17 May
It is a common saying that if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. That also applies to medical marketing in general. If you are casting a wide net in trying to reach every prospective patient of yours online, you end up reaching no one. Sure, a lot of patients may view your medical ad and click on your medical website, but the message you are trying to convey in your ad won’t resonate with them if it is not created with a specific patient audience base in mind.
If you have been noticing that your marketing campaigns haven’t been performing up to par, not having a defined target patient audience may be the cause. Finding your target audience is emphasized when you begin targeted marketing. The insights you gain from conducting audience research help with any medical marketing campaign on any platform. Therefore, learning how to find the target patient audience is crucial for doctors if you are looking to gain back exceptional ROI rates from your medical marketing campaigns.
What Does Target Audience Mean?
The specific groups of patients that you want to reach with your medical marketing strategies are called your target audiences. Your medical business’s tagline, medical ads, and content that you share on your social platforms should all appeal to these groups of patients. It is important to ensure that every bit of your marketing strategies should be created by keeping your target audiences in mind in order to ascertain their success.
What Are The Different Types Of Target Audiences?
It is important to understand that your medical business can have multiple target patient audiences since there isn’t just one demographic looking for your medical services. Also, various types of target patient audiences align with your various marketing strategies and goals. This is why, when creating a medical marketing campaign, you often tend to target one specific target patient audience to ensure the campaign performs optimally. Some examples of different types of target audiences:
- Email: Using email, you may have a medical newsletter with tips to target your general target patient audience, send out emails to target prospective leads, and/or send trigger emails addressed to existing patients.
- Local: Your local target patient audience can reside close to your clinic or hospital and you may use a platform or a special marketing technique that connects your local community of existing and prospective patients to your medical services.
- Advertisements: You could run Facebook ads to encourage patients to return, Google ads to target prospective patients searching for medical services, and Instagram ads to target the patients of your competitors.
- Social media platforms: You can reach out to the patient groups residing on various social platforms to post thought leadership pieces, how-to videos, or host interviews with your medical staff relevant to your medical services and practice.
Steps To Find Your Target Patient Audience
Up until you, if you don’t have a clear image of who the target patient audience is, you need to step back and try to determine it. Here are the steps you can follow to determine your target patient audience:
1. Reach Out To Your Existing Patients
Your patients are people who use your medical services. They came to be your patients because of the solution you presented to their queries and the way you marketed your medical business to them. This means you were successful in identifying that these people wanted your medical services. You can use the demographics of your existing patients, such as their age groups, their locality, job titles, etc to see if any similar patterns emerge from them.
Next, you can also reach your existing patients via email or social media to ask them why they love your medical services. You can also ask them where they feel medical services ads most target them to gain an idea about prioritizing the marketing channels to use for your target patient audience.
2. Review Your Social Media Following
You can also review your social media following to learn who your current marketing strategies are working for. It also gives you insights into which groups of patients are interested in your medical services. Here are some aspects you can consider when reviewing the demographics of patients following you on your social platforms:
- Age
- Activity level
- Their most interacted content you post
- Location
- Career
- Other followings
There are various online analytical tools that you can use to compile this data. Once compiled, you can use it to look for similar patterns between different patient groups.
3. Use The Insights From Your Content Analysis
The next platform you need to dig is to find your target patient audience is your medical website. If you have a medical blog where you post content regularly, conduct an in-depth analysis to see who reads your medical content daily, who downloads your Ebooks, or who is watching your videos and sharing them.
You can use Google Analytics to acquire and compile this type of demographic insight. See where your website traffic is from, where they are directed from, which content type or topic resonates with them, what terms they look up that lead them to your medical site, etc.
4. Monitor Your Medical Competitors
Once you stepped into the world of online medical marketing, you automatically acquired some competitors. The good news is that you can use insight from your medical competitors to gain insight into your target audience. See which groups of people your competitor is targeting in marketing, where they are advertising, who is the focus in their ads, what points they emphasize in their ads, etc.
Study their medical ads and try to learn how they use their messaging and tone to reach their target audience. You may end up finding an overlap between you and your competitor. This overlap may help you pinpoint your own target audience and if you see any difference, use that to articulate your marketing message more effectively in your medical ads.
5. Define Your Parameters And Create Personas
It might seem like an outlier in the process, but it is essential: You need to identify who your patient is and who isn’t. Therefore, for this step, you should review all of your information; patient interviews, social media following, website visitors, and the comparable audiences of your medical competition. Determine the gaps that you are not filling.
- Are you just focusing on the older demographic and missing out on the younger patients?
- Do you offer medical services for children but are not targeting young mothers?
- Are you only providing in-person medical services and missing out on the patients who want telemedicine?
With the gaps you are not filling and the already existing patient groups, you can now create patient personas to better target your marketing strategies. You can create a patient persona by highlighting a target group’s:
- Location
- Age
- Platform Use
- Gender identification
- Interests
- Industry
- Job title
These personas root from your target patient audience help you customize your medical marketing campaigns for optimal ROI.
Effective Medical Marketing Derives From Good Targeting
Medical marketing involves a lot of push and pull. To ensure that you are acquiring patients and earning back good ROI for the efforts you put into your medical marketing campaigns, you need to know who your target patient audience is. Your target patient audience is the start of your loyal patient base, which only grows as you keep on reaching out to more prospective patients and improving the standard of your medical care.
