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Learn To Speak The Language Of Your Client’s (Many) Target Audiences

Healthcare PR and marketing agency pros work with multiple clients at a time. That’s a lot of technologies, services, business strategies, marketing messages, workflows, timelines, and personalities to understand and manage.  

It’s easy for us to feel overwhelmed because healthcare technology clients by definition are working on cutting-edge technologies that can be challenging to comprehend, never mind explain to an audience. Conversing regularly with healthcare startup founders about the clinical-grade, model-informed, reverse-engineered algorithm they developed to transform healthcare as we know it – when they weren’t working their side gig as a highly regarded neurosurgeon – is a humbling experience. My encyclopedic knowledge of BoJack Horseman episodes barely measures up.

But here’s where things get even more complicated: Not only does each client have all that stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph, they also are trying to reach multiple audiences.

That matters, because to craft an effective message you need to both identify and understand the target audience. The first question I ask clients when we’re on a call with a subject matter expert to get information for a writing assignment – a byline, a press release, a white paper – is, “Who’s the target audience?” Even if I already know, I’ll ask anyway just to make sure we’re all on the same page and to get more details. Plus it’s a great icebreaker!

Know what each audience cares about

At the most basic level, every healthcare technology company has three distinct audiences: customers (both potential and existing), investors, and the media. Let’s start with the less complicated audiences: investors and the media.

Investors view healthcare technology as, well, an investment. So while they may thoroughly believe in the technology and what it will do for patients, providers, payers or some other stakeholder, their primary interest is whether their investment pays off. Investors want to hear about the market opportunity, growth strategy, financial and growth metrics, the expertise and experience of the management team, and how the company intends to become profitable.

A media audience is looking for an interesting story. That might be the background of your client’s founders, the scope of the challenge your client is trying to address, and how many lives the client’s product or service will change. Even media outlets that drill down into the details of healthcare technology, business, and policy want to cast the content they publish in human terms.

You can best understand what type of content specific media outlets are interested in publishing by actually reading what they publish. (Pro tip!) If your client is all about the revenue cycle, you’re not likely to draw interest from a website that covers medical devices.

Customers are more complicated because many healthcare companies may be trying to reach several subsets of customers. For example, one of Amendola’s clients I write for markets its platform to hospitals, health information exchanges, labs and clinics, and health plans. Each of those target audiences has its own priorities and needs. As a marketing/PR agency, it is our job to effectively address the specific pain points of each target audience.

Listen, research, and listen some more

So how can we best understand each of the client’s target audiences? One way is to talk with someone at the client who interacts regularly with customers and prospective customers.  

For example, if the target audience is customers and potential customers, I would want to hear from sales executives. They are the people who listen to customers describe their business goals and challenges, explain what problems they need to overcome, and articulate what they need (or don’t need) from the type of solution the client is selling. Once you can identify the problems a customer wants solved, you have the raw ingredients for crafting a targeted, compelling message using the customer’s language.

Unfortunately, sometimes it’s hard for a PR/marketing agency team to get time with a client’s sales exec because they’re busy selling (hopefully!). It’s much more common for agencies to work with the client’s technologists, who typically are among the founders. While their ability to explain the company’s technology within the context of various use cases is indispensable, it’s the sales team that understands challenges from the customer’s perspective. They have an outside-in perspective, rather than the inside-out view of many technologists.

A less direct way to learn about a target audience is through online research. That includes using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to find information. (Just make sure it’s not hallucinated info.) Learning the lay of the land within a client’s competitive sphere provides more perspective to help inform the content you create. Large consulting agencies such as McKinsey and Accenture have ambitious healthcare practices that offer comprehensive market analyses.

Developing customer personas also can help marketing/PR agencies hone their messages by providing a crystal-clear picture of a target audience. What are the backgrounds, values, preferences, and pain points of the chief technology officers targeted by your client? They undoubtedly would be different to those of the chief financial officer or chief medical officer. Interviews, surveys, and feedback can be used to refine those personas.

