The “persona” in healthcare marketing

Marketing experts are constantly developing new methods to help businesses promote their products and services while staying close to consumers. To satisfy consumers and meet their needs, every business must know its target audience well in order to understand its behaviour.

To achieve this goal, one marketing concept has been widely used for many years: the persona. This technique helps the marketing efforts of the businesses that use it bear more fruit by adopting an effective approach to understanding and anticipating their target audience’s behaviour.

The “persona”: definition and characteristics

In a marketing context, a persona is an imaginary profile representing a segment of the population. This technique is widely used in projects involving the development of a new product or a new service.

In other words, a persona is a model with fictional characteristics that are themselves based on concrete data. This data is collected beforehand during marketing research and is then used to create a profile whose assigned characteristics are representative of the individuals who make up the segment targeted by the business.

The persona is therefore a tool of choice for all marketing managers who, when launching a product or service, want to reach their target segment appropriately and effectively. Combined with the business’s commercial objectives, the data used to create the persona helps guide not only the choice of communication channels to prioritize and the content to be presented on them, but also the development of a product or service whose features match the target segment’s needs.

The importance of the persona in healthcare marketing

The field of healthcare marketing is no exception. Creating personas gives any business working in the healthcare sector an accurate understanding of the consumers who make up its target. Creating such a typical profile provides an overall view of the preferences, lifestyle habits and purchasing behaviour of clients and prospects. The business is then able to adapt its products and services, as well as its messages, by aligning them with its target’s preferences and expectations.

Personas therefore allow a business to launch targeted offers and personalized services for each category of individuals it targets in its marketing efforts.

To give a concrete example, you clearly wouldn’t communicate the same way if you wanted to sell dietary supplements for people who work out as you would if you were a dental clinic wanting to promote its cosmetic dentistry services. These services are usually popular with an older, more affluent clientele, while fitness is popular mainly with young people. Not only will the nature of the message and the tone differ, but the communication tools used will probably not be the same either.

Some companies offer training in creating communication and digital marketing plans, in which creating personas is one of the main steps.

In this context, creating “personas” helps you build usage scenarios for a product or service, with the goal of putting in place an effective strategy for promoting and distributing it to consumers. Thanks to personas, healthcare marketing specialists are able to better identify consumers’ needs in order to satisfy them by adapting both the offer and the way it is communicated.

Personas are fictional users, but oh so important for the design and success of a marketing strategy! To that end, the Virus Santé Communication team can help you define your personas and categorize them according to your business projects. Whether you’re a start-up or a business looking to promote a new offer, calling on the support of marketing professionals will guarantee that you better achieve your goals!