For Effective Marketing, Define Your Target Customers and Markets

Target Customers and Markets

Before developing specific marketing initiatives, it is important to define your customer segments because each has their own needs and wants. It is more than just “patients” or “referring physicians”. It could be existing patients, new patients, referring physicians, referral coordinators, referring physician practice front office staffs, the hospital system, Emergency Room physicians, Hospitalists, etc.

Once you have defined your customer segments, it is important to create a value proposition for each entity. In other words, how will your customers benefit by doing business with you? For example, patients may benefit because experience translates into results and your practice has done more lung cancer surgeries than any other practice in the state. Referring physicians might benefit because they know your practice provides quality care with exceptional service so they feel confident that they are not going to hear any complaints from their patients. The referral coordinator may benefit because you simplify the scheduling process through a back office hotline. In other words, every “customer” has different needs and understanding them will allow you to tailor your key messages to satisfy their needs.

In addition to defining your customers, to be efficient with your marketing dollars it is also important to define your target markets in terms of geographic location and patient demographics such as age, marital status and household income. As an example as to where this would be useful, many practices have introduced cash-based screening services as a way to grow ancillary volumes and to capture new patients. Because these screening services are not covered by insurance, it is important to determine the relative affluence of the market because those markets with higher household incomes will most likely have more discretionary dollars. For example:

The ________ market has the largest population within ten miles of the office of any of our locations (706K) and the largest number of households within ten miles of the office of any of our locations (306K). Additionally it has the highest average household income of any of our markets ($102K) with 33% of the households having an average annual income greater than $100K. The size of the market provides the greatest upside opportunity for the practice to secure new patients and the affluence of the market would indicate the likely viability for cash-based screening initiatives.

Demographic information by zip code can be found online, through your local Chamber of Commerce or can be purchased if the specifications of your search requires more detail.

The more clearly you define your customer segments and target markets, the better able you will be to customize your marketing strategies and tactics.