B2B healthcare marketers: Do you know where to find your target audiences?
Identifying your audience – your ideal customer profile – is the first step to reaching it. Along the way, another crucial step is to figure out where and how your audience members congregate, get their information, and learn more about the products and services that could help them do their jobs.
For simplicity’s sake, we could break this down into a hierarchy. Let’s assume that the tightest set is the most valuable, so we’ll start there, then wind up with a look at the broadest category.
Peer networks: Think one-to-one or small group conversations. More than in many other industries, B2B healthcare purchase considerations are influenced by people talking to each other. Almost anyone making or influencing a purchase decision relies on their professional network for recommendations. You can’t break into the conversations you don’t know about, but you can build your brand visibility and authority so that others are more likely to mention you.
Private communities: Thousands of online communities exist, both free and paid memberships, and frequently on Slack and sometimes Discord. Join the community, participate in conversations, learn from others, give more than you expect to receive… These are tried and true ways to understand and engage with your ICP on these “dark social” platforms. I’m in Health Tech Nerds. Even though I don’t often post, it would be impossible to quantify just how much I’ve learned about digital health from some true experts.
Industry associations and conferences: HLTH, HIMSS, and a host of other conferences draw tens of thousands of people in healthcare each year. Then there are the various industry associations, both for business and clinical professionals, and state and local chapters. With more professionals yearning for in-person gatherings nowadays, it makes sense to prioritize events as budget allows.
LinkedIn: Who’s not on LinkedIn these days? The world’s largest professional network is hot – or a hot mess, as some would describe when talking about being overrun with spammy pitches and three-week-old posts. A note of caution: Not everyone in healthcare wants to be there. A previous client of mine didn’t spend a lot of time on LinkedIn because its physician target audience didn’t have much of a presence, so we shifted attention to medical associations and physician publications.
Media: Let’s define this broadly as information sources. What does your ICP read? Where do they find it? Which websites do they visit? Which newsletters do they subscribe to? What else do they consume – podcasts, videos, webinars? The media category can range from healthcare trade publications to Reddit to your own website and newsletter. Plus those of your competitors.
Audience research tools
We have more tools than ever to learn more about our ICPs and their interests, at least as far as online behavior and media consumption trends can take us.
The challenge is, how do you find the specific watering holes that your audience considers valuable?
Giving an AI tool your ICP and personas and asking for an analysis is a good step, but doesn’t go far enough on its own. Surveys and audience research methods yield insights on perceptions and behavior, though not necessarily on where your ICP consumes content, unless you design the survey to show this. And they’re expensive. Social listening tools track brand and topic mentions, but don’t give you much about audience characteristics and behaviors.
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed some valuable insights on audience research coming from SparkToro. Founded by Rand Fishkin, previously the founder of SEO platform Moz, SparkToro provides a rich set of data about an audience’s online behavior. I recently signed up for a paid account after using a lot of their free stuff.
As an example of what you can find in SparkToro, entering a query for “healthcare AI” shows:
- People who search the web for that term are far more likely than the population as a whole to use GitHub, a common developer platform
- They’re also 15% more likely than others to use LinkedIn
- They visit the websites of healthcare publications Medical Economics and HealthTech Magazine (which is owned by IT giant CDW)
- And they’ve exhibited a likelihood of doing a web search for “shortages in healthcare professionals”
These are data points that would be hard to find without an advanced tool like SparkToro. You probably wouldn’t use all this data in understanding your ICP and developing content to reach them, but it does give a more complete profile.
Why bother?
We all tend to jump into marketing and PR tactics, assuming we already know our audience and how to reach them. And we think we can overcome any gaps by asking ChatGPT.
Until the media landscape splintered, and Substack writers and YouTube influencers gained loyal followings that dwarf those of traditional media, we could rely on our assumptions and experience. It’s clear that we can no longer do that.
In the above example, you might have developed a media list for publications that cover AI in healthcare without ever thinking about Medical Economics – which targets physicians and clinicians. After looking at the data from an audience research tool, you might consider the publication worth adding to your list for pitching a story idea or contributed article or to target for ads that could reach your audience.
Conducting the research into where your audience gets its information is no longer optional.
Healthcare search isn’t dead, it’s just different