How Patient Personas Can Improve Your Practice (Personas Part 1)

In 2022, Beyonce released a little album titled Renaissance. Like everything Queen B does, the album was critically acclaimed, earning 4.5/5 from Rolling Stone, a 9/10 from Pitchfork, an A from Entertainment Weekly and a 91/100 on Metacritic.  

Despite the critical acclaim, though, Renaissance struggled in its third week of sales, dropping by 74%. Interestingly, some critics attributed this momentary decline in sales to Beyonce’s decision to forego the typical promotion process.

Essentially, they believed the problem was that she wasn’t getting her content in front of the right people’s eyes, causing a huge decline in interest and garnering criticism about her mentality toward promotion.  

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Don’t worry — Beyonce is doing fine. The album sales rebounded after some quick adjustments and she is back to being one of the most consistently successful and viral stars in the world. But if there is something to be learned from this moment in her album sale history, it’s that no one, not even the best 33.4% of Destiny’s Child, can take reaching their core audience for granted. 

Because taking your audience for granted is a death wish for your relevancy. Luckily, though, you have something that mega-celebrity Beyonce doesn’t have…

…29 GRAMMYs

…a monstrously overrated spouse

…lemonade

…oh, right, no, sorry: you have something even better.

You have a powerful way to selectively distribute your content to people who are the most interested in what you have to offer.

You have patient personas at your disposal.

Beyonce, on the other hand, will have to keep doing late-night and early-morning talk shows whenever she wants to release a triple platinum album in order to make hundreds of millions. 

Tough luck for her — sucks to suck.

But in all seriousness, this is why we marketers sing the praises of patient personas so much — because they are a way for medical professionals to efficiently identify who your services and products will most deeply resonate with, ditching those people who are not likely going to become a patient and giving you a huge advantage in your digital marketing.

“But what is a patient persona? And how do they benefit my practice and marketing?” Seriously, I am so, so glad you asked.

Patient Persona, Defined

If you aren’t already privy, a patient persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal patient, created by synthesizing real data and insights about your ideal and current patients. Sometimes, patient personas are also known as “avatars” in the medical aesthetics industry. 

But to be honest, we hate that since these avatars are neither tall and blue nor do they master all four of the elements. 

(Note from Sam: That’s a Last Airbender reference in case anyone wants a life-changing series to watch - yes, it's technically a cartoon, but seriously, we are talking about one of the top 10 greatest shows ever.)

This comprehensive profile includes everything from basic demographic information and personal backgrounds all the way to medical histories, aesthetic preferences, motivations, total spending power, and even potential objections and concerns. 

By creating a vivid, human-like character, you can better understand your target audience's unique needs, desires, and expectations.

How Can Patient Personas Benefit My Practice?

In the grand scheme of digital marketing, whether it is for your medical practice or any other business on the planet, there are two elements that work together in tandem that are largely responsible for the success of a marketing effort: targeting and viscerality. 

Let’s talk about targeting. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I wish all of my patients were like Melissa Rogers,” the mother of two who is clear in her needs, open in her treatment options, decisive in her planning (and liberal in her spending), then you have already come to understand on your own the power that targeting could have in your digital marketing.

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Because the reality is, you could be filling your practice with a never ending stream of Melissa Rogers every day. Every consultation you have, every lead filled out, could be another chance to copy and paste some slightly alternative version of your perfect patient in your practice. 

Okay, I am exaggerating a bit here, but to a large degree, targeting can help you do that — but only if you understand, on a deep and researched level, who Melissa Rogers is. 

After all, Melissa Rogers is 40, but if you only target 40-year-olds, that isn’t enough to scope out only the Melissa Rogers of the world. She is also a mother of two, but a 25-year-old interested in fillers might also be a mother of two so that particular metric won’t do much for your targeting alone either. 

I could go on and on here, but the general idea is that you need a fully developed patient persona, heavily researched and intentionally crafted, to reliably target the patients you want of the world.

And this is the point where viscerality comes in — because it isn’t enough to simply target Melissa Rogers and hope any content out there will be enough to get her to come into your practice. 

