What Is A Patient Persona & How Can It Help Me Increase Patient Acquisition?

A patient persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal patient type based upon real data about existing similar patients. Information frequently included within a patient persona includes behavior patterns, motivations, goals and demographics. The strongest personas typically include market data as well.

The Purpose of Patient Personas

Developing patient personas will help you understand your prospective customers better and it will actually make creating content for your website, blog, and social media pages even easier. Why? Because once you’ve identified your top personas, you’ll be creating content that speaks directly to that patient persona — not about yourself, your practice or you program.

2 Content Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

A few common content mistakes that people make are whether this is on their website pages, blog content or in videos are:

1.) Writing Content About Yourself or Your Services

There is a time and place for this content, and it’s limited to your About Us page — with that being said, you can always take information about you and translate that into how your skills/qualifications/practice/program helps your target patient personas.

If you catch yourself writing about yourself or your service, stop and see how you can reframe that into how it helps your ideal patient persona instead.

2.) Not Using Multiple Forms of Content

Images today are simply not enough, and further to that point, if you’re using stock photos on your website you should take some time to invest in photographs of your facility instead. Why? Because it is much more personal and will give prospective patients a sense of what your facility is like and who the people are that work there — it’s well worth the investment. Infographics can be helpful as well. Free softwares like Canva.com can make creating infographics and adding personalization to your photos simple and beautiful.

Back to multiple forms of content, video is increasingly becoming more important and will absolutely differentiate you from the practice or program down the street that’s not using it. If pictures are worth 1000 words… videos are worth… a lot more! If you can create your own videos, that’s fantastic and preferred. If not, perhaps there are videos you can embed from YouTube.

Developing Patient Personas

Think about who your ideal clients are and pick your top three. Then come up with some creative names for them such as Bipolar Becky or Alcoholic Adam. Next, write some bullets about your target patient persona is in terms of who they are, what their goals are, why they need help and how you can help them. This can be as simple as creating a bulleted list.

If you want to get more detailed, here are 20 Questions To Ask When Creating Buyer Personas from HubSpot. Note: The HubSpot term for personas is “Buyer Persona” and another term often used is “Avatar” — regardless of the terminology used, the purpose and process is similar. HubSpot also has templates that can be dowloaded to help with this process. Just keep in mind they’re targeting business people and they’re not in the healthcare space, so these questions won’t be completely on target with your needs.

Applying Patient Personas To Content Marketing

Now that you have a sense of who your ideal patients are, you can begin to create content specifically for them on your website, blog, and/or social media posts.

If your specialty is treating female patients with Bipolar Disorder, then you’ll want to create content specific to that Patient Persona — Bipolar Becky and Alcoholic Adam.

With what you know about Becky and Adam, you can now begin creating content that speaks directly to that patient persona. Here are some topic ideas:

• What Is Bipolar Disorder?
• 3 Misunderstandings About Bipolar Disorder
• 10 Warning Signs You May Be an Alcoholic
• So, I’m An Alcoholic — Now What?

With patient personas in mind, review the information and blog content that’s already on your website and determine if it is speaking in general terms or to your top personas. Adjust as needed.

The post What Is A Patient Persona? appeared first on Behavioral Health 360º.