How to prioritise audiences for more effective healthcare PR and communications
“Measurable outcomes are only achieved when we persuade specific audiences to behave in specific ways.”
When we launched our MERTO Map Framework for effective healthcare PR and communications campaigns last year, the above quote was one of the most important lines.
It feels strategically obvious, but it's usually overlooked in practice.
The PR and communications industry is not generally very good at focusing on audiences. Traditionally, the first thought has been channel rather than audience and, too often, the only channel under serious consideration has been the media.
However, that kind of thinking can lead - and has led - to incredible waste. It is behind a culture of chasing vanity media coverage or backlink volume, rather than meaningful engagement with audiences to drive meaningful impact for organisations. And it leads to PR being misrepresented and undervalued as a discipline.
Evergreen PR’s ‘Power Interest Analysis’
So what are the practical steps to introducing a more audience-focused approach to your healthcare PR and communications? Well, in this blog, we’ll guide you through our process - which is behind campaigns that have scooped 35 industry awards over the last five years - and outline the common pitfalls to avoid.
Identifying audiences
I’m a big fan of the Government Communications Service (GCS) and their guide ‘The Principles of Behaviour Change Communications’. It recommends “identifying the relevant ‘actors’ who are involved in behaviours relevant to the problem, which should help to identify the correct audience for your campaign.”
Essentially, you just need to make a list of the segmented audiences you are targeting and the audiences that could influence them. Some insights on each are helpful, too.
A practical example of the impact of this kind of exercise can be seen in the case study of our campaign for the Royal College of General Practitioners’, where we helped drive an 800% increase in sign-ups to the Veteran Friendly GP Practices Programme by expanding communications from just GPs (who make up 26% of the practice workforce) to include practice managers, nurses and other members of the team.
At Evergreen PR, we split audiences into two categories:
Target audiences - who are directly involved in the decision or behaviour
Enabler audiences - who may have the potential to influence the target audience
Prioritising the audiences
The Pareto Principle (often called the 80/20 rule) states that, for many outcomes, roughly 20% of the inputs drive 80% of the results. So, if we can successfully identify who the most influential 20% of our audience will be and focus our effort on them, we can disproportionately increase our effectiveness.
It’s a rule of thumb rather than a law, but it has real merit.
The ‘Pareto Principle’ states that 80% of the impact comes from 20% of the effort.
At Evergreen, we use insight-driven Power/Interest scoring of all of the audiences on our list to identify where to focus. This one-by-one assessment forces an extra layer of detailed thinking, but the end result is total clarity on which audiences to prioritise.
A good example of how this approach then shapes activity came in our campaign for Tinnitus UK, where we took just six hours after campaign launch to hit a 3-month target for attracting 1,000 people with tinnitus to sign-up to share their data with a proposed Tinnitus Biobank. We had scored mainstream TV as the most influential channel for driving large-scale audience behaviour and secured a slot on BBC Breakfast, alongside 171 other items, including Radio 1, The Times and the Mail Online and the result was that the priority outcome was achieved within the day.
Common Pitfalls
There are all sorts of reasons why PR practitioners jump straight to activity and miss out the vital step of identifying and prioritising audiences.
I can’t pretend to know all of them, but suspect that some are externally driven e.g. leadership misconceptions about the role of PR forcing a focus on tactical activity over strategy and some are internally driven e.g. perceived lack of time or natural interest in getting straight to ideation or tactics.
One thing I do know though, is that taking the time to identify, understand and prioritise audiences is imperative to the development of effective breakthrough health campaigns.
By taking a truly audience focused approach, health organisations can ignite momentum, build authority and drive those priority audiences to act, driving measurable outcomes and resulting in a genuinely positive impact on people’s health.
About the author:
Leigh Greenwood is the founder and managing director of Evergreen PR, the healthcare PR agency that makes health happen. He is a chartered PR professional who has been working in healthcare PR, public affairs and communications for the last 20 years. He has worked across the whole spectrum of healthcare and has won more than 40 industry awards for effective health campaigns that generated measurable outcomes.
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