Bringing Healthcare Segments to Life with Personas

Health is highly personal, so it’s baffling to think that as marketers we would tap generic messaging tropes.

Healthcare providers and solutions are so diverse, how would a one-size-fits-all campaign have a positive effect? In fact, it may end up doing more harm.

The challenge in healthcare marketing vs. a lot of product marketing is that EVERYONE potentially applies. Old/young, active/sedentary, men/women, liberal/conservative, healthy/unhealthy, athletes/accountants…

This makes persona development that much more important. Think of an orthopedic practice and the range of patients that are applicable, from a 16-year-old osteotomy patient who wants to be back on the court ASAP for their high school basketball team to a 70-year-old multi-hip replacement surgery patient looking for someone to finally help them be pain-free. A message might say, “Recover quicker,” but if it doesn’t speak to the unique motivations of different segments, the impact of the message will get diluted or worse, feel inauthentic and salesy (which is especially scary for healthcare).

So how do you capture the wide swatch of potential audiences, while also being deeply relatable? It starts with understanding what you stand for as a healthcare provider and then translating that beyond demos into attitudes. Who do we (the brand) click with (the human)?

Why Are Personas Essential for a Successful Marketing Strategy?

If you don’t invest the time to train for a marathon, then on the day of the marathon your results are going to be disappointing and probably painful.

If you don’t invest in knowing your audience and building a more personal and empathetic marketing program around them, your results are going to be disappointing and frustrating.

In the simplest terms, personas are detailed summaries that represent different segments of your audience. Unlike traditional market segmentation, which often categorizes people based on demographic data alone, personas offer a richer, more nuanced understanding of who your customers are. Personas give marketers the tools they need to create effective marketing:

1. Tailored Messaging: Personas help craft messages that speak directly to specific audience segments.
2. Predicting Behaviors: Personas provide insights into customer behaviors and preferences, allowing businesses to anticipate their needs and create marketing strategies that address these needs effectively.
3. Building Engagement: Humanizing customer segments through personas fosters stronger connections. When a message resonates on a personal level, it builds trust and loyalty, making customers more likely to engage with your brand.

Going back to the orthopedic practice discussion, COHN got to know real patients of Panorama Orthopedics and Spine in Colorado and ultimately made them the central point of the campaign, organically creating personas through their actual stories and tapping into authenticity, emotion, and motivations.

The diversity in stories, experiences, successes, etc. allowed us to create connections with people who could see themselves in these stories and faces, all tied together through the lens of a brand campaign that was focused on putting the patient first.

Effective persona development is a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy. By crafting detailed representations of your target customer, you can tailor your messaging, predict behaviors, and build stronger engagement with your brand. A well-defined persona template can help guide your marketing teams in creating targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments.

Creating Personas and Executing: A Case Study of Donor Alliance

Donor Alliance is a non-profit organ procurement organization serving CO and WY. Since forming in 1997, the organization hadn’t made many updates to its brand, messaging and approach to reaching more people to register as donors. This past year, they embarked on an emotional journey to revamp their image from a “sterile” healthcare entity to an empathetic and transparent resource and advocate for saving and healing lives.

Persona Development: When designing marketing campaigns for behavior change, attitudes and motivations are far more important to understand than demographics alone. Effective customer segmentation strategies go beyond basic demographics and into the psychographics and motivations of your target audience. COHN partnered with a niche research provider that delivers “attitudinal research,” which finds audience personas rooted in beliefs and attitudes. To better understand attitudes around organ donation, COHN surveyed hundreds of people across Colorado and Wyoming, and we learned people have one of four attitudes about donation: Negative, Proud, Distrustful or Curious.

• Proud (27%): Inspired by examples of the impact donation can have on recipients, actively promote registration and want the process to be even simpler.
• Curious (25%): Open-minded about organ donation and want to learn more about all aspects of the process.
• Distrustful (24%): Don’t trust those involved and worry about who may be influencing the donation process. Also feel disconnected from others/community.
• Negative (24%): Doubt the value of donation and are disturbed by the concept of donating.

Persona Application: We decided to focus our campaign messaging on converting the Curious and Distrustful groups while empowering the Proud group to advocate for registration. We also layered this attitudinal insight on top of data that told us which locations in CO and WY and which age groups/ethnicities were lacking in registrations to become donors. All of these factors lead us to a very call-to-action-heavy campaign strategy that puts the registrant (our audience) as a priority.

Challenges in Creating Effective Personas

Personas are incredibly valuable, and like most things that hold value, they aren’t easy to come by. Some common barriers include:

1. Data Collection: Gathering reliable, data-driven insights can be difficult. It’s essential to base personas on real data rather than assumptions to ensure they accurately reflect customer motivations and habits.

• Silver Lining: This doesn’t have to mean formal research (although it’s AMAZING when that’s an option!). COHN has tackled this through interviews, informal customer/patient surveys, good ol’ Google searching, AI prompts (tip: use AI in a supporting role vs. primary), etc.

2. Keeping Personas Up-to-Date: Customer behaviors and market conditions evolve over time. Regularly updating personas is crucial to maintain their relevance.

• Silver Lining: This isn’t reinventing the wheel as much as keeping a pulse on how environments are changing and therefore influencing our audiences. You can gain insight from campaign performance and optimizations, annual surveying of audiences, applying industry trends to personas, etc.

3. Consistency Across Channels: While personas should guide content across various platforms, maintaining consistency while adapting content to different channels can be harder than it seems.

• Silver Lining: If you invest in getting to know your personas the tide will change and you will start to find that personas make your job easier and organically lead to consistency. Having a customer journey map against each persona will also help prioritize channels and how each persona is interacting with your brand.

4. Budgets/ROI: Persona development is an investment – whether that is time, money or brain power. In an increasingly data/KPI-driven marketing environment, there is a case that needs to be made for that investment.

• Silver Lining: Persona development is a small upfront investment for long-term gain that WILL improve conversions and quality lead performance. You can also use technology to “prove” effectiveness such as reviewing CRM data that scores lead quality and A/B testing messaging against personas.

Ultimately, using personas in healthcare marketing allows you to connect with your audience on a deeper level, tailoring your messages to their specific needs and motivations.

This personalized approach not only improves customer experience but also fosters brand loyalty and drives conversions. By investing in persona development marketing and implementing effective customer segmentation strategies, you can achieve greater success in the competitive healthcare landscape.

Understanding the unique needs and pain points of each type of customer through user personas empowers your marketing teams and sales teams to create content and deliver targeted marketing campaigns in the healthcare industry that resonate, ultimately leading to improved customer service and increased market share for your products or services.

COHN is Here to Help You Develop Personas

We believe the quality of a campaign’s output starts with the quality of what we put in. COHN Marketing specializes in strategically-driven marketing that many times starts with persona creation. With healthcare being such a personal industry, you really can’t afford to bypass this step or you risk being one in the crowd versus a sought-after solution. This rings true for patients, recruiting and being a thought leader in a specialization.