Recently, we looked at how great content can turn awareness into relationships: Campaigns that create awareness are just step one. Content that builds enduring relationships must follow, or the full ROI of creative ad campaigns will be left on the table. It’s a vision for truly personalized marketing seen through the lens of friendship development, which we all know how to do almost without even thinking about it.
Yet executing that vision as a hospital or health system seeking to develop enduring relationships with patients can be perplexing. Where to begin?
First, move beyond traditional audience definitions
Personalized marketing both creates new touchpoints and leverages existing ones with identified audiences across the customer journey. What happens at those touchpoints? What is the audience’s experience in each of those encounters? To answer those questions, you need to know your audience very, very well. Because by definition, great content is about your audience, not about you. It’s about their needs and concerns, their preferences, their lives. Address those topics, and they’ll come to you to learn how you can help meet their needs.
But who are “they”?
In our experience, health system marketing teams don’t spend nearly enough time answering that question. Audiences tend to be defined as, for example, “women age 25+.” Why is that a problem? After all, that definition would capture women during their childbearing years. And that’s an important moment to begin a relationship with them given that women tend to be loyal to the hospital where they gave birth and go on to make healthcare decisions for the rest of their family (children, partners, and their own parents) for years to come. This approach even has a name: life-stage marketing.
What this broad definition of an audience doesn’t account for, however, is that women 25 and older are not a monolithic group. There’s vast variety in their demographics, interests, behaviors, and healthcare needs. Without distilling the definition of your audience further than stage of life, you cannot build authentic relationships that are sustained, like friendships, through understanding and empathy. You wouldn’t talk to your childbearing cousin the same way you’d speak to your 60-year-old aunt, would you?
Next, use data to understand and segment your audience
So, how do you paint a finer portrait of your audience? With data. Data-driven insights lay the foundation for authentic, personalized connections through content. Become hungry for data sources that will fill in the details about your audience. Whether from anonymized clinical or claims data, social listening tools, consumer segmentation methods, or other tools, a diversity of sources will deliver insights about your targeted audience that allow you to personalize content for them.
Start with the clinical specialty or service line you represent. Returning to the typical health system audience of women 25 and older, let’s select a service line that caters to these women’s health needs—say, breast oncology—to demonstrate how data can be used to segment these women into smaller groups.
Clinical staff can help provide data and insights that reveal, for example, that breast cancer is a completely different journey for women under 40 than it is for older women. Women under 40 aren’t yet getting regular mammograms. Many of them have young children and may even be breastfeeding. As a complement to conversations with clinical staff, you can leverage web analytics or a social listening tool for a deeper understanding of the types of questions and concerns women under 40 with breast cancer may have: Will I still be able to breastfeed after surgery? Can I have more children after chemotherapy treatment?
