4 tips: Building buyer personas for medical advertising

Whether you're marketing pharmaceuticals or medical devices, you need to develop buyer personas. These customer profiles will help your team direct its time and resources. Knowing who the key decision makers are is the first step to building buyer personas that drive lead generation and ultimately, sales.

1. Physicians versus executive leadership

The first step to creating an effective buyer persona is to identify the key decision makers. For pharmaceutical and medical device companies, decision makers tend to be physicians or executive leaders within the organization.

With this in mind, you'll need to make several buyer personas for each category. For example, let's say a pharmaceutical company wants to sell a new asthma medication. The company will need to convince physicians of the drug's efficacy. Likewise, it will need to convince hospital leadership that the drug is a better investment than those already in use.

This is a great starting point because there are many opportunities to create and then appeal to specific buyer personas. In this case, the marketing team might create three personas: a family physician who may initially see patients with respiratory issues, a physician who specializes in respiratory conditions, and a hospital formulary committee member.

Marketing to doctors presents a number of unique challenges.

2. Defining which channels to use

The next step is to decide which channels will provide the best return on investment. It may be tempting to only buy advertising space on HCP-targeted websites, but this would be a mistake. Hospitals have strict rules about how doctors use personal devices. Although clinicians are never far from a smartphone, close to half still rely on printed material for medical reading, according to Kantar Media.

When marketing to doctors, it's best to take a multi-channel approach, one that encompasses both print and digital media. Display ads work well in printed peer-reviewed journals as well as within email newsletters and specialty-focused medical websites.

3. Pinpointing physician needs

As you refine your buyer personas further, you'll need to identify unique wants and needs. Sometimes this will be easy - say, if your product addresses a previously untreatable diseases (ie, Sovaldi for Hep C) - other times, it will be difficult, especially when competition is fierce.

"How does your product help doctors provide better care?"

As Domain Me noted, it can help to ask yourself how your product or service could become a part of the buyer's daily life. Marketing to doctors is a unique challenge because they aren't the end-user of the drug or device. Rather, it's your job to convince physician buyers that your product will help them be better at their jobs. In this industry, that often means providing additional support to physicians.

For example, say there are two pharmaceutical manufacturers that have each developed a new medication. Both function in roughly the same way and cost about the same. One manufacturer offers a series of patient education videos. The added value of the video series could tempt more physicians away from the competing medication, because the clinicians can reference this resource in their discussions with their patients.

4. Identifying obstacles to purchasing decisions

Finally, you'll need to be prepared for pushback. Once you've developed a persona, you can begin to imagine conversations about your product. This is where Q&A testing can come in handy. What kind of concerns do buyers raise? What are the most commonly asked questions? As you identify potential concerns, consider which should be addressed in your advertisements.

Now that you understand how to market to physicians, it's time to look at your target audience and determine where they're likely to consume medical information. To learn more about how you can best leverage Elseiver's trusted content and expansive HCP reach with your marketing efforts, visit elsmediakits.com today!