As marketers, we are always trying to understand our audience – who are they? What drives them? We try to anticipate questions that they’ll have and how they will react to our messaging. But as with any group of people, our audiences are not monoliths. Our customers have diverse needs, perspectives, and challenges. Defining specific personas can help clarify your audience and allow you to focus your marketing efforts. While personas are not new for marketers, everyone approaches building personas differently.
Some marketers develop personas based on a fictionalized individual consumer. A persona could be a board-certified neurologist in the Southeast or Kathy Smith, MD, a cardiologist in Manhattan who wakes up every morning at 5:30 for a run before dropping her two kids off at school and heading into her private practice. The level of specificity is up to you, but the key is to visualize your customer, their goals, and their pain points to address them thoroughly with your marketing strategy.
Another strategy for developing personas is focusing on a consumer segment that has specific behavioral patterns. Consider how each segment of your audience consumes content and makes decisions, then organize them based on their shared characteristics. While this method might not get as granular as an identity persona, it provides a valuable framework to break down your audience into groups of like-minded individuals who are seeking similar content. Regardless of which method you choose, personas will deepen your understanding of your consumer, which only serves to strengthen your messaging, content, and targeting.
At Doximity, we use personas to segment physicians into cohorts based on over 47B data points so that our partners can connect with them on a deeper level by developing content that speaks directly to their target audience. Consider Dr. Smith. Like many physicians, she is incredibly busy, not only in her practice but her daily life. A key pain point for her is getting relevant and trusted field-specific updates to stay informed of developments in preventive cardiovascular healthcare since she cares deeply for her patients but doesn’t have time to sift through thousands of articles a week. We would call Dr. Smith an “Independent” persona. We know that patient experience and care coordination are essential to physicians who own their own practices. This knowledge of our physicians allows us to target Independents with highly relevant stories, resulting in a more valuable experience for Dr. Smith and higher engagement rates for our partners on their sponsored content.
Read more about how Doximity uses personas to support our healthcare partners’ success in reaching physicians here.