Conclusion

No healthcare client has a single target audience. All of them at some point will need to communicate the appropriate messages to investors, the media, and various customer groups. Marketing/PR professionals must be fluent in all these languages to ensure they are helping clients achieve their goals.

Know Your Audience: The Fine Line Between Technical Language And Jargon

One of the foundational PR rules that any communications professional learns is to avoid the use of jargon –  the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group, as defined by Merriam-Webster. In my years working in PR for healthcare and health IT organizations, this has been a permanent item on my list of interview tips, and any media training I’ve conducted has included guidance to avoid the use of jargon.

When communicating to a general audience, this is sound guidance and standard practice. Jargon is unnecessarily complicated, can confuse your audience and cause your audience to lose interest. If your audience has tuned out because they don’t understand what you’re telling them, they won’t hear or read your message.

It may be tempting to include technical language to demonstrate proficiency and credibility with particular subject matter. This is an especially tricky trap for those of us who work in specialized areas like healthcare and health information technology. But there’s a fine line between using familiar terms and wading into the murky waters of jargon.

As with any marketing content, one size does not fit all. Public relations and marketing must be specific to your audience. Using technical language can demonstrate competency and help build credibility, if the audience can understand it. That’s why it’s crucial to do your homework, research your audience and their level of understanding.

Get to Know Your Audience

In a recent Amendola Communications blog post, my colleague Jack O’Brien reminded us that PR representatives should take time to do their research on the journalists and outlets that they’re pitching. Not only will this help you target your pitches to topics of interest, but it will also help you tailor your language to the journalist’s readers and the publication’s audience.

This is especially true for any media relations professionals who work in a specific industry, as we do at Amendola Communications. We work with a variety of reporters – from those who write for publications focused on a specific medial specialty, to trade reporters with a deep focus on health IT, to healthcare beat reporters at major national publications, to general assignment reporters at daily newspapers. The audience and level of understanding for each of these reporters and publications will be different, and so should each pitch. As you can see, one size definitely does not fit all.

Write in a Manner the Audience Will Understand

Once you’ve done your homework and you understand your audience, you should also delve into their level of familiarity and understanding of the topic you’re pitching. For example, if a publication targets physician executives, you can safely assume the audience will understand basic medical terminology because of their medical education. A physician discussing cardiovascular health can thus feel confident that the audience will understand the term “myocardial infarction.

However, if that same physician is instead speaking to the general public about heart health, it would be more appropriate to use the more colloquial and widely understood term “heart attack.” A good rule of thumb when pitching to and writing for a general audience is to avoid using language that your Aunt Sally wouldn’t understand.

Always Keep the Reader in Mind

I’ll offer some sage advice that one my college professors, Steve Kopcha, shared from his decades of experience in strategic communications: “Say it square, then say it with flair.”

It’s easy to get so caught up in figuring out how to “say it with flair” that we forget to first “say it square.” In the simplest terms that Aunt Sally would understand, how can you communicate what your client’s product or service does? What problem does it help to address? Why does this matter for the reader?

A former communications colleague of mine who had spent years as a local news reporter offered a helpful way to frame this concept. She would ask me how I’d explain something to my next-door neighbor, and why it would matter to them. When you find yourself struggling with whether to use technical language, ask yourself what it will mean to the person reading the article you’ve pitched. Will it help further their understanding, or does it muddle your message? Keeping the reader in mind will help you to walk that fine line between technical language that helps to inform and jargon that muddles your message.

Kindly Do The Needful: Coping With Outcomes Anxiety

In healthcare, we’re always talking about improving patient outcomes, clinical and financial outcomes, or even the mind-numbing phrase ‘operational outcomes,’ whatever that means. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the intersection of language and performance anxiety, and I keep circling around the concept of what I’ve been calling outcomes anxiety.

Our inability to control the future often manifests in an urge toward excess—the desire to subdue all unknown variables with an overwhelming volume of material. It’s the opposite of a strategic approach, and it’s unfortunately fairly common. Many healthcare companies err on the side of quantity rather than quality, assuming that whatever sticks to the wall will function just as well as an intentional choice.

