Defining Your Ideal Hair Restoration Patient for Your Marketing Agency
Do you know your ideal patient? Knowing the answer to this question is incredibly important to your hair restoration business.
Marketing best practices recommend targeting your archetypal patient. If you do not know your ideal patient, then your marketing efforts are not directed. In my history of coaching business owners I have seen first-hand how many practice owners did not understand the ideal hair restoration patient they were targeting. This creates an incredibly inefficient marketing and business strategy that costs you time and money because your marketing message is unclear and directed toward people who will never buy a procedure. It also creates confusion for the customers who are your ideal patients, and when customers are confused, they leave.
By understanding and defining your ideal patient, your message will become clear, and you will attract the right hair loss patients who need your services while also spending less money on those who do not. Now let’s look at what is an ideal patient, a patient persona, and how to create a patient persona with an example included.
What Is an Ideal Patient?
Your ideal patient in hair restoration is the individual who has a problem you are able to solve. I like to explain this with the analogy of a movie.
In the plot of a movie, you have a main character of the story. This character has a problem and must go on a quest or journey to discover the solution to the problem. Along the way they meet new people or ideas and have conflicts or experiences that either draw them closer to the solution or farther away.
Donald Miller, a marketing and business author I follow, wrote the following in his book Building a Story Brand, “Every story is about a character who wants something and has to overcome conflict to get it.”
Your hair restoration business is the solution in the story. Your ideal patient is the character. All the conflicts and experiences of everyday life are the plot and affect what the ideal patient hears by either drawing them closer or further away from your solution. Define your ideal patient or character to clarify the message so they will listen.
What Is a Patient Persona?
A patient persona is a hypothetical person with the characteristics, demographics, and attributes that may exist in the patients you want to serve. If you give your patient persona a name, assign attributes, place them in respective demographics, and give them hopes, fears, dreams, and goals, what would the combination of this look like? Detail is key, and creating more than one is dependent on the differences between who you can treat.
Why Is a Patient Persona Important?
Marketing can be expensive, and you could be spending all your money in the wrong places, wasting valuable resources without the results. So, the patient persona is beneficial to assist you in identifying and marketing in the correct channels to those who will need their hair restored.
Having a patient persona will also simplify the communication between you and your marketing team when they ask, “what is your target market?” so services can be more efficient and better directed toward your hair restoration goals. Remember earlier how I said that clarity is key? Behind any well-known brand is a clear message. The patient persona will give you the road map to clarify your message.
How Do You Create a Patient Persona?
The sample questions below can start the process of creating your hair restoration patient persona. Answer the questions in as much detail as possible:
- What is your hair restoration patient persona’s character name?
- What are their demographics? (Gender identity, annual income, education level, etc.)
- What is their background?
- What are some aspects to their identity?
- What are their hair goals?
- What are some of their common objections?
- What do they want?
- External problems, how is this affecting their looks?
- Internal problems, how is the hair loss making them feel?
- (Please note: This is the sweet spot for customer buying habits. Most businesses sell to external problems. However, if you can clearly define and market to the internal problems of those suffering from hair loss, you will turn more bystanders into scheduled procedures.)
- Who do they want to become?
See Example:
How to Utilize Your Patient Persona Once You Create It?
A well-done and thorough patient persona will be the guide to knowing where and how to market. That makes your marketing more efficient and cost-effective.
Perhaps one aspect of your patient persona is that they listen to a lot of webinars. Now you know that webinars are key to your marketing strategy. Perhaps they watch a lot of TV or listen to sports radio. Do you see where I am going?
A good marketing team can give you these recommendations based on their market research when they receive your patient personas. And since you did several, determined by your business needs, you are now equipped with a robust set of deliverables for them when they ask you, “who is your target market?.” Remember clarity is key, and your next hair restoration patient will buy from you when they see that your solution solves their problem.
In the best interest of your hair restoration business,
Kari Collins
