When we talk about healthcare marketing, we’re usually talking about patient acquisition. Hospitals telling consumers to seek care with their organization is a multi-billion dollar industry. However, there is a largely overlooked side of the industry that still occupies the time and attention of healthcare marketers everywhere: B2C marketing to healthcare professionals.
The healthcare industry is one of few that affords options for necessary products and services and leaves the decisions on which products or services to buy to the individual employees.
While B2B marketing to universities, hospitals, and medical groups obviously plays a large role in this space, there is a demand for understanding how to sell directly to doctors, PAs, nurses and nurse practitioners, etc.
Today, I want to discuss one of the fundamental elements of advertising to those healthcare professionals – audience segmentation.
Segmenting Audiences
I currently work in marketing for healthcare Continuing Education (CE), and the classification of our audiences is a daily consideration and evolution for my team. We constantly evaluate where members of our audience fall when considering state-specific requirements, required updates to the field, and through which platforms these professionals prefer to engage with content.
The first step in any campaign targeted toward healthcare professionals is to understand the requirements of the profession, and how those requirements vary from state-to-state. A nurse practitioner in California may have very different continuing education requirements than a nurse practitioner in Texas. Understanding and segmenting your audience based on these professional and geographic differences is the foundation for crafting relevant messaging.
You need to continue this critical analysis of your audience as you develop your campaigns. Sending a generic message like “Calling all California PAs – Renew CE Now!” as a mailbox stuffer to everyone on the coast is a fast way to waste a lot of money. You need to incentivize people not to throw your hard work in the trash, and you need to find a way to capture more information you can use to remarket and to segment your audiences. Instead, initiate lead generation efforts and build up your email list (yes, you can still use direct mail to complete this initiative as well). You can do this by offering a free download or a free webinar on a trending topic.
Beyond professional requirements, the challenge often lies in understanding how to best reach this audience. Some healthcare professionals, for instance, are more responsive to marketing emails, while others might not engage with email content at all. Just like many of us, healthcare professionals are selective about what they open in their inbox. A one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work. You need to identify not only where your audience is, but also how to approach them there.
Targeting the Unresponsive: A Multi-Channel Approach
So you’ve sent some direct mail or run some paid digital ads with prospective targeting and you’ve acquired some leads. You enroll them in your email campaigns and start leveraging your earned media for little to no cost and generating revenue. What’s next? Should you set it and forget it? How sustainable is this effort?
Buried in all of this talk about segmentation is identifying HOW to segment and target healthcare professionals who are less responsive to traditional marketing efforts, such as email. Let’s say I send out a campaign email promoting a new CE course. I’ll closely monitor the open and engagement rates to see who’s responding to my message. Those who open and engage with the email receive more targeted messages through this channel, perhaps with content like course details or a discount offer to encourage them to enroll.
Eventually, open rates will decline and I will hit a point of diminishing returns on my earned channels. This is when segmenting your audience becomes more important than ever.
What about the individuals who don’t open the email at all? I’ve found that it’s often more effective to remove these individuals from our regular email cadence—sometimes even before they opt-out on their own. That’s right. Even though I have their email and I can send them emails all I want for free, I remove them from my marketing cadence. Why? Because they’re not opening, which means they’re not generating revenue.
Instead, I focus on reaching them through alternative channels where they may be more receptive. I create a custom paid digital campaign targeting unresponsive contacts, using their email addresses for first-party data. The content for these campaigns would differ from the email messaging, providing a more compelling reason to engage. Since they won’t just open any marketing email, my messaging needs to reflect a more value-driven approach.
By taking the time to segment these audiences based on their behavior, I can tailor my marketing strategy to engage them where they’re most comfortable and willing to engage. Now, instead of spraying and praying with email, I can improve my email health scores by sending content that people want to read to people who want to read it all while driving revenue on another channel.
Whether it’s through earned or paid campaigns, each channel requires a unique approach depending on the audience’s preferences and habits. By monitoring and adjusting how and where you send content to segments of your audience, you can create a highly efficient marketing funnel.
Conclusion
At the heart of successful healthcare marketing—whether for patient acquisition or targeting healthcare professionals—is the ability to understand and act on the differences within your audience. Careful segmentation allows marketers to craft highly targeted and effective messages that speak directly to the needs, behaviors, and preferences of their audience. In the healthcare space, where both the stakes and the competition are high, strategic audience segmentation is essential to driving results. Whether you’re trying to acquire new patients or engage healthcare professionals, it’s not just about casting the widest net—it’s about casting the right one.