5 Distinct Target Audiences Your Concierge Practice’s Marketing Should Reach
Whether your business is selling Schooner Tuna (“The tuna with a heart”) or a concierge medicine service, marketing is a must.
Most concierge physicians know they need to engage in some form of marketing to attract new patients to their practices.
This is absolutely true, but it’s also true that marketing impacts other audiences that aren’t quite as obvious as prospective patients. You’re probably already aware of several, but others may be flying under the radar.
In this post, we’ll focus on five major healthcare target audiences for your marketing, why they’re important, and how to effectively reach them.
Most concierge physicians know they need to engage in some form of marketing to attract new patients to their practices.
This is absolutely true, but it’s also true that marketing impacts other audiences that aren’t quite as obvious as prospective patients. You’re probably already aware of several, but others may be flying under the radar.
In this post, we’ll focus on five major healthcare target audiences for your marketing, why they’re important, and how to effectively reach them.
What Kinds of Marketing Are We Talking About?
Marketing is everything you put out into the world that represents your brand and grows your business. This includes any channel to the public, such as:
Social Posts
This includes posts to platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., with content like:
- Public service announcements.
- Quick tips.
- Friendly reminders.
Content Marketing
Content marketing usually involves posts on your practice’s own blog, sharing on topics such as:
- Health education.
- Preventative medicine.
- News and updates.
Emails
Email marketing can involve a variety of content, depending on the target audience. Some common email material includes:
- Links back to blog content or a new website.
- Community event announcements.
- Walk with a doc.
- Meet and greet.
Website Content
Your website content is like a digital storefront for your practice. It gives visitors a feel for your brand, your values, and your offerings, conveyed through your:
- Homepage.
- About page.
- Philosophy or Our Practice page.
- Member Benefits page.
- Site design.
Paid Advertising
To reach some of your target audiences, you may choose to market through certain paid channels, such as:
- Bilboards.
- Print ads.
- Digital ads.
Market for the Big Five
For the most part, physicians — and all entrepreneurs — see marketing as a tool for attracting new business. While this is certainly a huge function of marketing, prospective patients are only one of the major healthcare target audiences for private medical practices.
The truth is, many different audiences see and experience your marketing materials, interpreting them from different angles and through different lenses. By expanding your awareness to additional healthcare target audiences, you can be very intentional with your messaging and anticipate those different perspectives. Then you can more effectively reach each audience with material that speaks to them specifically.
Below are the five healthcare target audiences your marketing already reaches, and how it affects them. The first three may seem obvious, but we’ll discuss why they’re important and the top ways to reach them.
The last two may not be so obvious, and you may not have considered them as healthcare target audiences for your marketing before.
Current Members
Your current members already pay for access to your service, believe in your practice, and have a relationship with you. Marketing to this healthcare target audience can help nurture and maintain that relationship.
Consider a traditional fee-for-service practice. Barring appointment reminders, they don’t contact patients about anything. Ever.
But in the concierge model, you’re developing a relationship with your patients, and you’re providing them value far beyond what the fee-for-service model could ever dream of. One way to do this is through your marketing.
You might post on social media in spring to remind members to wear sunscreen, or in October to let them know about a breast cancer screening day. Social posts can also inform members about promotional and community events you’re putting on. A blog or podcast can educate them on specific health topics or about your practice philosophy and methods.
This audience has already provided you with their contact information and placed trust in your practice. You have a much higher level of access and freedom with them than with almost any other group. Besides blog posts and social media, you can use mailers, email, and even tailored resources in the office to directly appeal to them.
Marketing with current members in mind allows you to foster your relationship with them, stay present in their lives, and provide incredible value even when you’re not face to face.
Waitlisters
Waitlisters are people who want to pay for your services, but who have to wait until you have the capacity to take them on. The purpose of marketing to this healthcare target audience is to keep them warm, to let them know you’re thinking about them, and to remind them why they’re waiting for your practice over others.
Rather than letting your waitlist languish, you can instead nurture their excitement and anticipation about joining your practice. Then, when the waiting period is over, they won’t have signed up with another practice or need to be reminded who you are.
You won’t have to convince them of your worth because they’ve gotten a steady stream of value from you over the past several months. You’ve stayed top-of-mind, and they’re ready for your call.
