Buyer Personas And Smarter Hearing Healthcare Websites

Pitching to different viewers with customised website flow

Buyer personas are a big deal in the marketing world at the minute, in fairness they have always been a big deal, but there is a lot of focus lately. I think that we need to consider this concept for our hearing healthcare website viewers, I think for clarity though we should call them viewer personas. I think there are three of them we should focus on for website design and content creation. These are only definitions at their highest level, they can of course be drilled down much further into segments. Before we go into that, lets look at buyer personas briefly.

Buyer Personas

Many companies break down there buyer personas to comprehensively defined personas and strategize how to communicate with and convert them.   Buyer personas have real value, it allows you focus on who you are dealing with in a generalised way and set out strategies for dealing with them including what marketing channels you should use, what approach to take and how to truly engage them. I think this concept has real validity when it comes to audiology marketing, website design and content creation for hearing healthcare.

The three viewer personas

I have been thinking a lot lately about website visitors, specifically typical website visitors to most hearing healthcare websites. I think that we can place those people in three overall categories,

Researching for a loved one

These people are researching information and options for a significant other/loved one. That loved one could be any member of an extended family. It could also be someone unrelated whose care they have been charged with.

New to the process/think they have a hearing loss

As described, on the start of their journey, they think they might have a loss and have begun researching the process and their options.

Experienced user probably someone else’s patient

Experienced users, they have purchased before probably from someone else. They are thinking about re-purchase and they are weighing their options and researching new technology and providers.

Different goals

Each one of these personas have different needs and goals, they also need different information. Consider this, if three people, who fell into the personas I have described, arrived in your Practice, would you speak to them in the same way? Would you offer the same information? Would they all be asking you exactly the same questions? I think we all know that the answers to the preceding questions is no.

Website pathways

We need to understand that our website needs to meet the needs of these three high level viewer personas. In order to meet those needs we also need to design pathways to allow those personas to quickly get to the information that they need, the information that they want.

We also need to design that content so that it appeals to them and answers the questions they have in a way that is ideally suited for them. This should probably involve front page design elements that lead to multiple levels of content that are primarily designed for each segment.

Viewer flow

We probably will never be able to control viewer flow on our websites, our lives would be far easier if we could. However, we can certainly offer a viewer flow that is designed to meet the needs of each persona. We can do this in the hope that we deliver the information that they are looking for quickly. We also will do this in order that our pitch, is designed to connect with this disparate viewers.

You need to consider these viewers and how you are going to cater to them on your website and with your content. I think that if it is done correctly, it will really assist with viewer to enquiry ratio.