What are your healthcare brand’s highest priorities for the upcoming year? Do you have specific audience segments that you want to reach? What do they care about most? And how will you use those priorities to earn their attention and engagement?You may not be able to answer these questions quite yet – especially if your team is in the early stages of annual brand planning. But by the end of this essential exercise, your entire team should have clearly defined audience segments and targeting strategies, all based on validated insights you’ve gathered about your audience.

Start with Fresh Insights, Not Fixed Audience Segments or Personas

As we touched on in a previous post on brand planning, not all brand plans are created equal. Although brand planning helps align cross-functional teams around a common approach or idea, all that effort provides little value if the subsequent brand positioning, messaging, content, and sales tactics don’t resonate with your audience.Before you can develop targeted messages or a media plan, your team needs a reliable view of what your ideal customers value. That always starts with timely, validated insights.The healthcare industry is constantly changing, especially as current events put pressure on companies to transform, adopting new technology and ways of working. According to Gartner, the healthcare organizations whose brand plans and digital strategies take these shifts into account are significantly better positioned to lead in this highly competitive market.

Using Actionable Insights to Define Precise, Testable Audience Segments

Healthcare brand managers need to ensure their audience segments reflect current attitudes and pain points. Your organization may have personas that already seem effective, but annual brand planning is an opportunity to move past potentially outdated assumptions to truly understand the customer’s perspective.Insight-led audience strategy means defining segments based on more than surface-level demographics like age, gender, race, or occupation. Especially in healthcare, these factors often won’t tell you the whole story – that’s true for both healthcare providers and patients.As Brand Plan Rx delves into, the insights underpinning your audience strategy should uncover the why behind customers’ behavior. Taking this approach can help your organization:

Achieving Audience-centric Marketing

Whoever your primary audience is, understanding your audience’s motivations is critical for long-term success. Healthcare organizations that lack actionable insights to guide their subsequent marketing strategy will be hard-pressed to differentiate their brand and its offerings.At OpenHuddle, we recommend tailoring your brand plan to specific audiences so your marketing strategy speaks to their unique challenges and motivations.Your success in the coming year depends on how you answer our initial question: what are your healthcare brand’s highest priorities when it comes to audience segmentation? OpenHuddle can help you apply insights to better engage your target audience.

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