Audiology Marketing Audience

Demographic personas for your audiology marketing

This is the first of a series where we look at the individual characteristics of the demographics we need to market to. As I said in the last post, Learn Who You Are Marketing To, there are in fact three demographics that our audiology marketing should be aimed at. Those three demographics have very different characters, values and beliefs. We need to understand this in order that we can adapt our marketing message and channel to reach all three.

Seniors

There are general characteristics that we can base our understanding on, of course, there will be individual differences. Seniors are people who were born between 1925 and 1945. Because of formative experiences during their early years, they tend to be frugal. Having learned to do without at times, they have learned to save. They often have dedicated their lives to the serving of others, family, friends and spending on themselves is not undertaken lightly.

Loyalty, honesty, integrity

Seniors tend to rate loyalty, honesty and integrity highly as human traits and display these qualities. They tend to display a shared sense of community and camaraderie, valuing connections with friends and family highly. Seniors still have faith in traditional institutions and authority, they also tend to be very patriotic.

This faith in institutions means that they have high regard and trust in medical professionals, priests and other pillars of the community. Referrals made through these pillars of the community will be highly regarded with almost automatic trust. Whilst seniors are not as comfortable with technology it is interesting to note that they are some of the highest adopters of tablets such as the iPad.

Touching Seniors

Seniors tend to be conservative, they like things simple and straightforward. When communicating with seniors you need to consider the character traits, the persona. All of your marketing needs to designed in the light of the person you are trying to reach. The trick with all marketing, not just audiology marketing is to encapsulate an emotion.

You need to communicate a feeling, an ideal that your target market identifies with. In the case of seniors, your language needs to be conservative, courteous. Your overall brand feel needs to display the traits that they rate highly. Lifestyle scenes that they will identify with will involve community gatherings and extended family scenes.

When you have converted a senior prospect to a patient, it is important to remember that they value the connection and the relationship with you and your staff highly. They respond to warmth, empathy and the personal touch. If they value you in this manner they will be a strong brand advocate.

The Channels

Seniors are almost the last saviours of the newsprint, they are the highest proportion of newspaper readers. However, don’t forget they tend to read traditional conservative and local newspapers. They still watch TV, in particular, daytime TV. In the western world, they are on the web and they do use social media. In particular, they use Facebook, however unlike other demographics they don’t use it to follow brands. They use it to communicate and stay in touch with their family and friends.

Both traditional media and new media can and should be used to touch seniors. When you are designing imagery for traditional or web channels you need to consider the terms discussed. Your wording or tagline also needs to be framed in conservative but straightforward tones. Any affiliations that you have to wider community groups that appeal to seniors should also be displayed, possibly with small logos of the group at the bottom of the advert.

In this way, you can design adverts that will touch your audience and drive your enquiries.

Regards

Geoff