Applying Your B2B Buyer Persona to Healthcare Technology Marketing

A B2B buyer persona is an extremely valuable resource for digital marketers in industries with long sales cycles. And once you have one fully developed, it can really begin to improve your content marketing, especially for niche industries such as healthcare technology.

Buyer personas, also known as ideal customer profiles, give your marketing team a clear picture on who they’re marketing to. Buyer personas should be a duplicate of what your ideal customer looks like, and go beyond answering just the basic age/gender/location questions. 

But how exactly do you apply a completed B2B buyer persona to your marketing strategy? How do you keep B2B persona development from being a one-and-done workshop your team forgets about by the weekend? 

Once you learn how to do this, you’ll be able to market to your audience with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

Applying Your B2B Buyer Persona

It can be difficult knowing what to include in a buyer persona, especially if your product services an ultra-specific market. But once you’ve gathered enough information, you’ll have a great resource to refer back to at any point in your content marketing strategy.

You can apply your B2B buyer persona by focusing on these main knowledge points for your potential customers:

• Objectives
• Pain points
• Obstacles
• Social media usage
• Keywords being searched

Once you grasp these knowledge points, applying your B2B customer experience research to your healthcare tech marketing strategy will come naturally.

Objectives

This one is obvious. You need to know your audience’s objectives in order to create an effective marketing strategy.

What goals or priorities is your persona trying to achieve -- both for the company’s and for their own good? Develop a good understanding of your persona's role within the business they work for.

Make these objectives as detailed as possible. Everyone wants to “do better,” or “save money,” but that only tells you so much. Instead, try to make them specific.

For example:

• Improve the efficiency of communication between hospitals and patients
• Cut back on time spent doing paperwork using a digital, automated system
• Improve patient outcome rate through the use of new medical devices

The more detail you provide in their objectives, the easier it will be when the time comes for keyword research.

Pain Points (or Opportunities)

Pain points typically mirror your objectives. They are the reason that any objective was created to begin with, and tend to be the focal point of your content creation strategy. 

Although each individual will have their own frustrations, you’ll probably uncover trends across your persona. This pain point, or points, is what you ultimately want to identify because it will allow you to create content that addresses their problem.

The buyer’s journey doesn’t always start because of a negative emotion or experience. Sometimes an opportunity -- perhaps to expand a business vertical or adopt groundbreaking technology -- can prompt a persona to start researching your solution.

Identifying the “why” is the first step in attracting your audience. Once they’ve recognized your brand as a possible solution, it’s up to you to guide them through the remainder of the sales funnel.

Obstacles

Obstacles may seem similar to pain points, only they’re not the main source of the problem like a pain point is. Obstacles tend to be small inconveniences that can, at times, become deal breakers. 

For example, a common obstacle for any type of B2B purchase is “the price is too high.” Although this is a late-stage obstacle, it can pop up during any stage of the buyer’s journey.

And each buyer persona that you create may have a different perspective on these obstacles. Some may have more wiggle room when it comes to risk, making obstacles almost irrelevant. Others, however, may have several lingering doubts that can allow a single obstacle to become the penny on the train tracks.

The more you understand the obstacles your customers face, the more prepared you will be to help find their solution and alleviate their concerns.

Social Media Use

Social media use, along with where else your customers find their information, is vital to know, even if you think your company is “too niche” for social media. It’ll help give you a sense of what types of resources they look for, along with what specific products and services they’re interested in.

Once you know this information, it becomes much easier to brainstorm content topics for your healthcare technology marketing strategy. Not only will this create an opportunity for you to have a relevant social media presence for your target audience, but it will also help you plan out your future content.

Keyword Searches

The information that you gather from customer interviews to create your healthcare buyer persona will reveal the specific keywords and phrases you should target. 

There are many useful tools that assist with obtaining relevant keywords, such as SEMrush. They can show you how many times per month a keyword is searched, and how difficult it will be to rank organically for the keyword.

Overall, this is one of the best ways to apply your B2B persona to your healthcare tech marketing strategy. It will be useful as you plan and develop content that directly answers the Google search queries your audience makes.

p80 Tip: Make slight adjustments to your keywords and phrases for your content depending on the stage of the buyer’s journey it’s addressing. For example, an Awareness stage article probably shouldn’t focus on a Decision stage keyword like “dental software prices” or “pacemaker manufacturing services.” 

Learn More About Applying Your B2B Buyer Persona

Once you’ve learned how to apply your persona, you’ll find that your marketing efforts are much more effective and will help generate more relevant leads.

The best way to learn even more about applying your B2B buyer persona is to download our free e-book below. It even includes a B2B persona example so you can see how it’s done in real life!