Here’s a little hack for you though: the best way to convince Melissa Rogers that your practice is worthy of her time is to create content that resonates with her on an almost unnervingly personal level, content that evokes a powerful emotional response, content that feels real and relevant and leaves her to fill in the gaps with her own experiences, concerns and desires. It has to hit deep enough that it reaches that primal part of her brain that is responsible for making decisions… decisions like calling your practice for a consultation.

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In short, there has to be a visceral connection between your practice and Melissa Rogers. Without this, no amount of targeting will help you. 

To hit that level of relatability and personalization, you have to invest heavily in understanding who Melissa Rogers is. Patient personas have become the standard for this level of personalization because they are capable of making the marketer themself feel connected to this fictional patient — that is to say, they allow us to understand, on a foundational level, what will make Melissa Rogers laugh, cry, smirk, smile, eye roll, yell, contemplate and, most critically, take action. 

How Do Patient Personas Improve My Marketing?

From the bird’s eye view we discussed above, patient personas allow your practice to create more targeted and resonating content that will ultimately attract more of your ideal patient archetypes into your practice. But, from a micro perspective, the conversation is more nuanced. 

Patient personas manage to infiltrate virtually every aspect of your marketing strategy and creative assets when used properly. But for someone like yourself who might be considering investing in patient persona development, knowing exactly what benefits they will have on your marketing program can be hugely advantageous. So, let’s walk through them together.

1. They Improve Your Audience’s Engagement

Engagement, or the measure of how many people are interacting with the content you put out into the world, is one of the most informative metrics you can reference to really understand how your material is being received by your audience. 

The more personal the content feels, the more likely they are to engage with your content and sign up for services with your practice. This isn’t anecdotal knowledge I am throwing out. Check out these stats:

• 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from marketing that is personalized
• 70% of consumers say that a company’s ability to understand their needs impacts their loyalty
• 63% of consumers won’t buy from brands that have poor personalization

Engagement is about measuring the accuracy of your messaging. And if your message is accurate, the likelihood of conversion, i.e. patient sign-ups, goes up exponentially.

It’s not a particularly difficult concept: if you manage to pique someone’s interest, they are more likely to like, comment or subscribe. If you have a cheat sheet telling you exactly what kind of content to produce to pique that interest, you can reliably increase your engagement rates on just about any platform. It’s elementary, my dear Watson.

2. They Improve Communication With Your Patients

I am going to take a piece of your marketing program and break it down. Let’s go with your social media, but more specifically, let’s talk about your Instagram posts. On any given week, you might be producing one to three posts for your feed. (If you are doing more than that, kudos, you are killing it. Or annoying your followers, only your stats will tell.)

But do you have any general direction for that post other than “Botox has been pretty popular lately, let’s promote that” or “we just got a new medical device, let’s ^✨market^✨ it”? Have you put any effort into figuring out what voice or approach will resonate best with your audience?

Even if the answer to those questions is yes, have you figured out how you can best create regular content for the different segments of your audience? Say the younger crowd interested in fillers or the older crowd interested in surgeries?

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The voice and content that caters to one of those groups is different from the voice and content for the other group. If you had patient personas, you could easily schedule regular content for both of those segments of your business. You still need to find some way to unify those voices, but by working the personas into your social media schedule, you can make sure you aren’t missing out on any opportunities. 

And that’s just for your social media. The same applies for any part of your digital marketing and, get this, even your in-person communications. (Don don don… plays dramatic music.) 

But with predefined personas, you can give yourself somewhat of an edge.

Record scratch.

Alright, let’s pause really fast. I want to be clear here about what I am saying. I am not suggesting that you should treat every patient as though they fall into one of your persona buckets. That’s a recipe for disaster. 

But as you will find out in part two of this series, the research process behind patient personas is incredibly thorough and can absolutely give you some insight into the lives of your patients. Not on an individual level, obviously, but from a general knowing-how-to-relate-to-your-average-patient perspective, definitely.

3. They Personalize Your Advertising Programs

Advertising, at its core, is about tugging at the heartstrings of your audience. Think about every great commercial you’ve ever seen, whether it was a raging success or a complete bust. They all try to find and, well, exploit, a particular emotion.

The Apple 1984 Super Bowl commercial is notorious for the raw emotion it was trying to convey. It promised to break the mold of “Orwellian” tech and the threats presented in the book 1984. It built a story around fearful imagery and a hopeful savior — Apple. 

