Healthcare Market Segmentation
Market segmentation is a popular strategy that allows businesses to sort customers into diverse groups based on their similarities while looking at each group separately to determine factors that drive their behavior. It’s utilized in a wide range of industries but is a fairly new concept for healthcare providers.
The Move Toward Patient-Driven Care
The concept behind market segmentation is simple: it allows you to sort consumers into groups based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other behavioral criteria in order to better understand your target audience. Companies that use this information can then optimize their marketing efforts, product and service offerings, and more to target specific customer groups. It’s a way to fine-tune what can otherwise be a shot-in-the-dark approach.
Healthcare organizations can benefit from market segmentation through a better understanding of the behavior of their consumers—a key point in an era where patient-centered care is becoming the norm, with an increasing number of individuals taking a more active role in the management of their healthcare plans.
The benefits of market segmentation include:
- Patient engagement. Open communication between patients and providers is essential nowadays. Being able to separate information about patients’ behavior and attitudes from clinical data is an excellent way to foster engagement and, in turn, improve the overall care experience.
- Healthcare marketing. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare marketing. Developing an understanding of patient preferences through market segmentation will allow you to tailor your messaging to those healthcare consumers most likely to be receptive. This allows you to more effectively promote your products and services to specific market segments. This saves you both time and money in the long run.
- Service distribution. Healthcare market segmentation provides you with information that you can use to focus on different types of providers and services for different market areas.
- New product and service development. When you divide your patients into different marketing segments, you can determine how different patients respond to certain care models and healthcare plans. This allows you to determine areas where you currently fall short and focus on filling in the gaps to help meet their needs.