Four Steps to Actionable Customer Personas For the Healthcare Industry – Introduction

Introduction: From a marketing standpoint, the last 20 years have been the age of the user experience, which will always be important.  However, now we are in the age of the individual or the age of “one-to-one” marketing or personalized marketing.  Customers expect products, services and messages they receive to be specific to their personal needs.  One of the best ways to accomplish this is to employ customer personas (a.k.a. buyer personas). Customer personas take the customer from a generalized customer profile based on a segmentation study to the living breathing beings that they are.  A deep understanding of exactly who the customers are is imperative to developing a marketing plan that will reach, connect and motivate them.

What is a Customer Persona?

A Customer persona is a description of the ideal customer based on market research and real data gathered about existing customers. It is a fictionalized composite sketch of a target customer segment.  It identifies the key traits of a large segment of the target audience, based on both qualitative and quantitative data.

It provides insight into what customers are thinking and doing as they weigh options that address a problem they want to solve. An actionable persona should reveal insights about what drives the customer’s purchase decision, such as their attitudes, concerns and other key drivers. It will help uncover un-met or under-met needs that the product or service can solve.

Why Are Customer Personas Important?

Customer personas provide value by:

• Providing a better understanding of customer needs and how to best meet those needs
• Providing guidance for product development for synergistic products or services
• Helping prioritize projects to invest time, talent, and money in the initiatives that will be most fruitful for the business
• Creating alignment across the organization on a customer-centric vision

Constructing actionable customer personas has the potential to save the organization money and to drive increased sales by shifting the focus to what is most important to the customer.

Customer personas have been used in the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries for some time, but their use is relatively new in the healthcare space.  This article will apply the learnings from consumer industries to the healthcare space and provide four key steps for developing actionable customer personas, with the focus on the word “actionable.”  Personas are not just an exercise in a marketing plan that never gets pulled through to drive the key deliverables of the plan.

In the next installments on customer personas, the four steps to developing actionable personas will be explored.  The four steps to be discussed are as follows:

• Step One: Target Customer Selections
• Step Two: Pulling It All Together
• Step Three: Customer Persona Creation
• Step Four: Pulling It Through

About the author:  RD Shanklin & Associates is a healthcare & life sciences marketing strategy consultancy focused on driving profitable growth through enhancing customer insights, strategic & tactical planning, marketing and commercial strategy.

Regina Shanklin is the founder and principal consultant for the organization. She is a marketing executive with over 20 years of delivering business results while generating strong return-on-investment (ROI). Regina has a diverse marketing background and has driven results in the Healthcare, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Advertising industries.