Apple decided that an important segment (read: persona) of their potential customer base were people who didn’t want to have the same product everyone else had and wanted to avoid becoming a drone. They wanted to be something different, unique, cool. And as ironic as that is from today’s perspective… 

It was a powerful message in 1984. 

Now, in contrast, take the infamous Pepsi and Kendall Jenner commercial, which attempted to borrow imagery from a still active and heated Black Lives Matter movement. Ultimately, the commercial focuses on hostility between protestors and police forces and ends with Kendall Jenner ending that animosity by passing the nearest cop a Pepsi can and a cheap smile. 

The ice-cold pop went from hand to hand, fake condensation dripping — then, everyone cheers and race relations in America were completely solved. 

Except for the fact that they weren’t, people were enraged and appalled, and the commercial was ultimately pulled and is unavailable for viewing in any official capacity. Luckily, in this case, the internet never forgets:

While the botched execution would give the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots a run for its money, the commercial was still trying to do what all great commercials do best: personalize their advertisement to a specific group and make it resonate deeply. 

The concept was there, the execution wasn’t.

The point of all this is that personalization for your personas is everything, and it doesn’t need to be as high stakes as a Super Bowl commercial for it to matter.

You can use your patient personas to:

• Better define your adwords’ target audiences and the content on the ads
• Boost social media content that have are focused on topics that will pull in more of your perfect patient archetype
• Segment your email blasts by persona types to decrease unsubscribes and skyrocket your click through rates
• Identify precisely what treatments are most likely to be cross sold to precisely what patients for more revenue
• Provide additional referral rewards and codes for personas that are more keen on promoting your business to friends and family
• So much more

Maybe you learn through your persona research that the biggest obstacle to having patients in their 20s sign up for treatment is the ability to commit to regular payment for something like injectables. Maybe, then, to beat that obstacle, you develop a treatment subscription service that you advertise on Instagram and TikTok. 

Or perhaps you find that your largest demographic of surgical patients — women in their 40s — are more likely to commit to surgery if they feel educated about the surgical process. Think, then, how effective a web page optimized for surgical education could be as a conversion tool. 

What if one of your personas reveals that your most consistent stream of revenue comes from women in their early 20s who are having fillers and preventative noninvasive treatments, and, as it turns out, they all come on their lunch breaks from the same downtown area. 

This is how precisely you can narrow down your ad targeting: “Women between the ages of 21 and 29 employed in the downtown district of X who are interested in fillers and noninvasive treatments.”

In that ad, you can feature imagery of a woman leaving her workplace and coming straight into your office, then back to work without missing a beat. How well do you think that ad would resonate? How strongly do you think that potential patient would feel heard?

4. They Make Your Resource Allocation More Efficient

Figuring out your advertising budget is really a war of attrition between the results you want to achieve and the dollar amount you are willing to spend. The results you are hoping to achieve are slogging along slowly, sucking the life out of a poorly optimized advertising strategy, while your ad dollars are burning hotter and brighter each day, begging you to invest just a little bit more. 

But it doesn’t need to be that way. You can pull yourself out of that conflict and save both money and time by basing your targeting on your personas. A more focused understanding of your audiences means less shooting from the hip and less time spent on figuring out who the hell to send these ads to means you and your marketing staff might be able to take a full lunch once in a while. 

5. They Improve Your Treatment Outcomes

Gaining a clear understanding of each patient's potential goals, motivations, and concerns prior to meeting with them allows you to make informed recommendations for treatments that align with their desires. You still have to do a lot of the legwork and fill in a lot of gaps when they make it into your office, but the conversation will be a lot more productive if you have a general idea of what someone like that particular patient might be concerned with. 

You can better anticipate their needs, potential challenges and expectations, and strategically educate them to make those concerns less daunting. Plus, when your patients feel seen and heard and cared for, they are more likely to trust you through the post-treatment process (not to mention, leave a positive review). 

It’s All About Your Patients

If patient personas are starting to sound like a really good idea to you, or if you are ready to jump right into getting your patient personas started, then you definitely want to check out Part 2 of this series, where we breakdown the process of developing your own patient personas.