Want to Improve Your Healthcare Marketing? Start with Audience Analysis

Healthcare marketing can be volatile and unpredictable. A well-written ebook promoted via blog and social media posts may be highly successful for one health tech company but flop for another. SEO could be a core driver of growth for one practice, while another converts most of their patients from their email list. Yet one universal truth applies to all healthcare marketing: if you speak to everyone, you speak to no one. To follow this rule, your company needs a robust strategy to analyze your audience and tailor your messaging. Continue reading for five easy yet effective tips for stronger audience analysis.

What is Audience Analysis?

Audience analysis is the process of dissecting who your audience is, why they are searching for a specific topic, and why that topic matters to them. When done right, a reader feels like the writer knows them and understands the problems they face, building trust and likeability.

For healthcare marketing, content written with an audience in mind often answers readers’ questions and guides their journey as a patient or clinician. It resonates with the reader and serves their search intent. But before you can write this great content, you first need to conduct audience analysis.

Why Audience Analysis Matters in Healthcare Marketing

No matter what industry you’re writing in, audience analysis can help:

• Keep the audience engaged
• Resonate with the reader
• Build brand trust and credibility
• Increase the likelihood of readers taking action
• Ensure content is relevant to your ideal audience
• Attract the right people, not everyone

Within healthcare specifically, there’s also an understandability component. Healthcare is a nuanced field and if you write with incorrect assumptions about how much an audience already knows, readers will walk away confused or feeling as if you talked down to them.

When this happens, the content is no longer useful to the reader and could lead to poor decisions regarding their health or their patients’ care. Audience analysis isn’t just about converting more leads or keeping readers on your website longer; it’s a way to ensure your content conveys accurate and empowering information.

5 Tips for Better Audience Analysis

1) Clarify Your Audience

The first piece of advice is essential across all industries, not just healthcare: clarify who your audience is. Tiffany Smith, the editorial director at AKSA, has spent over 20 years in content marketing. One piece of advice that stood out to her from those 20 years is to write for your audience.

Smith explains, “If you’re writing for a healthcare client, is the audience patients, providers, payers, clinicians, pharma, admin, academics, policymakers, or some combination? Each persona has a different lens on the tangled mess that is the American healthcare system.”

She also recommends ensuring an article is uniquely situated in healthcare. “With every pitch I receive or piece of content I edit, I ask one question: Is this uniquely healthcare? With minor edits, could it easily be changed to fintech, manufacturing, entertainment, or another area? If so, something needs to change,” Smith says, “Every piece I oversee shows that we are experts in our healthcare niche and builds trust with our audience.”

2) Consider Search Intent

Identifying your audience is only the tip of the iceberg. You also need to understand why that audience is searching for the content’s topic (a.k.a. their search intent).

“Editorial priorities should take search intent and target audience personas into consideration, or they aren't going to be received well,” explains Rachel Billstein, the digital marketing specialist at Monarch Healthcare Management. She adds that while readers aren’t ranking a blog for keywords like a search does, they are usually reading with a goal in mind.

Billstein adds that there are ways to satisfy search intent beyond incorporating keywords. Some of her favorites include:

Answering the specific questions your ideal audience has

Cover topics that your audience cares about

Use language your reader will use

Note: An effective way to answer questions -– and another way to rank in search — is to add a FAQ to the end of your blog posts. I explained how to do this in a recent LinkedIn carousel.

3) Write for the Target Audience

Once you’ve clarified your target audience and their search intent, keep both top of mind when drafting. Heidi Wachter, a freelance health/climate writer and editor, explains how she would cover the same topic for two different audiences.

“If a story is about a study and the target audience is autoimmune disease specialists or researchers, I would share some of the study's data points in the beginning as a hook to grab their attention,” says Wachter. From there, she’d go in-depth about details on the study’s design and impacts for clinicians.

“If the same study story were intended for people living with autoimmune diseases,” Wachter continues, “I'd consider leading with a narrative or anecdote about how a patient or multiple patients were or could be impacted by the study results. Anecdotes help generate an emotional hook that connects others through shared experiences. Since many individuals with chronic illness often feel like they're alone, connecting with someone else's health journey is important to them.”

4) Use Relevant Examples

Healthcare marketin can speak to various audiences who approach topics with different degrees of familiarity and education. To ensure an article is as useful as possible to your audience, use examples relevant to their lives.

If writing about eczema for physicians, examples of how other clinicians treat eczema may be useful. An article about eczema for those with the condition may be more effective if examples are centered on patients who successfully manage flare-ups.

Demographic data, such as the ideal audience’s age or geographic location, should also influence how you write about a topic, especially for more general audiences. An article on dental health with examples from TikTok may work for a GenZ and millennial audience, but it’s less likely to resonate with an older audience or one who doesn't spend as much time on social media.

5) Ensure Everyone on Your Team is On Board

Like many content considerations, you want to make sure anyone who works on your content marketing is aware of your ideal audience(s) and your brand voice. A clear style guide is often the most effective way to keep everyone in the loop. Writing a small section in the article brief on the reader's intent can’t hurt either.

If you’re a member of a healthcare marketing team who doesn’t shape brand voice, such as a freelance writer, it’s important to carefully read the style guide and article brief. Lisa Samalonis, medical writer and editor, explains, “Submitting accurately written and carefully proofed work that aligns with the publication’s style is the best way to win repeat assignments and become an assigning editor’s go-to writer.”