Episode 2: Honestly, Why Target Market and Ideal Patient Avatar Matter for Your Marketing

If you’ve ever felt like target market is a purely theoretical exercise without practical marketing episode, then this episode for you!

Learn how to apply these important concepts to your marketing to make everything you create more effective and efficient.

Show Notes:

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Hi there, welcome back!

Today we’re going to talk about some pretty UN-sexy topics, and they are target market and ideal patient avatar.

These get a bad reputation for being boring, not that useful or difficult to apply in real-life marketing. But in fact they’re so important that I wanted to dedicate an entire episode to them because they can actually make all of your marketing way more effective and efficient. And of course, this means less work for you in the long run.

What specifically made me realize that we need to talk about these concepts?

In the previous episode I gave you three tips that you can put into practice this week to improve the effectiveness of your marketing and tip number two was to take a look at your website and evaluate the message on your homepage to make sure that it speaks to your target market or your ideal patient avatar.

And this can be pretty tricky. In order to do this you actually have to know both of these things, target market and your ideal patient avatar, pretty well. By the way, I’m just going to call the ideal patient avatar the IPA at this point, save myself some words.

So why do target market and ideal patient avatar matter for your marketing?

Why am I always telling people to get clear on them and saying it will help make your marketing more efficient?

The idea here is that once you’ve defined both of these things for your clinic, you can use it to direct all of your marketing.

They help you create marketing that provides clarity to your audience, helps them understand if they’re a good fit for you, and gives them direction and next steps.

It also helps you define your speaking voice so that you can create messaging that speaks directly to your IPA.

Again, it determines the direction of all of your marketing, including the tone of voice that you might use, the images you choose, all of the messaging that you share across all of your marketing. And not just on your website but on your social media, your brochures, if you were to give an interview with the local newspaper, for example, etc. etc.

And this makes your marketing more effective because you want to say the things that get the attention of your ideal patients and help them understand, “Oh! That’s exactly why I need acupuncture. That’s exactly why it is worth the investment of my time and my money to get a series of acupuncture treatments and really give it a try.”

Overall, the better you speak to your target market and your IPA in your marketing, the less work you’ll have to do in the long run.

It makes your marketing work harder for you because of that clarity and direction that it’s providing for people.

There’s a really common adage in marketing that says, “If you’re speaking to everyone, you’re not speaking to anyone.”

So this basically means that a vague watered-down message doesn’t get the attention of any particular person. Instead it sort of leaves everybody who hears it wondering, “Does that apply to me?” Or maybe it’s so vague and broad that it didn’t even register with them. They didn’t even hear your message.

But when you get specific what happens is that it resonates with the people you’re speaking directly to.

It perks up their ears. It makes them say to themselves, “That sounds like exactly something I would say,” or, “That sounds like what I need,” or “I’m always complaining about this too so-and-so, it’s like they’re reading my mind!”

That really grabs people’s attention! But it has to be specific.

So another way to phrase this is, and my friend Rachel Kurzyp is an amazing copywriter in Australia and she always uses this phrase, “I’d rather be as someone’s piña colada than everyone’s cup of tea.”

This reflects what we were just talking about, that if you’re everyone’s cup of tea it’s maybe a little bit too bland for anybody to care or be interested. It’s not speaking specifically to them whereas some people really, really love piña coladas and they would be super interested. It would perk them right up.

Here’s what I see all the time on people’s websites and I have done this myself in the past. We just make a list of all of the things that the World Health Organization recommends acupuncture for and we paste it on our website. And it’s like 25 or 30 things.

That is confusing to people. They might see their symptom and still be like, “Right, but does not apply to me?” They’re just not sure. So when you get specific it makes people take action with a much higher frequency than just blasting out that really vague message trying to reach everyone at once.

The definition of target market is a big picture description of a group of people that you want to become your patients.

Generally target market is pretty broad. Usually people are just listing demographics.

The magic really comes in when you go a step further and you define your ideal patient avatar (your IPA).

The IPA is a detailed, nitty-gritty description of a single individual who fits within your target market.

This describes either your real favorite patient or a made-up one. Perhaps you have a real patient already who is ideal. You know, they take your advice, they never miss a treatment, they’re interested in Chinese Medicine, you’re treating them for conditions that you enjoy treating, they always feel better.

So this could be a real person or it could be an imagined person, someone that you sort of dream up and that you think would be ideal in your practice. Or it could be some amalgamation of both.

Now, typically most people will go broad first and define their target market. So they’ll outline the big demographics and then they’ll define their ideal patient avatar who fits into their larger target market.

But if you’re having a hard time with this and you already have an image of your perfect patient in your mind, you can work backwards. So in that case, define this magical ideal patient in detail and then extrapolate their features backwards to define your target market. I hope that makes sense.

I’ll often get the question, “Can I have more than one ideal patient avatar or more than one target market?” Absolutely, and there are ways to implement this effectively on your website and in your various digital marketing.

But for the sake of today’s conversation, especially if this is your first deep dive into these concepts, I recommend just starting with one IPA and then you can sort of branch out and create others if you’d like. I wouldn’t go crazy and create six IPAs, but two or even perhaps three I think is doable. For now we’re keeping it simple.

Let’s talk a little bit more about defining your IPA and getting nitty-gritty.

Again, this is the most perfect patient you can imagine for your practice. If you had 40 of this person each week, you’d be a happy camper. So let’s say your ideal patient’s name is Alex. If you had 40 people or a full schedule each week and every patient was just like Alex, you’d be thrilled. That’s what you’re going for.

