A 3 step guide to focus on what your patient wants most and what your practice does best

What’s your success sweetspot?

Phil Youngcontent marketing, customer journey, healthcare marketing

What's your success sweetspot?

Focus on what your patient wants most and what your practice does best.
Three steps: attract patients, build engagement, increase visibility
Step 1. Create Your Patient Personas

The first crucial step is to map your patient’s digital journey with a patient-centric mindset. With so many different options for healthcare services, it is essential to design an effective strategy.

Ask yourself some tough questions…

  • Why would a patient choose care over our service? Cost, convenience?
  • What is the patient’s perception of our quality? Our cost?
  • What do our current patients say about us?

The goal here is to get a list of the desires, hidden needs and preferences of your patients. These support you in creating your patient buyer personas. A patient persona is an imaginary description of a person that represents a typical group of patients with similar demographics and motivations.

Understand the buyers needs and pains
Defined personas are powerful reference points for all marketing and communication pieces.
Personas are created by looking at a cross section of many different actual patients within a specific niche. Your personas target the type of patients you’d like to attract. Clearly defined personas give you a reference point for creating marketing and communication pieces. If you have detailed personas to work with you can easily determine if your messaging will be effective for the intended audience.
Step 2. Develop Patient Communications to Match the Personas

Review each stage of communication based on what you know about the patient. By refining your step-by-step sequence of messages, you can build rapport and trust with both prospective and existing patients.

Consider the communication sequence and timelines for delivery. Every piece of active and passive communication is important. Your communications should add value and avoid irrelevant messages.

Start with the initial point of contact for a prospective patient, it could be a business listing you have. To help you cover all the touchpoints you can download our patient journey infographic. Creating a chart or matrix can help, get as fancy as you like.

Need help covering all the touchpoints?
Download our patient journey map
It will make building that checklist a load easier
Step 3. Review, Rinse and Repeat

Once you are up and running with personas and communication sequences, you can review and refine them to improve your results.

Our team at Ys is very experienced working with healthcare clients to support them to define their personas and craft relevant communications. Ask us for support – we will be glad to help you grow your business with clarity and efficiency.

How Ys can help your business grow

GET YOUR BRAND CRYSTAL CLEAR

In healthcare, people will buy into a brand due to the security it offers and represents. We help your brand set you apart from all the competition. We know it gives your business its own unique personality. Your brand becomes a promise of what the patient can expect.

Once you deliver, the good reputation of the business grows over time. As reputation grows, the brand grows stronger. It becomes a point of gaining competitive advantage.

COLLABORATE TO DEFINE YOUR MESSAGE

Marketing messages are always apt to sound like any and all other marketing messages. Thought leadership messaging, though, isn’t about the novelty of any old message sufficing. It’s about value. Whether or not your thought leadership perspectives are similar to or shared by others doesn’t matter. If they’re valuable, people will benefit from hearing it whether it’s the original note, or an echo resounding around an important point. It’s critical that such value is always there.

TARGET YOUR MARKET WITH PRECISION

As far as healthcare marketing goes, it is more than defining a target market of "Prospective Patients ages 23- 35."  It means truly understanding what drives them to make healthcare decisions, where they shop, how they shop and how they make decisions. It involves understanding their frustrations, their pain points and their hot buttons.

NURTURE YOUR PATIENTS AND PROSPECTS WITH EMPATHY

Communication is at the core of consistent content marketing. Not only is it important to communicate within your team, but it is also vital that you are communicating with your patients, whether prospective or existing. Two-way communication is the only way you’ll truly grasp the challenges your patients face on a daily basis. Building a relationship around their concerns nurtures their loyalty to your brand and communicates your investment in providing them with humanity, not customer service.