One particularly useful marketing tool to reach your waitlist audience is an email sequence crafted just for them. From the time they sign up for the waitlist until the time they join your practice, you can keep their interest and provide value through emails about your practice philosophy, benefits, physicians, and more.
Prospective Members
The most obvious healthcare target audience — prospective members — are the folks who probably don’t know you exist yet. You don’t have their contact information, and they haven’t subscribed to your blog.
These are the people you want to join your practice — the target patient in the target niche. Reaching this audience involves a more proactive approach.
You have to find a way to put yourself on their radar, introduce them to your brand, show them why they need a concierge physician, and why that physician should be you. Your messaging creates awareness of the benefits of concierge medicine over fee-for-service, including the convenience, quality of care, and physician-patient relationship.
The marketing tools you use will depend on what the best ways to reach your target niche are. Are they young professionals moving into the new high-rise building next to you? Then you might want to invest in attractive signage, targeted mailers, or a billboard. Or maybe you can best reach your niche through targeted Facebook ads or a TV spot.
Your social media and website content will also serve as marketing to this audience, whether they find you through advertising or on Google. Search engine optimization for your website and blog posts is an especially important tool for helping new patients find you.
Prospective Physicians and Team
One healthcare target audience that can get overlooked is prospective physicians and team members. You want (and need) these people to join your team as your next new hires so you can grow your practice, increase your capacity, and decrease waitlist times. But hiring new physicians — and new staff — from scratch can take a lot of time.
Marketing with this audience in mind can cut this time down.
You can reach this target audience both directly and indirectly. Social media provides a great forum for directly mentioning job openings, and you can also use paid advertising on platforms like LinkedIn to target certain groups — like lists of private physicians — with job postings.
Other direct avenues include professional industry publications and conferences.
Indirectly, though, your website, blog posts, and other public-facing marketing materials also provide opportunities to reach this audience. You may not speak to them directly, but your content reflects the culture of your practice and the caliber of your people. Prospective team members see how you operate, what your philosophy is, and how rewarding a job with you would be.
Your marketing toward this audience doesn’t feel false or salesy because it isn’t. They’re simply seeing how you communicate with the public about what you do. When you do this well, it resonates with the kind of physician, nurse practitioner, or administrative staff you want to bring into your practice.
Search engine optimization can help here as well, allowing this target audience to find you when searching for potential concierge employers in your area.
Existing Team
Possibly the most overlooked healthcare target audience is a practice’s existing team. This includes all levels of team members, from owners to shift workers.
Marketing for this group can be both direct and indirect as well.
Indirectly, this audience sees all your marketing to other audiences, which can help maintain consistency in your practice’s messaging.
For example, if your team feels a disconnect between what you promise the public and what the office actually delivers, it can create a sense of discouragement or resentment. But if they see that what you promise is what they actually carry out on a daily basis, it fosters a sense of pride in their work.
Marketing to this audience can both directly and indirectly ensure that everyone on your team is aware of everything you offer and the language you use to talk about it. Indirectly, they absorb your language through blog posts, office materials, and even general office discussion. Directly, you might educate, encourage, or otherwise engage them through marketing just for them: staff meetings, emails, flyers, and more.
There’s no other audience to which you have greater access than your existing team. The opportunities for reaching them are endless, and it’s imperative to be intentional about the marketing messages they get from you.
Target Your Top Five
Marketing isn’t just about attracting new business, though it is that. It’s carefully crafting the image of your practice for each healthcare target audience that interacts with your messaging.
In healthcare and, more specifically, in concierge medicine, you have your current, waiting, and prospective patients, and also your current and prospective team members. Keeping each of these audiences in mind and targeting your marketing to them will expand the effectiveness and broaden the reach of your practices’ messaging.
Dr. Scott Pope serves as the Chief Growth Officer at In Scope Ventures, a growth consulting firm focused on early stage healthcare companies. Scott is passionate about healthcare entrepreneurship and has been involved in various advocacy efforts to promote innovation in the industry.
Scott earned his PharmD from Ohio Northern University, where he participated in Habitat for Humanity, Phi Mu Delta, Order of Omega, and NCAA basketball. After graduating from ONU, Scott completed a pharmacy residency at Cone Health, followed by a specialty residency in infectious diseases, internal medicine, and academics at Campbell University and Duke University Medical Center.
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