Do you experience low website engagement rates? Are you wondering why your marketing campaigns are not resourceful? Probably, your strategies do not address the patients’ concerns. Or maybe, you don’t have insights into what the patients really want.
The healthcare industry is highly competitive, and as a healthcare marketer, you need to be a step ahead to get a real connection with your audience.
Healthcare personas are helpful tools for aligning your goals with the target audience. They provide truthful insights into what the patients want, based on a series of personal attributes (gender, location, etc.). Our guide provides a general framework for creating healthcare personas (or consumer profiles). Read on to learn more about the benefits of personas in a marketing campaign.
The Value of Building Healthcare Personas
There is one clear benefit of healthcare personas: they allow your marketing team to direct their focus and efforts on the target audience only. They provide a better understanding of the needs, challenges, and expectations of the people you need to reach, allowing you to offer better services.
Healthcare personas can help you realize the negative aspects or obstacles in your services or website compared to your competitors. Human-centric marketers in the healthcare industry use personas to not only understand their patients but also their stakeholders and caregivers.
These personas humanize the healthcare process to reflect better the people you interact with on daily basics. When your personas are well established, your team can come up with more creative ideas and strategies. The overall result for well-thought personas includes the following:
- More engagement rates
- Lower marketing costs because you know your target audience
- Effective marketing campaigns
- Lower bounce rates on your website
- More app downloads, etc.
How to Create Effective Healthcare Personas
Research is the key to building a persona. You need to collect detailed information for your target audience so that you can address the issue better. Before you start your research, you will need to write a few questions, which you can represent in a questionnaire or survey. These questions include:
- Where do your patients come from?
- How old are they?
- What are their cultural believes?
- What’s their employments status?
- Are they married?
- What are their strengths and weakness?
- What challenges are they facing?
Additionally, everyone has different expectations. Identify your audience based on your services to create the best personas. With the right information at hand, it can be easier for you to create your personas effectively.
Research Tips for Healthcare Personas
We have mentioned research as the key to building the best personas. But what research methods should you use? Here are the three best methods for collecting data for healthcare personas:
1. Conduct Interviews and Surveys
You can conduct interviews face to face, on the phone, or online. All methods are effective because they provide first-hand information on your customers. If you need to build patient personas, for instance, then you should interview some of your patients. You can ask them a plethora of questions regarding your healthcare services and record everything. You can also ask for their opinions on the exact areas that they think you should improve.
Apart from interviews, you can survey your audience. Surveys can be done offline or online. The interviews and surveys should give you helpful insights regarding your facility and be your primary example when creating the personas.
2. Analyze Data Trends
You will undoubtedly collect helpful data from your surveys and interviews. But did you know that your past data records can be helpful as well?
Here are helpful sources for your health care data trends:
- Review the administration data to get an overall view of the patient population, patient pattern’s and your healthcare services
- Check the patient medical records to know the most issues affecting your patients
- Check comments from past patients to know their experiences, complaints, and remarks
Your website database can also provide helpful data ad patterns. This is true if you use Google Analytics to track the behavior of your visitors. By reviewing the web database, you can know:
- The number of people who visit your website daily.
- What your visitors do upon landing on your site.
- What action does the audience do after reading your content — it can be contacting you, visiting your website, or taking no action at all.
- The patients who come back to your website
- The bouncing rate, etc.
3. Brainstorm with Your Healthcare Team
Your healthcare teams can help you gather patients’ insights for building your personas. For instance, the marketing team can give you better audience information because they interact every day. Here are a few things to learn from the marketing team:
- The best/worst performing marketing campaigns
- The most common marketing issues
The caregivers can also provide insights based on their daily interactions with the patients. When compiled, this information can help you plan well and create the right healthcare personas.
4. Rebuilding Your Healthcare Personas
Before we finalize, it’s worth noting that you can rebuild your healthcare personas as many times as possible. When the personas come as real people, you can test if they match the profiles. Since you continuously get information from the patients and the caregivers, you can evaluate the performance of your personas and rebuild them if need be.
Get Started With Healthcare Personas!
An effective healthcare persona goes beyond understanding the demographics of your audience. You need to be diverse in your research to understand the issues affecting your patients and how you can perfectly address them.
You should know your consumers’ expectations and concerns. If you would like to create a healthcare persona for your facility, follow our guide and don’t hesitate to seek help when need be.
Odato Marketing Group is committed to helping healthcare brands grow and thrive well in marketing. We advertise, brand, and design healthcare websites to create a great first impression and drive traffic. Our team has tremendous expertise in digital marketing, and we will be glad to help you grow. We welcome you to contact us for help in digital marketing.
