The Importance of Reaching Your Target Audience

When creating a marketing campaign, you may have heard many times that the focus of your strategy should be your target audience. But how do you identify them, and what are the steps to take to reach them?

With a goal to generate leads and increase sales, it seems logical for many healthcare businesses to sell to as many customers as they want.

Take these words from Seth Godin: “Everyone is not your customer.”

Trying to sell to everybody is an approach that will break the bank and will give you little to no return.

So, how do you ensure that you get a better return on investment? Is it possible to develop an effective marketing strategy while saving time and money?

The key is getting to know your target audience. It sounds exclusive but that doesn’t mean that you are limiting the majority of the people to recognize your healthcare products and services. Tailoring your message to the right group of people helps you maximize your spending and resources.

What is a Target Audience?

A target audience is a group of people you want to reach with your content and social media channels. These people are most likely to get interested in your service offerings or healthcare products.

Understanding your target audience just doesn’t stop right there. Keep in mind that it’s a process, a journey. You have to constantly revisit your brand performance so you can reassess and fine-tune your strategy when needed and allow you to keep up with the fast-changing market.

Let’s put it this way: customers want a brand that understands their challenges and offers solutions for their health problems. Targeting the right audience shows that you understand them as a person, allowing you to deliver a better customer experience.

How to Identify Your Target Audience?

The better you understand your market, the more you’ll be able to focus your marketing budget and messaging to potential leads and convert them into paying customers. You need detailed information about who your target audience is so you can determine the applicable marketing strategies to reach them.

Keep reading as we further discuss some ways that you can reach your target audience.

1. Compile data from your social media platforms

While people are more likely to discuss medical trends online, other groups are just as likely to be searching for information related to their health issues.

A simple way to start is by conducting social media research and narrowing your focus. Use the following data points to gather your audience information. You can grab some of these details from the social media platforms such as Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights and LinkedIn Analytics Tool.

• Age
• Location – include the time zone to identify the hours that your audience is live and learn when you should post your content that will enable them to engage with you and increase your brand’s visibility
• Language – don’t assume that your audience is speaking the same language where their current physical location is
• Spending patterns – will they be able to meet the price category of your products or services? What financial barriers may they face when purchasing your offers and how can you help overcome them?
• Interests – what do they like to do? what other businesses do they interact with?
• Challenges – what pain points are they dealing with that you can address?
• Status or stage in life – are they students? Parents? Senior citizens?

For B2B healthcare companies, it is important also to include the following information:

• Size of business – are you targeting start-ups or large companies?
• Level of the person in the company who is responsible for making buying decisions – CEO? General Manager?

2. Find out what social media platforms your target audience use.

We recommend you use an app like Metricool to get detailed insights into each of the social media platforms that your audience is using. It also includes engagement data to let you see what posts, formats, and channels have worked well for them and even your competitor’s performance and strategy!

Check out 5 more tools for analyzing your social media interactions and related traffic sources that will also help you track your target audience.

3. Understand how helpful could your product or service be to your audience

Think about the benefits of your products, services, or practice to your target patients or customers.

• What pain points can you address?
• What health goals can your offerings meet?
• Does your line of business solve or answer their inquiries?
• What kind of content do they tend to engage with?
• Where are your audiences at in their buying journey? Are they researching to get health information, looking for reviews, or finding a practitioner in their nearest location?

How to Reach Your Target Audience

Now that you have identified your target audience, it’s time to reach and connect with them using the following tips:

1. Ad targeting

This strategy is very helpful if you are trying to reach multiple audiences. It allows you to deliver your campaign using the right platform, content and messaging that is most relevant to them. You also have to make sure that the language and visuals you use appeal to exactly the demographics that you are targeting. Two of the most common tools to create such ads are Facebook Ads and Google Ads. Want to learn the difference between the two and know which is effective to use for your industry? Learn more here!

2. Test paid and organic content

We suggest you run monthly analytics for you to adjust both your organic and paid content strategy when needed. Having clear insights on your brand performance helps you make some adjustments on the types of content you deliver, captions, and visuals and see what works well.

3. Utilize hashtags on social media

This strategy could be useful if you are using social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. Using industry-specific hashtags on your social media content can help you expand your reach. For example, you have a travel nursing agency and want to target travel nurses. You should use hashtags such as #travelnurses, #travelnurse, or #travelnursing instead of #nursing or #travel only. This will help you reach travel nurses who might want to find jobs in the field of travel nursing.

4. Create relevant and informative content.

The value of creating relevant content is undeniably useful when reaching your target audience. Aside from sharing topics that are of interest to your readers, Google also loves fresh and relevant content! Content marketing plays a vital role in ranking in the first pages of search engines to grab your audiences’ attention easily. Write RN has you covered if you need content backed by science and credible research written by nursing professionals with various expertise and experiences.

If you are having trouble reaching your target audience or you don’t have the luxury of time to keep an eye on each of the processes, our team is surely ready to help! We at Write RN create content that delivers your brand message, promotes your products and services and increases conversion. From social media management to content development, we got all the marketing strategies you need to target the right audience and eventually, grow your healthcare business.