Think about things like:

• What does this person like to eat?
• What do they like to read?
• Where do they shop?
• How do they spend their extra income?
• Do they have pets? What are their names?
• What magazines do they read?
• How do they like to exercise?
• Do they spend time outdoors?
• What kind of coffee do they drink?

The goal here is that you want to make your IPA feel like a real person to you, so that you can speak directly to them every time you are writing any kind of marketing.

And here’s a really big tip for actually putting this all of this into action and making it applicable in your real life marketing. Because what happens so often with my students is that they define their target market and their IPA and then they feel like they still don’t know what to say to get that person’s attention. How to have their messaging actually reflect what their IPA needs.

So think of it this way. You’ve defined your IPA, they feel like a real person to you, you’ve gotten really nitty-gritty, you’ve given them a name.

Now, imagine, what are the FAQs that this person might have for you about acupuncture for their specific condition? And then I want you to answer those FAQs, just do this stream of consciousness – you can just turn on the voice memo app on your phone and record how would you answer this person’s questions.

For example, we’ll say, questions about acupuncture for digestion or acupuncture for knee pain due to running, if this IPA was sitting in front of you.

So we’re not trying to sound super formal or professional. We’re not trying to speak or write in any special way because it’s marketing.

All we’re doing is saying, okay, if Alex was sitting in front of me and she asked about nutrition for fertility, how would I answer her? And just answer the question, stream of consciousness-style.

Using this approach is really, really helpful for writing marketing or website copy that resonates with your IPA because you are literally thinking about them while you’re writing it.

You’re thinking about, “How can I say this in a way that makes sense to them and is going to motivate them to actually take my advice and put it into action when they go home?”

It’s very helpful. Of course, this takes some practice. I would say that one thing people really worry about with their IPA and applying it to their marketing is whether or not they’re going do it right.

In fact I’d like to talk about that a little bit more because it comes up pretty often.

I’ve asked my marketing students, “Have you been avoiding either completing your target market exercises? Or putting them into practice in your marketing? Why is that?”

When the answer is “Yes,” they usually say that they are either worried about:

1. Defining their target market and their IPA incorrectly, so that when they apply it in their marketing it doesn’t bring in the kind of patients they were hoping for, or –
2. Their other concern is usually that they’re worried about the specificity that is required to make this successful, because they don’t necessarily specialize and they worry about being too niche. They want to be a general practitioner.

So let’s talk about both of those.

If you’re worried about applying your target market and your ideal patient avatar incorrectly and not getting the right results, I would say, first of all, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you will get better with practice.

So you need to just apply whatever you have and then course-correct as you move forward.

Think about marketing as an experiment. This takes off a ton of pressure. Everything we’re doing is with the goal of collecting data so that we can do it better next time. We don’t have to be perfect when we launch a new marketing plan or initiative.

If you’ve defined your target market and your IPA and you’re worried it’s it going to   work, literally the only way to know is to apply it to your marketing and just see how it goes.

It might not be perfect the first time. That’s okay. A lot of my students tell me that their IPA feels a little clunky at first, that it doesn’t actually feel like a real person to them yet. That’s fine. This is all about refinement over time.

So apply your target market and your IPA to your marketing, apply it to your website, and then check in every six months, or three months if you’re very motivated. And tweak it. You’re going to get to know your IPA better and better the more often you revisit these concepts and make little changes.

I recommend letting go of perfection. Guys. I’m such a perfectionist. I know how hard it is. Whatever you’ve got, put it into action and course-correct from there.

If you’re worried that you’re limiting yourself by niching down or getting too specific in your marketing message, remember that a more specific message simply makes your marketing more effective.

Blasting out that broad, vague message isn’t going to make anybody sit up and take notice. Because you might you’re trying to appeal to everybody and we talked about how that is just not an efficient way to go about things.

It’s also very likely that even if you get specific on your website, you’ll probably still see patients who are not your ideal patient avatar and they’re not even within your target market. Something that happens all the time is patient referrals.

Let’s think about it this way: Let’s say that you decide to focus on orthopedic acupuncture. So you’re focusing on the weekend warriors, helping people get healthy so they can participate in the sports that they love. You focus the landing page of your website on speaking to that person.

And you help one of them heal his knee pain so that he can keep competing in 5Ks. Then he has a friend who says, “I have elbow pain and also some digestive issues. I read acupuncture can help both of those. What do you think?” And so your patient says. “Yes, you should totally see my acupuncturist.”

This friend is going to come see you even if they land on your homepage that is all about helping people recover from injuries so they can continue their athletic passions.

The friend is not going to bounce when they see that, because they have a referral from someone they trust. This is a very warm touch point. They’re not going to try to search and find someone who specializes in digestion. They’d rather see you because they trust their friend.

So you are going to get people who decide to come see you for things outside your target market. For example, just because you take their insurance or you’re located close to their home or whatever it might be.

So please don’t worry too much about getting specific on your website and that it might reduce the number of patients who are actually interested in coming to see you. I think that is not what most people experience when they implement this.

I hope that this episode was really helpful for you in clarifying target market and ideal patient avatar.

It’s always a pleasure being here and talking about marketing with you. If you have any questions feel free to email me at michelle@michelle.com. I hope you’ll take a look at some of the free marketing worksheets and checklists on my website, michellegrasek.com. And I can’t wait to speak with you next week!