Identifying your target market isn’t always as simple as it sounds, particularly in medical marketing, with a variety of target market segments. Segments are ways to group your target audience. Think of gender, age, location, illness, or injury. Don’t forget to consider your favorite patients. How could you find more people like them? Is there some commonality that links the patients with conditions you treat well? Identifying your target market makes it easier to create marketing that will resonate with your current or potential patients.
Marketing to your various niches can be a powerful way of getting your message out to specific categories of patients. If you have strategic marketing resources, a targeted, niche marketing approach could put your practice into a different league.
Why? Because this approach can “strike a chord” and tell an interesting story about why you’re the best medical practice around.
What is Medical Niche Marketing?
Your patients are all different. Some seek preventive care, others need chronic condition management, while a third group might come only when they are acutely ill. Some have families and others don’t. Each of these groups is likely to represent a different niche market. Recognizing their differences enables you to tailor your medical practice marketing to the largest part of your client base. You can then target them more closely, make your messaging more relevant, and become an authority to the niche.
Identify Niche Groups
First off, you need to identify the major niche groups serviced by your medical practice marketing. Focus on specific areas of health care to identify niches, but for the average family practice, it can be harder. Go through your past year’s records and categorize patients according to commonalities, from age through illnesses, frequency of visits, or profit.
Examples of categorization could include standard medical groupings such as gynecology and obstetrics, oncology, or pediatrics. You could also drill down more to list categories such as pregnancy, skin cancer, thyroid problems, or weight management.
Compare these categories to make sure they generate enough revenue to warrant marketing activities. Spending time or money to market to a category that is too small may not help your practice.
Develop a Niche Marketing Strategy
For each niche group, find out what is important to them and focus your strategy on providing that. For example:
- Families with young children will relate to medical practice marketing aimed at primary childcare, early childhood vaccinations, nutrition, and children’s illnesses.
- Women in their 40s may have an interest in health maintenance during menopause.
- Men in their 50s and older may worry about erectile dysfunction and prostate check-ups.