It’s not easy acquiring new patients. No matter what your strategy is, the first step will always involve a complete understanding of your current patients, those you’re looking to attract, and having an identifiable USP. Without a solid grasp of these components, your efforts may lack focus and direction.
Understanding Your Patients
Looking to grow your practice? Growth = new patients. You need to understand what kinds of patient are out there in your market. This is where developing patient personas comes in.
This will allow you to understand:
- Who are these patients?
- Where are they geographically?
- What do they want?
- What are their hopes and aspirations?
- What treatment will they be interested in?
- Why do they want that treatment?
- How can we help them?
- Why are they interested in treatment? (we’ve gone full circle there)
You use personas to frame your marketing strategy. You’ve identified your target market and defined it’s values, beliefs, and motivations. By pulling these together into one “persona,” you’ve created a customer type to target.
What is a patient persona?
Put simply, a patient persona is a fictional person that represents a group of patients with similar needs, wants, desires and clinical needs. Each group requires a different marketing approach.
This information will influence many of your marketing decisions:
- Website content
- Social media posts
- Testimonials
- Services
- Clinician selection
Instead of targeting the ‘average’ person with your content you specifically target your ideal patients.
Patient persona example
Mistake: “25-34-year-old married women with an annual income over €50,000, with 1-2 children,”
Detailed example
Aoife Brennan
• 33 years old
• BA in HR
• Married for six years
• 2 children
Aoife works for a large US multi-national, both kids are now in school. She’s in charge of all family medical decisions. She’s the one that brings the kids to the doctor for all visits. She has to juggle that with work. Aoife is a non-smoker, uses the gym when she can, but family commitments often prevent her. She care passionately about the welfare of her family.
With this persona in mind, isn’t it easier to develop marketing messages that appeal to Aoife? Your marketing content should help her and connect with her.
This is the point of developing Patient Personas.