Healthcare Personas help you discover and stay focused on your audience. They showcase your audience’s motivations, challenges, concerns and behaviors – the things that underpin the healthcare decisions they make – so that you can build structures, processes, designs and content that resonate with them. In the healthcare industry, your organization might have a variety of different personas, from patients to healthcare providers and caregivers. Within each general persona group, your organization probably focuses on a specific segment – such as patients with asthma or healthcare providers specializing in cancer treatment. As such, when creating your buyer personas, it’s important to get as detailed as possible.

Creating Healthcare Personas is an incredibly important aspect of your overall digital and inbound marketing program – how can you reach your ideal audience if you’re unsure of exactly who they are? Instead of going in blindly and pushing out content that your audience may or may not care about, once you have a good picture of who you want to target, you’ll be able to create personalized content and develop a patient- or customer-centric inbound marketing program. Take the time to learn about your target audience first and you’ll find success comes more quickly and costs less in the long run!

Here’s how to begin defining a Persona for healthcare marketing:

Clean the slate. Pretend for a moment that you don’t know your ideal customer, patient, consumer or buyer. Let go of your biases and assumptions and work from a blank page.
Don’t over-generalize. You’re painting a semi-fictional picture, but be as specific as possible. You will likely have more than one persona, so don’t let generalizations overlap.
Do your research. The deeper you dig for details, the more refined and accurate your persona picture will become. Ask questions. Assemble information from several sources, including existing/previous patients, patient comments and survey data. Update regularly.

DEMOGRAPHICS: Chart the basic information such as gender, age range, education levels, occupation, household income, etc. Narrow any data ranges.

ACTIVITIES AND BEHAVIORS: What actions or activities are important in their daily lives? Determine their sources of information, both online and elsewhere. Does the patient use and rely on social media, word-of-mouth, referrals? What other characteristics define lifestyle or interests?

DREAMS AND EXPECTATIONS: What is the nature of their problem, needs or wants? How do they define satisfaction or answers to those needs. What is important or what happiness do they seek? What needs are not being met?

DECISION CRITERIA: What are the strongest reasons for buying? Do others influence their healthcare information gathering or decision process? What is their buying process and how quickly do they take action to seek services?

MEETING THE NEEDS: What, from the buyers perspective, is different, better, unique and/or compelling? How do we stand out from the competition? What do customers say that they like best about us? What can we deliver, and how can we deliver it, so that the buyer is delighted and satisfied?

Some doctors tend to distant themselves from “things retail.” But applying the concept of a Buyer Persona is, in fact, a technique that has been used successfully to move away from the old school, impersonal mass-market retail world to a personalized, customer-centric mindset.