A network of International Board Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLCs) who provide lactation support for parents and families historically focused its marketing efforts direct-to-patient. However, with a more aggressive business objective, the organization knew they needed to expand how they reached potential patients by engaging with and marketing to obstetricians (OBs) and pediatricians, two critical healthcare providers (HCPs) during the lactation journey.
The organization wanted to ensure they understood these new target audiences in order to build a strong marketing strategy. That’s when they turned to Hedy & Hopp (H&H).
To begin, H&H conducted a workshop with the organization’s key stakeholders, including those who were very familiar with both OBs and pediatricians, to uncover key insights about the HCP audience. Along with additional research, H&H developed four personas, consisting of two OBs and two pediatricians. The personas ultimately revealed a meaningful difference between the two audiences while also uncovering an unexpected similarity.
Though OBs and pediatricians both work with the lactating parent, their focuses and priorities differ. OBs’ primary patients are the birthing parent and fetus. They want to ensure both remain healthy during pregnancy and through delivery. However, the pediatrician’s primary focus is a healthy baby post-delivery. The older OBs and pediatricians do not view lactation support as part of their role, while the younger HCPs want to expand clinically to support lactation challenges, but feel constrained by time and training. Despite recognizing the importance, neither OBs nor pediatricians view lactation support as a clinical priority, leaving the parent in a provider gap.
This critical insight led the way for the development of the foundational HCP marketing work
H&H positioned this client as a critical bridge in care that complemented the role of OBs and pediatricians for lactating parents. With this structure in place, H&H developed three additional foundational marketing pieces: a messaging framework, which created core messages and reasons to believe that would resonate with the HCP audience; engagement frameworks for each persona to ensure the client best understood how to meet the providers where they were relative to their interest in lactation support and move them towards recommending the organization to their patients; and a marketing plan to strategically activate initial initiatives in the market.
By gaining a deep understanding of your target audience and crafting messages based on the findings, you avoid making potentially costly assumptions about your audience and their priorities. Investing in audience definition with Hedy & Hopp sets your campaigns up for success.
Madison Molho, Director of Strategy, Hedy & Hopp
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