I’ve seen 15-touch email campaigns delivering 18 assets on 11 disparate products; product lines with 85 fact sheets; website rebrands of hundreds of pages doomed to start over again in six months’ time.  When you don’t know what will work, you try everything, right?

Wrong. This is always a bad idea, both for your company and your career—not to mention your mental health. Let me explain.

The Anxiety Spiral at Work

Most of us have at least a passing familiarity with the anxiety spiral when it comes to our daily lives. One asks oneself a reasonable question, which is immediately answered with the worst possible outcome and escalated to ever more dire hypotheticals. What if my child’s cough is a symptom of Covid? becomes she’ll miss school for two weeks and morphs into all the grandparents could die before you’ve even removed the thermometer from its case. The literature calls this catastrophic thinking.

Of course, given the pandemic, we’re all trying to grant ourselves extra leniency as we cope with our anxiety; after all, there are real consequences at stake. For my friends with clinical anxiety, however, the spiral is triggered a thousand times a day by the most mundane concerns: a meeting conflict, a late payment, an unreturned email. As a healthcare writer with generally deadline-driven anxiety, I try to stave off stress with the usual preventative measures: deep breaths and long walks.  

At work, I notice that my worry tends to coagulate around long-term outcomes. I don’t have time to research this byline today becomes nobody will like what I write and morphs into this whole week will be a firestorm of horror before I’ve written the first paragraph. As the things we tell ourselves are mostly subterranean, it can be tricky to diagnose yourself with outcomes anxiety.

For me, it starts with the language.

Marketing Speak: The Original Social Distancing

Whenever I think about healthcare jargon, I remember listening to intake calls with one freelance writer who routinely strung together industry phrases without apparent concern for their meaning (or lack thereof). He asked questions like this: “So we leverage clinical intelligence efficiencies to thread the needle of those at-risk enterprise social determinants and optimize technology-enabled solutions to close the gap, right?” The subject matter expert he was talking to would pause for a moment, frown ever so slightly, and resume her explanation.

Even more puzzling was the reputation this writer had among marketing management. “He knows his stuff,” I heard time and again. This could not have been further from the truth, at least not in my opinion. While the final product of these intake calls was serviceable, particularly as SEO fodder, it wasn’t very good. His copy did not help readers understand a new concept, or elucidate product intricacies, or address how the company could help clients. It just put all the relevant jargon in a blender and served it up like an ambitious smoothie: empty calories, suspicious taste, but certainly filling.

Why do so many people talk this way on calls? I think they suffer from an acute case of outcomes anxiety, one that’s particularly endemic to marketing. When you don’t yet know what you need to, you worry about the ultimate outcomes of your work. Will the piece miss the mark? Will the audience click on your links? Will any of this result in sales?

That misguided writer was trying out all his phrases at once, hoping the cumulative effect would be impressive. Although he thought he sounded knowledgeable, he was too insecure to ask the useful questions, the kind that might be perceived as too simplistic: “So, how does this product help patients? How does it work?”

When I edit copy for a client, I try to eliminate marketing speak, and I often get pushback. People tend to believe that dense language sounds more professional, and it can be a struggle to help them understand that jargon is the enemy of clarity. By its nature, marketing speak is an agent of exclusion: it alienates readers who are unfamiliar with the terminology. This is not for you; this is for those who can decipher this code. What a pernicious myth! Readers should not have to decipher meanings, at least not in professional writing. It’s the writer’s job to deliver the message with grace and clarity.

Circumventing Your Own Outcomes Anxiety

In my experience, extra fluffy language is motivated by insecurity about the real value of what is being produced, and it shows in the piece. It’s also the first indication that you might have outcomes anxiety.

So, the next time you sit down to write, and your first paragraph is hogwash—or when you’re in a meeting, and everyone’s talking about peeling the onion on customer buy-in—try these tips:

Ground yourself in the practical. What is the point of this piece? What do we want this campaign to accomplish? Whenever you find yourself tempted to overcomplicate things—when you’re wrestling with how to deliver 18 assets in a logical order—it’s a sure sign that you need to go back to basics. Ask simple questions. People will thank you.

