People readily share massive amounts of information about who they are online, such as their location, age, gender, etc. We often see customers refine their campaign material when they find out even the most basic demographic information about their audience – their age, gender, languages. Brands and organizations can even look into more sophisticated analytics, like interests and affinities, in order to help target their message, approach and channels or engagement. The most sophisticated healthcare marketing organizations take advantage of this data by using it to segment their audiences.
In other words, these healthcare marketing professionals understand that social data is trying to tell them everything that they need to know about their audience which allows for audience segmentation. Once the audience is segmented, healthcare marketers can then create unique and strategically tailored messaging and outreach, using the social data to generate better marketing campaigns that will yield better results. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that one of the most helpful things that a healthcare marketing professional can do with social data is segment their audience to create the most powerful content and make sure that it gets into the hands of the right audience.
In order to help illustrate the importance of this, below is a list of a few examples of ways that healthcare marketing professionals can segment their audience, and why it will help them.
Age
The senior market is the largest driver of pharma revenue, which is why it is crucial for the healthcare industry to know what seniors are saying online about their drugs, and to provide proper messaging to that audience. Targeted the senior market will also allow for proactive customer service to seniors who don’t know where to go to get the answers to all of their questions about the medicine they are taking.
Gender
While there are some obvious benefits for healthcare marketing organizations to target audiences by gender, for example, some medications are gender-specific. However, there are also some more subtle advantages, for example, monitoring and understanding what side-effects are happening and how different medications affect different genders. It’s also a great way to find candidates for clinical trials.
Interests
A person’s interests are obviously an important part of what will resonate with them, however, this goes even further than simply what somebody likes and dislikes. Healthcare marketing folks can use interests to determine what kind of imagery resonates with their core audience of sufferers, and interests can even be used to find a celebrity spokesperson that appeals to the target.
Channel
To put it simply, healthcare marketing professionals need to spend a lot of money to advertise and reach their audience, so they need to know where their audience is to make sure that the money is being spent wisely.
Another great benefit is for market research, as proper Social Listening can help healthcare marketing organizations find where sufferers and patients are posting about their afflictions, for example, many turn to blogs and forums where they have the benefit of benefit of anonymity. This can help healthcare marketers understand more about how their audience feels, and can even help them find influencers that can help advocate for their brand.
Location
Different countries have different laws and regulations, which is why segmenting your audience is more important in healthcare marketing organizations than for almost anyone else. Not to mention, this can also help find “disease clusters,” hot spots where certain pharmaceutical products can have the most impact.
If you want to know more about how Social Listening can help you segment your audience to create stronger, more strategic and insightful healthcare marketing campaigns, check out our eBook about using Social Listening in the pharma industry.
