Marketing. The bit of running your business that you hate the most (well, maybe alongside VAT returns) . You don’t really want to do it, you just want patients to magically know who you are and make an appointment with you and be very successful very quickly. Alas, very few commercial businesses have that luxury - even Kim Kardashian has to do marketing to sell the stuff she makes. 

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times from all of the marketing ‘experts’ that the first thing you have to do is ‘know who your ideal client is’ or ‘find your tribe’. 

Marketeers forget that if you’ve never worked in a business or corporate setting, then saying something as flippant as ‘know your market’, is akin to you telling someone who has spent their whole life in suit in an office, to ‘just take that patient’s blood pressure’. They wouldn’t have a flipping clue where to start.

It’s also weird. Because surely everyone is your potential patient? 

They’re not actually. Depending on the type of person you are, where your clinic is, what your clinic looks like, the type of treatments you offer, the prices you charge, your values, beliefs, morals and the results you achieve, you’ll appeal to a segment, or a few different segments. You won’t appeal to everyone. So identifying those segments who you are for, or who are for you, is the first challenge you have in marketing. 

But How Do You Identify Them?

You create what the marketing bods call ‘personas’. 

Personas are like a sketch of key segments of your audience, that comprise lots of components. You might have one sketch, you might have a few. The sketches aren’t one person, they represent a group of people in your market, but you give them one identity or a character.

Where to start?

Data. Use public records to find out more about the population where you are based, there is so much free detailed information available to you. A quick search on Google and I can find that my area indexes highly for married couples with children, there are very few single parents and students or multiple occupancies. It also indexes highly for people educated to degree level and beyond, indexes low for ethnic minorities and people on benefits and high for people in professional occupations. 70% of the population are homeowners. In fact, The Guardian further helped me out by writing a feature on my town, stating it ‘is for middle-aged IT workers leaving the bright lights for life amid Bugaboos and failing pension plans. This place is parental perfection! Nice little caffs for Yummy Mummies to gather.” We get a pretty clear idea of the main type of people who make up the local population. This was literally a two minute search, but I now know (if I was to set up a clinic here - which I might now!) the type of people who I need to attract, what stage of life they’re at, what their concerns might be and the tone of messaging that will resonate with them.

Individual Data. Look at the patients you already have and the data that you hold on them from their treatment forms. How old are they? What’s their occupation? How much do they typically spend with you? What’s the most popular treatments. And think about their personalities, are they outgoing or quiet, confident or meek?

Insight. If you don’t know much about your patients, get to know them. Ask them if you can speak to them for 20 mins.  Tell them that you’re gathering feedback to know how you can improve your business and what you offer, that their help would be much appreciated. Find out how they found you, what made them choose you - what was their trigger for making the appointment? Ask them if they had any concerns about booking, how they found the experience. Ask them about themselves, what they do, hobbies they have, what local clubs they belong to.  If doing this face-to-face feels too much, create a feedback form and email it out to them - perhaps offer a prize draw for a free treatment if they complete it, it’s an investment in your marketing.

Create your Personas 

Once you’ve gathered as much intel, try to organise it and see if you can sketch out your target character or a couple if your audience is diverse enough. You may have a Primary Persona and one or two Secondary Personas. It really does depend on the nature of your clinic. Harley Street will be very different to Hull. You might even have Non Personas - the people you’re definitely not going to attract, so there’s no point trying to even appeal to them.

Now, personas aren’t actually one person and they’re semi-fictional.  They represent many people where you see similar themes and trends and cross-data - they represent a segment - your target audience. However, by giving them all one identity you will feel more comfortable knowing how to communicate with this audience. You can imagine you’re talking to one person, and it makes crafting and formulating your messages far easier.  

Think of it this way. If The Financial Times and The Daily Sport were to run TV adverts next to each other to encourage customers to buy their newspapers,  they would look and sound very different in terms of style, tone, language, visuals and creativity. The FT has thousands of ‘Tarquins’ to attract, The Sport thousands of ‘Daves’ and they’ll have these people in mind when creating their advert.

What you’re doing is creating the person that you have in your mind when you’re promoting you and your services - although that marketing will actually reach lots of people who are like this person. 

What Might It Look Like? 

So if I was doing this for my imaginary clinic in my posh town, it might look something like this:

Primary Persona - Coastal Claire

Claire is 49 and married with four children. 

Claire is a finance director for a large charity, working part time in between ferrying the kids around to various clubs and activities. She is also the chairwoman of the PTA, and a member of her local running club. She enjoys sailing and paddle boarding. 

Claire found Kelly’s Aesthetics after doing a Google search for ‘Botox Cardiff’, she says she was reassured I was a nurse and found my guides to anti wrinkle treatments very informative and clear.  She researched further and read the reviews on Glowday and was encouraged by the positive feedback and the before and after photos she booked in.

Claire was absolutely terrified of having Botox as she doesn’t want people to know she’s had it and was concerned she would look fake, discretion was hugely important to her. She is perimenopausal and felt that her face had rapidly aged and her children were always saying she looked angry and cross, when she wasn’t. She feels conscious of her looks at work and felt Botox would give her more confidence. Claire said other patient’s reviews were important to her, alongside my medical background and she spent a lot of time analysing your photos.

Claire liked how easy it was to book, and that she was able to change the appointment herself when a PTA meeting came up. Claire says she feels more confident following her treatment and she’s now interested in other skin treatments such as Profhilo.

Secondary Persona - Bashful Beth

Beth is 26 and a secondary school teacher with no children who recently moved to the area with her boyfriend for a new job.  Beth suffers from PCOS related acne which she is very self-conscious about when in the classroom, she was beginning to feel very down about it. Beth spends a lot of time on social media and follows a lot of skincare influencers and has tried numerous OTC products, she found me when scrolling through TikTok using the hashtag #acne.

She came to me for a consultation which resulted in a chemical peel, and says she has seen an improvement in her skin and would like to pursue medical grade skincare but it’s unaffordable right now, but she was impressed with my knowledge and treatment plan. Beth didn’t know the industry is unregulated, and would like to try lip fillers at some point too, she saw the local beauty salon offers them for a good price. Beth said she liked seeing the clinic on instagram before she came and that she knew who I was before meeting me and that she got a ‘good feeling’ that I was friendly and warm. She also liked the fact she was able to pay online.

In reality, you might not be able to go as deep as I have with Beth and Claire, but you will notice key themes; confidence, education, knowledge and openness, which can all be used as anchors for messaging.

Make Them Real

Keep Claire and Beth in your mind for all of your marketing. Give them a face (cut out a person from a magazine) and make some posters of them with all of the key info around them. You will start then to mould your marketing messages for these characters. Are you more formal, more educational or are you more fun and frivolous? You can talk to their pain points (skin getting you down?), relate to their circumstances (busy Mum? I got you) and begin to build awareness where these people will see you (Google, TikTok, posters in your local gym, engagement on  local Facebook groups). When someone new follows you on social media you can have a look who they are - do they seem like Claire or Beth ? - drop them a DM, get chatting. 

Your Dream Client 

If you’re fortunate enough to operate in a diverse geographic area, perhaps a City centre, with a large population you’re perhaps in an enviable position of being able to determine your dream client and even maybe creating a niche for yourself. Perhaps your Prime Persona will be Asian, male or menopausal - maybe you can specialise in treating the transgender community. If you’re in a small village or town, you might not have this luxury and will need to tailor your Prime Persona to the most likely audience you’re going to attract.

Whatever your position, knowing who your patients are or who they could be is a crucial first step in your marketing plan - and it’s kinda fun to do too!