Patient Personas

Posted on 22 Oct 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Marketing

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.

Services

Posted on 17 Aug 201717 Aug 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Marketing

BRANDING

Our team of talented designers can create beautiful logo and brand to encapsulate your business purpose and goals.

WEB DESIGN

Need a website? We’ve got you covered. Our design team will work to transform your brand into a stunning site design.

WEB DEVELOPMENT

We have a large team of developers to bring your vision to life. Whether you need a landing page or a WordPress site, our brilliant developers have got you covered.

CONTENT STRATEGY

Need help putting together content for your website? We can help. Our team of content strategists will get your site on track.

MARKETING AND SEO

Any good site needs to be found. We can put together marketing campaigns to get you lots of new customers and attract leads through search engine optimization.

VIDEO PRODUCTION

Putting together a video ad for your business? We can help you shoot, produce, edit, and release it.

Building your personal brand

Posted on 21 Feb 201731 Jul 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Personal Branding

Understand how you are percieved:

7 Tips on building up your personal brand

The term branding has long been associated with companies, but personal branding is also relevant to clinical professionals. A clinician’s reputation and brand go hand in hand. A strong personal brand leads to more referrals.

Here are seven ways to improve your personal brand.

Think of yourself as a brand

What do you wat patients to think of when they hear your name? Expertise, interpersonal skills? Once you know how you wish your personal brand to be perceived, you can begin to put a strategy in place. What resonates with your target patients?

Online presence

How do patients see you, what comes up when you Google your name? Understand how you are percieved, then begin to cultivate your identity and interact with patients in a brand consistent way

Personal website

A personal website is a great way to get your name and brand out there. It gives you an opportunity to present yourself to patients and show them what they can expect from you.

Content

Consider what you post and what you say about yourself. Be sure to put the patient at teh heart of everything that you do. That way you are providing value to the patient and building up your own brand equity.

Purpose

Everything that you do online feeds into your brand, good or bad. Knowing how you want to be percieved should act as a guide to what you post.

Associate with other strong brands

In branding, you are who you keep company with. Position yourself with brands that complement your own and share similar values.

Story

What’s your story? What are you trying to say and is it relevent to patients?

Have a clear brand story and a consistent brand.

Practice Brochures

Posted on 21 Feb 201723 Mar 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Practice Material

Smart practice brochures sell your practice

Your practice brochure is a great way to communicate what your practice is about. It’s a great way to tell patients about the high-quality care you provide. The majority of practice brochures are boring and have no real marketing value. A great brochure should motivate new patients and cases.

Key ingredients for your practice brochure:

Brand message

Does the brochure tell the patient why they should use your practice and not another? What experience might they expect?

Emotions

Patients buy emotionally.Does the brochure tap into those emotional needs and wants?

Visuals

Visuals should resonate with the patient. Can the patient image being the person in that picture?

Copy

We don’t always have time to read the full copy in a brochure, so make sure that the subheadings are snappy and get the key message across.

Colour

Colours can convey many emotions. Make sure you use the right emotional colours.

Calls to action

Energise the patient!

Benefits

Don’t confuse patients with science, sell them the benefits of your treatments.

Brochure pitfalls

Targeting

Make sure your brochure uses copy and images that resonate with your target market.

Sell

Selling is done mostly through the compelling copy.

Size

A good copy is as big as it needs to be. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to squeeze everything onto a tri-fold sheet of paper.

Images

A picture paints a thousand words, so use Irish, original images that are big enough to see in detail.

Clinical images

Trust me, no one wants to see close up clinical images.

Keeping websites simple

Posted on 20 Feb 201731 Jul 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Website Design

If you’re like me, you like to keep websites simple and clean. But there’s more to a great website than just a clean look, here’s what I look for.

Logical navigation

If users don’t know where they should clicking they are likely to give up and leave your website.

Content

It’s great to have a good-looking site, but is there any useful information on the site? Remember: content is king.

Too much info

Content is king, but if you stuff everything you know onto a website the chances are that you will confuse the patient. Think about value. What does the patient really need to know?

Accessibility

There is a sizable number of patients that have vision issues. Does the site have good accessibility? Simpler sites tend to be better in this regard.

Quick look

Seems today that everyone is under time pressure. Simpler sites, with clear concise copy and images, are easier to read at a glance.

Focus

Less is more. Think about what you want to say and say it in the clearest, simplest way.

Speed

Google wants a fast web, so if your site loads slowly expect to find it on page 1 million! (SERP)

One at a time

A minimal website allows you to focus on one clear message on each page. Focus on one value proposition that resonates with the patient.

Need help with your website? Contact us today and let’s get started together.

