Four Steps to Actionable Customer Personas For the Healthcare Industry – Step One

There are four key steps to developing actionable customer personas.  Integrating these steps will help you develop a clearer picture of who your key customers are and what best motivates them in the brand selection and the buying process.  This in turn will bring clarity and focus to where your organization should best invest time, talent and money to best meet the customer’s needs and thus maximize the impact to the business.

In first installment, we provided an overview of what customer personas were and why they are important in ensuring customer centricity.  In this installment, we will discuss the first step in developing actionable customer personas, selecting the right customer segments to target.

Step One:  Target Customer Selection

Customer personas can be done for any relevant target customer type such as:

• Patients
• Physicians or Healthcare Providers
• Key decisions makers in Payer or Managed Care organizations, etc.

Always remember that a person is being targeted and not an organization or company.  A human being working for a company is the decision maker, not the company itself.  For this step, hard data needs to be utilized.

For each customer type, the top segments that are most desirable for the business need to be identified. Segment the customers by demographic data including age, gender, income, profession, interests, attitudes and more.  The best place to find this data is in a recent segmentation study, with concentration on the top two segments by customer type.  If there is not a recent segmentation study, a lot of data can be gleaned from web analytics on who is visiting the brand’s product or service website. Google Analytics has a lot of great data in this area.  If the brand is engaged in social media, Facebook has data on who is interacting with the business page.  Social media listening research is also a great way to gather information about a key target.  Data can also come from the call center and CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing) programs.  The point is to use the best available data to define the most valuable customers for persona development.  There is no need to develop personas for every customer segment, just the top segments that will drive the business.

A key way to go wrong with persona development is to base it on irrelevant data, poorly sourced data or no data at all (your gut).  Do not include things that could never be known about a customer, just because it feels like it fits.  A successful personal persona develops a clear picture of what drives the different types of customers to purchase the products or services.  This is best done with a combination of qualitative and quantitative data.  Qualitative research will help in developing the questionnaire to fill in the knowledge gaps that should be addressed through quantitative research.

Most personas are done on customers that are desirable targets for the company’s products or services, known as positive personas.  There is also value in creating negative personas to target audiences that are unlikely to purchase the company’s products or services.  Negative personas are a great way to identify these undesirable targets for the sales force so that they can be easily recognized, thereby avoiding wasted time and money.

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.