that capture a range of
relevant data, such as age, key demographic
information, insurance provider and the
conditions for which those patients are seeking
treatment.
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• Patient surveys You can distribute a patient
  survey via e-mail, hard copy, or on your website.
  This helps you achieve the same objectives
  generating valuable patient data and direct
  responses about how their experience with your
  organization meets their expectations.
• Patient interviews Patients are often eager to
  share their experiences and typically respond
  honestly during in-person and phone interviews.
• Ask them what they look for when choosing a
  healthcare provider. Ask them how they gather
  information and make decisions. To gain
• greater knowledge and understanding of what
  really makes patients tick, always ask why?.
• Team feedback Consult your internal medical
  marketing team and learn more about the patient
  personas they believe your organization serves
  best, and those you dont serve particularly
  well. Ask your team about the objections they
  face most often from patients, and the unique
  values they cite to help overcome those
  objections and earn new business.
• Avoid limiting your interactions only to current
  patients and staff.
• Develop more complete personas by reaching out to
  prospects who have shared their contact
  information and have yet to become patients.
• Engage third-party networks including social
  media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. In
  some cases, you can use remote user testing and
  feedback sites to connect with additional,
  outside respondents and round out your target
  audience sample.
• Conduct at least three to five interviews in each
  of three categories. These include patients,
  prospects, and outsiders. These will help you
  begin to see patterns and commonalities that
  pinpoint your primary patient persona. At that
  point, you can begin building a persona that
  describes who, what, why and how for each
  persona. Give each persona a name, then include
• Who?
• Background
• Demographics
• Identifiers
• What?

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• Goals
• Challenges
• What we can do
• Why?
• Real quotes
• Common objections
• How?
• Marketing messaging
• Elevator pitch
• Use Patient Personas to Your Marketing Advantage
• Take care during your data collection process to
  ensure accurate, illuminating results. Armed with
  this new and revealing data, youll be able to
  make a broad range of more informed marketing
  decisions. These include

Website content creation If your website data
shows high demand for content related to
cardiovascular or heart health, then you should
continually boost heart health information to
encourage those patients and prospects to
return. Market segmentation Identify different
patient segments by developing targeted e-mails
or newsletter campaigns based on the subject
matter that patients and prospects demand most.
This could be about heart health, injury
prevention, nutrition, exercise tips, cancer
screening, and more. Messaging You may have
noticed certain words or terminology that were
commonly used by a particular persona. Try
adapting your marketing messages to paint an
ideal picture for those personas, and make sure
that you and your team speak to each of them
using their own words, which are more likely to
resonate most with each group. Time and
resources Take a closer look at your operational
procedures like scheduling and follow-up to
ensure a positive patient experience that
addresses the expressed, individual expectations
of each persona. Strive
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to maintain efficiency in physician and staff
hours, as well as equipment usage, spending on
equipment and office medical supplies. Training
your staff Remember to share your findings and
candid statements from each persona with your
practice staff to better prepare them for
conversations with patients. Train them to share
actual quotes and other persona-related
information that you obtained firsthand so they
can overcome objections and communicate more
effectively. Ensure that you properly address
your patient personas even if you dont have the
time or resources. Partner up with dedicated SEO
agency for doctors. Consult with healthcare SEO
agency for doctors that has an armamentarium of
healthcare SEO solutions. Make your life much
easier and more profitable by partnering with
Practice Builders. Learn more by visiting
practicebuilders.com.