Insist on a plan. One of the best healthcare writers I know routinely frustrated the teams she worked with by refusing to write before a plan was in place. And not just any old plan, with a wishy-washy “we’ll use this later, definitely” rationale, but a good plan, with strong strategy, clear tactics, audience definition, a timeline, the whole shebang. Paradoxically, your outcomes will be better when you spend more time on the inputs, as that planning process eliminates the creep of outcome anxiety from infecting your work.

Kindly do the needful. At a former company, I had a lovely coworker from Bulgaria whose English was refreshingly creative. When she sent me an article to edit, she’d close with this line: “Kindly do the needful.” When you catch yourself beginning the anxiety spiral, try to focus simply on the task at hand. Do the needful. And then do the next needful. And so on.

Reclaim your joy. When we stop worrying about uncontrollable outcomes, we remember why we enjoy the work we do…and then we do it better. When I stop wondering whether a client will like what I write, I suddenly realize that I’m enjoying myself, and that I actually like to write. Who knew! Give yourself permission not to focus on the deadline, the reception, or the ultimate outcome. For thirty minutes at a time, focus on the fun.

The Key To Writing Marketing Copy That Gets Results

Successful marketers are persuasive. Whatever their medium – print, audio, video – the content and messages they create consistently prompt their target audience to take action.

There are multiple schools of thought about effective marketing, not to mention plenty of marketing and copywriting “experts” (legit or self-proclaimed) willing to offer you their insights through books, online courses, subscription newsletters, and other revenue-generating vehicles. Many of them offer excellent advice.

But there also is a seemingly unlimited amount of free online advice offering sound tips and strategies for writing deeply persuasive marketing copy. The advice ranges from the theoretical to the practical. I’ve pulled together five that jumped out at me for one reason or another. They are in no particular order. Let’s get going.

Know your audience

OK, right off the bat I lied, which admittedly isn’t a great long-term marketing strategy. The truth is, this first item – know your audience – actually is the most important piece of advice on the list, which now (so far at least) has a semblance of order!

You simply can’t hone an effective marketing message if you don’t know who it’s intended to persuade. One copywriting advice guy I read says “the key to great copywriting is to like your audience.” I understand where he’s coming from, but I would instead suggest it’s better to understand your target audience, particularly their needs and pain points that could be addressed by your company’s products or services.

While liking them might help get you there, doing some research would be even more illuminating and productive. Another way to help sharpen your understanding of the target audience is to create a profile or persona based on demographic data.

Know your message (and tighten it)

You can’t market effectively if you 1) don’t know what you’re marketing and 2) how to explain it in various levels of detail. The latter can be particularly challenging for healthcare technology companies that have complex platforms or services. There’s a lot to explain! One cofounder I know told me he knows the exact moment when he loses potential customers as he tries to explain his startup’s technology: “I can see their eyes glaze over.”

Eye glazing is never a good sign. Make sure you can explain your technology – and, more importantly, what problems it can solve – clearly and concisely. That’s a struggle for some technologist entrepreneurs, which is why many of them hire marketing and PR professionals to help them shape and deliver their message.

Write about your audience (not about what you’re selling)

Your content needs to read as if you’re personally addressing your target audience, as if you can read their minds and are on their side. The best copywriting puts the focus on the needs of the audience, not the merits of a product or service. Yes, those eventually will have to be discussed, but only in the context of solving a problem for the potential buyer. At all times, it is about the customer. A lot of “you” in your marketing content goes a long way.

Write for your medium

How you write content for a 2,000-word white paper will be dramatically different than how you would write 150 words of web copy for a home page. People who sit down to read a white paper they downloaded have different expectations than those who are surfing around looking for something to interest them – or a solution to their problems.

For the former, you have room to delve into how your technology works, how it applies to various use cases, etc. You can geek out. In the latter case, your mission is to capture readers’ attention and keep them on your site. That requires the equivalent of emotionally hard-hitting ad copy that leads to data capture, lead generation, and potential customers.