Building your brand on Facebook

Posted on 20 Feb 201731 Jul 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Facebook

Twitter for healthcare

Posted on 20 Feb 201731 Jul 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Twitter

Get Twitter working for your practice

Shape perception

Twitter is a great channel for demonstrating knowledge. Good use of hashtags allows you to reach out to patients with an interest in your clinical area, regardless of whether they follow you or not. Tweet on what you know and give potential new patients the information that they need. You can share original content or ‘re-tweet’ other relevant content.

Hashtags

Hashtags are Twitter’s way of indexing. Index correctly and you’ll get your message out to the right people. Just don’t use too many and keep the tags accurate.

Chat don’t shout

Don’t be afraid to ‘chat’ to other users. Engage in conversations about your profession. Demonstrate knowledge and offer ethical advice and options. The best Twitter accounts are the ones where the user is actively engaging in conversations. This leads to additional followers, more influence and more potential patients.

Timing

Tweet when people are most likely to see your content: during the commute to work, lunch times, commute home, after dinner.Images

Images can help you make your point, so don’t be afraid to use high-quality images. But mind patient privacy at all times.

SEO tips for healthcare websites

Posted on 20 Feb 201723 Mar 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in SEO

There’s more to SEO than just building links and analytics. Content and social media play a huge role SERP/SEO.

At Healthcare Marketing Ireland we work on-site and off-site to improve SEO/SERP. Here are a few of our techniques:

Competitors

What are your competitors doing? How have they structured their pages? Learn from what is going on in your market.

H1, H2 tagging, back links and so forth.

Quality back-links

Google rewards back-links, but only those that are meaningful and honest. Here are a couple of examples:

Golden pages and similar
Citation on a popular website such as the Irish Times
Popular active blogs

On-Page Optimisation

Make sure that you have good housekeeping:

Short URLs
Meta-descriptions, tags, blurb etc
Logical, meaningful, semantic keywords
Correct use of H-tags
Social media buttons
Cross-link relevant pages

Going Mobile

If your site is not mobile-friendly expect to be penalised by Google. Full stop!

Looking to improve your SEO? Contact us today!

How to better position the branding of your practice

Posted on 20 Feb 201731 Jul 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Marketing

There used to be a time when patients would go where their GP’s told them to go. But today’s patient is far more proactive in his choices. It’s not easy to differentiate your practice from the competition, but without differentiation how will patients choose your practice over another?

Positioning

When we talk about brand positioning we are talking about everything your brand stands for. The services you provide, your patients, your competition, pricing and location.

Understand these factors and you have the data you need to build your marketing plan, branding and sales strategies.

Brand audit

Good brand positioning is reliant upon understanding your patients: needs, wants, desires attitudes etc.

What other brands do they like?

How do the parents of patients perceive you, what impact do they have?

What matters to your patients?

Understand your market

What’s important in your market, what are the trends? Who are the customers? Develop a strategy that responds to this market data,

Sales focus Brand-Building

What is it that drives the decision-making of your potential patients? Identify the needs, wants, and desires that are relevant and position yourself to meet those needs.

Brand experience

Create a brand promise and patient experience that meets the emotional and rational needs of the patient.

Summary

Positioning is how patients perceive your practice brand. Good brand positioning evokes and responds to the emotional needs of the patient.

A strong brand position communicates a practice’s ‘promise’ in a way that is attractive and helps patients make informed medical decisions.

Developing a medical brand

Posted on 20 Feb 201731 Jul 2017 by Healthcare Marketing Ireland in Marketing

Steps to developing a winning practice brand

Overall business strategy

What type of practice do you want? One with organic growth or will you buy a patient book? Your branding strategy should reflect your overall strategy.

Target patients
Who are your target patients? Define your target patient and focus on them to drive growth.

Deeper understanding of patients

Practices that carry out detailed patient persona mapping benefit from data that allows them to make better branding decisions. You’ll better understand your patient’s priorities and needs.

Brand positioning.

Use these insights to help you position your practice, in relation to patients needs and the competition. Explain why patients would want to come to you.

Messaging strategy

How will you get your brand positioning ‘message’ out to patients? How will you reach your target audience of patients? Each sub-group of patients will need a communication approach appropriate to them.

Name, logo and tagline

Your name will need to resonate with potential patients, think about colour psychology, fonts, logos and so forth. Your choices will be dictated by all your patient and market insights.

Content marketing

Content marketing is particularly well suited to medical practices. provide the right content, to the right people at the right stage of the sale cycle.

Website

Your website is where patients learn what you do and how you do it. It’s also the place where you will present all your content to educate and steer patients.

Experiment, observe, learn and improve

There’s always more than one way to do things. A/B testing is your friend. Try out solutions, see what works and implement.

Ready to start building your brand? Contact us today.