Healthcare is personal. It’s intimate. It’s individual. Shouldn’t healthcare marketing be the same? Especially when it comes to at-risk patients. Here are three ways taking an audience-first marketing approach can help you reach those groups.
What they need
In an audience-first marketing campaign, you always want to find the truths that drive a patient. “It’s not about what a hospital needs or what a health system needs. It’s about what the patient needs,” explains Michael Krieger, Director, Marketing Analytics & Operations at MKR. “If it’s not right for the patient, it will never be right for your organization.”
With the proper listening tools and understanding, you can define your audiences to create a foundation of truth on which your marketing efforts are built. With an audience-first approach, you can define both the anxiety and the relief your patients might experience while dealing with their health and address it in a genuine and resonant way.
When they need it
In healthcare, you should always be creating resonance when a patient needs a specific service. The best way to do that is to create an experience for that patient at the moment that they have that healthcare curiosity.
Chronic health conditions are long-term, expensive, and can negatively impact quality of life. This makes at-risk patients either highly motivated or highly complacent. Either way, you need to be there to provide solutions the moment a patient is searching for them. According to Chris, “It might take a patient a while to come to terms with the fact their knee pain might call for joint replacement. We need to be there when the patient is ready. Not when the business is ready.”
Where they are
At-risk patients show behaviors and health conditions that can often lead to chronic health conditions. This audience might need more proactive healthcare support. That being said, it’s important to take a step back and look at the behaviors and psychographics of at-risk patients to see where they are.
Chris offers this example: “Someone with joint pain might also search around weight loss or orthotic inserts. We need to be there when they do.” Using an audience-first approach will provide the behaviors and psychographics we need to find eyeballs where they actually are, not just where your business wants them to be, allowing for more impactful, flexible marketing.
With an audience-first approach to healthcare marketing, you can deliver what patients need, when patients need it, where patients are. Interested in hearing more about our audience-first approach to marketing? Contact us here. We’re always excited to talk.