Invite a conversation

Granted, you can’t do this with every marketing asset. But a steady social media presence can enable you to have an ongoing dialog with members of your target market. There may not be an immediate revenue payoff, but social media is about the long game. It’s for building relationships, encouraging engagement, learning about your customers, and establishing a consistent voice for your brand. Writing for social media should be relatively informal and conversational.

Conclusion

Marketers have more tools and channels than ever for connecting with existing and potential customers. To get the most out of your marketing strategy and efforts, you must understand your target audience, know how to talk to them (depending on the medium), know what to say to them, and be eager to listen and learn.

6 Ways Trade Outlets Trump National Media for B2B Marketing and PR

6 Ways Trade Outlets Trump National Media for B2B Marketing and PR

Whenever we ask clients about their “dream placement,” national media (especially the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) always top the list. These multi-platform outlets, after all, attract millions of eyeballs on a daily basis.

Although there is no denying the substantial publicity boost a mainstream media outlet can bring, trade pubs and niche outlets offer several advantages, especially for companies in business-to-business industries such as healthcare IT. Savvy PR pros recognize their importance and feature them prominently in PR/marketing plans.

How do healthcare trade outlets trump mainstream press for B2B PR? Let me count the ways:

Target audience. A mention in USA Today is impressive but offers little benefit to a company that markets a telehealth platform. While millions of people visit the site daily, it’s highly unlikely they are there to learn about telemedicine. An article in Becker’s Hospital Review, with 1.4 million monthly visitors, has a greater chance of reaching clinicians and medical directors. In addition, buyers in the later stages of the buying cycle prefer to get their information from trade outlets. That’s because B2B outlets dive deeper into technical details while major publications cover broad topics in general terms.

Legitimacy. Trade outlets are highly respected by industry insiders. Health IT professionals rely on industry associations such as HIMSS and CHIME to provide insight on laws and regulations that affect the industry. A consistent presence in their newsletters and websites can brand a new company as a legitimate player or help establish a company founder as a thought leader.

Digital presence. There is a definite trend away from print toward digital, which means fewer space restrictions and more room to expand on a topic. There is also a trend toward specialized sites and blogs (e.g. HIStalk, Healthcare Musings). Even LinkedIn has a healthcare channel run by a former editor of Modern Healthcare. Answers Media has created several sites — HITECH Answers, Health Data Answers, RCM Answers, to name a few. It also has an internet radio station, HealthcareNow Radio, with 15 shows attracting 1,400 listeners a day who listen an average of 30 minutes. An article on one of their sites could potentially be seen by 42,000 visitors, shared among 25,000 social media followers, and be featured in a weekly e-newsletter sent to 50,000 subscribers.

Greater use of press releases. Have press releases become obsolete? That may be true for pitching B2C publications, but B2B pubs welcome news releases relevant to their niche audience. Trade editors are also more willing to run press releases in both print and online, Tweet them out, and include links back to your website, enabling you to re-share the posts and expand reach.

Sending a new product press release along with a brief pitch about a new tablet device for seniors to a trade publication such as McKnight’s Long-Term Care News is a direct hit. It shows you know the publication and its audience.

Article placements. National publications prefer to report about large companies and breaking news. Getting quoted in a major publication may take weeks, even months, though it is not impossible as this example in Forbes shows. On the other hand, niche editors are happy to report on small companies in their sector. As long as the pitch is on-topic, they will respond to media requests faster and publish articles sooner. In addition, because trade outlets are often short on staff, they’re more open to accepting contributed articles as long as they are objective and vendor-neutral. Click here to see a sample placement in Health Data Management.

Reversioned content. PR can repurpose a byline article placed in a niche publication into owned media, webinars, case studies, and pitches to larger outlets. We call this the “turkey carve out” approach to content. It works only if you start out with a 25-pound turkey, not a Cornish game hen. We advise or remind our clients to amplify the article using corporate social media channels. We also recommend creating a marketing e-blast to customers and prospects with a link to the article.

Journalists and editors for major newspapers and consumer magazines often use trade journals to research article assignments. The trade pub article may become your ticket to being part of a bigger story in a major consumer pub, eventually getting your CEO the mainstream hit s/he desires.