How Well Do You *Really* Know Your Audiences in Healthcare?
Marketers like to think they know their audiences.
This is particularly true in healthcare, where you’ve seen the patient demographics. You’ve reviewed the age brackets, income levels, and zip codes. You should theoretically know your audiences more than most!
But here’s the truth: surface-level data isn’t enough. Real healthcare audience understanding requires going beyond the “who” to uncover the “why. That is, the motivations, emotions, and perceptions that shape every decision a patient makes.
At COHN, we’ve seen how this deeper level of research reshapes a marketing strategy. The most successful campaigns we’ve built started with one crucial step: listening. When you stop assuming and start hearing what patients, families, and communities truly want, you uncover the insights that drive real impact.
This post is for healthcare marketers ready to move past assumptions and ground their strategies in real, research-backed understanding of the people they serve.
Why Deep Audience Understanding Matters in Healthcare
It’s easy to view your audience as one big, uniform group: patients in need of care. But that assumption can and will cost you in healthcare marketing. In reality, healthcare audiences are diverse in their priorities, access challenges, cultural expectations, and emotional drivers. Treating them like a monolith often results in generic campaigns that fail to connect.
Effective messaging depends on nuance. Emotional drivers like fear, hope, and skepticism shape decision-making. Barriers to access (i.e., transportation, insurance literacy, access, or mistrust) can keep someone from scheduling a procedure or following through on treatment. Even cultural context influences how your brand is perceived and whether your message resonates.
Understanding these dynamics allows you to craft better strategies. You know where to focus time and budget. You can create campaigns that meet patients where they are emotionally and practically. And you can build loyalty, which is more important than ever in a self-directed, digitally influenced healthcare journey.
When Donor Alliance faced a sudden dip in organ donor registrations, we helped them dig into the “why.” Through attitudinal audience research, we uncovered four distinct segments. Instead of pushing one broad message, the campaign targeted the “Curious” and “Proud” groups with a community-focused approach, which has led to a much more meaningful approach to engagement.
What Most Healthcare Brands Miss
Most healthcare systems rely on basic demographic data (e.g., age, gender, location), and then just stop there. But these numbers tell only part of the story.
True understanding comes from listening. It’s about uncovering the lived experiences, motivations, and preferences behind the data. This is where many organizations fall short.
(Side note: In a recent research project with a large hospital system, we learned that above all else, patients just want to be listened to during their care. Your marketing should probably take note!)
In addition, healthcare providers often emphasize clinical outcomes. They focus on survival rates, advanced technology, and physician credentials. But patients? They’re often more concerned with bedside manner, recovery time, and whether their care team will understand their unique needs.
Or take a cardiac program marketed around medical excellence. If research reveals that patients are worried about their ability to return to work quickly, your messaging needs to shift. This is where healthcare market segmentation (as in, layering psychographics on top of demographics) transforms your understanding and helps you market specific healthcare services more effectively.
How Research and Focus Groups Unlock Deeper Insights
You can’t fix what you can’t see. Research opens your eyes. The most valuable insights often emerge when you pair quantitative and qualitative methods.
Quantitative research, such as surveys, CRM data, website analytics, and social listening, can reveal surprising trends. Maybe there’s low awareness of a new orthopedic service line despite heavy web traffic to related educational content. Maybe your social channels are generating high engagement on wellness topics but little traction on physician-focused posts. These numbers tell you where to dig deeper.
Qualitative research is equally essential. Healthcare focus groups and one-on-one interviews uncover emotional barriers, language preferences, and personal stories that you didn’t even know to ask about. Moderated discussions with patients, caregivers, and community members provide context that data alone can’t deliver.
It’s funny, this is actually how we begin all brand development processes. We start with qualitative research, which we call Brand Discovery.
For example with Craig Hospital, COHN conducted focus group–style interviews with 12 internal stakeholder groups. Across all sessions, one theme emerged: “Only at Craig.” That phrase became the backbone of the campaign’s messaging and creative strategy, capturing the hospital’s singular role in spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation.
When you hear people describe their needs in their own words, you gain patient insights no survey can deliver.
Bringing It All Together: Turning Research Into Strategy
Collecting insights is only step one. The real power comes from translating those insights into action.
Start by synthesizing findings into detailed audience personas. These rich profiles describe not just demographics, but values, motivations, and behaviors. Collaborate with service-line leaders to connect these personas to marketing priorities. Consider how those priorities impact everything from channel selection to content development to messaging refinement.
This is how you move from generic messaging to segment-specific strategies rooted in patient insights for marketing.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Even organizations that invest in research can fall into traps. One common issue is keeping insights siloed in the marketing department instead of sharing them with physicians, administrators, and frontline staff. Another is relying too heavily on outdated or assumed knowledge. Patients’ expectations evolve quickly, especially in a digital-first world, and so should your data.
Many also treat research as a one-off project. It isn’t. Audience understanding needs to be a continuous discipline to remain relevant. And while focus groups are invaluable, they should be balanced with hard data to avoid over-generalizing from a few discussions.
At COHN, we help clients implement recurring research cadences, so they stay aligned with their patients’ evolving needs.
How to Start: Practical First Steps
Building a culture of audience understanding doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start small with a pilot focus group or a stakeholder survey, using tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Facebook Audience Insights, or CRM data to gather insights.
You’d be surprised just how much you can learn with a simple Google Form or SurveyMonkey.
When neutrality or specialized skill is needed, consider bringing in outside partners. An experienced moderator or research team can help you navigate sensitive topics and extract the most valuable insights. And above all, commit to a cadence. Biannual or annual research ensures your strategies stay relevant and your messaging reflects the people you serve.
Even modest efforts can reveal big opportunities for connection.
COHN Marketing: Your Partner in Insight-Driven Healthcare Strategy
Guesswork isn’t good enough anymore. Patients are making more informed, more personal, and more complex healthcare decisions than ever. If you want to connect meaningfully, you need to understand them, deeply.
Audience research isn’t just clever marketing. It’s patient-centered marketing built on trust, empathy, and data.
At COHN, we help healthcare organizations go deeper by turning authentic patient voices into actionable strategies. From audience research and focus groups to segmentation and campaign development, we create marketing that resonates and performs.
Ready to know your audience better? Let’s build your next strategy together.
