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

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 third installment, we discussed the forming your core team and collection of the relevant data for persona development.  In this installment, we will discuss the third step in developing actionable customer personas, development of the customer personas. 

Step Three: CustomerPersona Creation

Now that the core team has reviewed all the available data and the research has been conducted to fill in any customer knowledge gaps, the team will need to distill down the learning’s to that which is most important in driving purchase intent.  A persona i snot a data dump around all that is known about the target, but rather a clear picture of the customer likely to purchase the products or services.  The team should focus on gleaning customer insights around their needs and barriers to purchase, along with purchase intent drivers for each target customer. 

There is no correct template for a customer persona.  However, they all contain the same basic information:

• Demographic data
• Personality
• Interests & Behaviors
• Role in the purchase decision
• Motivations & Frustrations
• Goals & Challenges
• Influences

Depending on the data available and the insights gleaned, the team can adjust what is included in the persona as necessary to construct a living breathing being (as close as possible anyway).

Shown below is a hypothetical diabetes patient persona as an example.

Keep in mind that customer personas are living documents and should be revisited as new customer information is collected so they will always be up-to-date. 

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.