Optimize your medtech marketing strategy with persona profiles

How can you tell a medtech company that knows its audience apart from one that doesn't? Easy: the one that does is still in business.

Sure, that's an oversimplification. Successfully selling medical technology involves navigating a variety of sales, marketing, and operational processes (and at least a little bit of good fortune). But the importance of understanding your intended audience can't be overstated.

From product design and development to sales strategy and marketing, knowing the people involved in the process of buying and using your medical device is key to business success. Creating consumer personas of these prospective individuals can help you turn generic, broad-stroked messaging into highly personalized, impactful engagement campaigns.

What is a consumer persona?

A consumer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal user or buyer, typically built on a foundation of market research and data. An effective persona profile is thorough and "lifelike", including details such as an individual's demographics, goals, pain points, typical behaviors, and preferred communication methods. It may even be worth including lifestyle details like hobbies, values, and living situations.

Consumer personas have a place in every healthcare marketing campaign, but the types of personas needed will differ from industry to industry. A data-driven medtech marketing strategy should leverage a variety of personas, not only for the people directly responsible for making purchasing decisions, but also the end users and others who may influence the buying process.

How to create a persona profile

If you haven't already gotten to know your audience, now is the time. Research the decision-makers, users, and influencers in your market using a combination of market and demographic data, social media analysis, polling, and even one-on-one interviews. Consider using predictive analytics to get an idea of who your buyers might be three, five, or even 10 years in the future. As Sir Francis Bacon said, "Knowledge is power," and in this case, the more you know about your audience, the more powerful your marketing efforts will be.

Your data-driven personas can be as detailed as you'd like, and generally speaking, more detail is better. At minimum, each persona profile should contain the following data points:

Job role

What does this person do for a living? If they're a decision-maker, they may be a C-suite executive or the head of a service line. Your users and influencers could be nurses, surgeons, pharmacy technicians, or patients (no, "patient" isn't a job, but it'll do for your purposes).

Manager

Who does this person report to? A CTO may report to a company president or an advisory board, for example. Understanding to whom this individual is beholden will help you establish their motivations and limitations in the buying process.

Initiatives/Responsibilities

What does this person's role entail? Are they focused on improving patient outcomes or ensuring supply chain continuity? Are they responsible for transitioning a facility to "green" operations or finding alternative sources for a hospital formulary? Get detailed here; this information goes hand-in-hand with the challenges they face, and thus informs their perceived value of your product.

Challenges/Pain points

What's keeping this person up at night (or causing them grief during the workday)? For a nurse or administrative worker, this could be real, physical pain, caused by repetitive motion tasks. For a doctor or executive, it might involve patient satisfaction and safety, concern over operational costs, or accurate usage reporting. Patients are most likely to be worried about the cost of treatment and the ease of their recovery.

Role in buying process

Is this person a decision-maker, a user, or an influencer? They might belong to multiple categories: A patient or a physician, for example, may be both users and influencers.

Key information sources

Where does this person go to get information? Medical professionals are likely to seek information from medical societies, journals, or government sources. A business executive could keep up with trade publications and conferences, while a patient is likely to simply use a search engine or ask their doctor directly.

Communication preferences

Through which channels is this person most likely to engage with information from your company? If you're building an omnichannel marketing strategy, this is where you'll be pushing your messaging. Depending on the person's age, level of tech savvy, and professional role, this could be email, LinkedIn or other social networks, webinars, or even in-person meetings and workshops during conferences.

Additional details to consider

While the above data points are the "must-haves" for a useful consumer persona profile, there are some "nice-to-haves" that can help you flesh out a persona and understand your audience even further, including:

• Age
• Education
• Workplace setting
• Personal goals
• Marital status/family structure
• Income level (especially useful if you're selling direct to consumer)

Build a smarter medtech marketing strategy with healthcare commercial intelligence

A detailed and meticulously crafted persona can help medtech developers better understand the decision-makers, influencers, and users at the center of the buying process, making it easier to tailor marketing and sales efforts that resonate with the consumers who matter most.

But it's not enough to hypothesize about these characteristics; your persona profiles should be shaped by real-world data. Definitive Healthcare's commercial intelligence solutions deliver critical consumer and clinical data points to help you align your messaging with your audience's needs and expectations-and maximize your ROMI.

Want to see how it works? Sign up for a free trial today.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.