The Art of Patient Journey Mapping: Creative Strategies for Marketing Success

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Lauren Leone: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I have a new guest with us today. I think this is your first time joining us, right, Jean?

Jean Zhang: Yes, it is.

Lauren: Awesome. Welcome, Jean Zhang. She is our Senior Creative Director. We brought her on because when we think about the patient journey and how to deliver the best media possible, creative is such an important part of that. What we say to people matters just as much as getting in front of them in the right place at the right time. Welcome, Jean. Happy to have you.

Jean: Happy to be here. Thank you.

Lauren: All the way from Denver. Jean, so I have a couple questions for you that I get asked a lot of time in the sales process and that we see, I think, you and I in working together and kicking off new clients when we’re really trying to help understand their patients and figure out where to buy the media, what to say to them. We want to give everybody listening some tangible tips on things that they should be thinking about and asking themselves, their internal teams, or their agency partners as well.

I want to start out by before we can devise a creative strategy, we need to understand what the patients think, feel, fear, what their barriers are. As you’re sitting down, a new brand just came across your desk, where are you starting? What kind of information do you need to gather and how do you go about collecting that information on the patients?

Jean: I think the most important thing to call out first is to figure out if there are target audiences already broken down. We say patients as a catchall, but patients are absolutely unique. What is nice is that we can start to see patterns by audience groups and then tackling it that way, of course, is going to give us the most granularity and best overall context and picture for how we move forward.

In terms of ways for us to approach research, there is really a twofold strategy that I think is most impactful and that is a quantitative and qualitative strategy. Marrying those two together allows you for that holistic view to truly understand what your users think, what their motivators are, how they engage with your brand and really how to tap into that to further your brand engagement with these patients.

Lauren: Let’s take qualitative research first. What are some of the mechanisms, like how are you actually going about collecting qualitative information?

Jean: Absolutely. One of the ways that I think is really helpful is actually getting user interviews into the queue to ask people directly and start to have more of that open-ended conversation. The reason I think that is really powerful is if you lead with, for instance, a survey first, you’re able to provide certain choices or leave an open-ended question. That back and forth conversation, that drilling into details that someone says, those pieces allow for more robust conversation, in my opinion, that allows you just start to see these really big themes.

Alternatively, on the other side, you are able to do more of these user, or sorry, user research pieces that are survey-based. You can use a combination of multiple choice as well as open-ended questions, but there are a multitude of things to consider when you’re considering that methodology. First and foremost, you need to consider how are you finding your people? Are you using usertesting.com and finding your demographic that way? Are you tapping into an existing distributor list and emailing out? What is the complexity of your survey and therefore do you need to have an incentive attached to it?

I think that’s a big piece that people don’t always remember is typically when you’re asking a patient or someone who isn’t necessarily a brand friendly to give you feedback and spend a lot of time with you need to incentivize them. Typically, there needs to be budget set aside for that. Oftentimes, when I’ve worked with brands in the past, that part hasn’t necessarily been considered, so it’s certainly worth considering that earlier on in the process.

Lauren: Jean, if I’m hearing you correctly, you like to start with qualitative because those interviews give you then the foundation for what do I want to put out in my quantitative surveys to try to understand if what this person is telling me about their journey is statistically relevant to the rest of my population. Do other people feel the same way?

Jean: Exactly. It gives you the thematics and the general patterns for you to then do additional exploration on. The other thing I would say prior to getting to qualitative, it is really important that you’re taking a look at actual data. If you have data for how people are experiencing your website, if you have any of those touch points, those can also help you get to the point where you’re putting together the initial scripts and questionnaires for your actual qualitative conversation.

Lauren: Sometimes, that qualitative can be tricky. I think an alternative I’ve seen people use is working with the manager of a contact center or the person doing intake, listening to a subset of intake phone calls to understand what people are asking on the phone. That’s just an alternative I’ve seen on the quantitative side that if you’re hitting a barrier, don’t feel like, “I just have to give up. I’m going to just guess what people care about.” It lives in your data and you just have to go extract it.

Jean: I’ve had conversations also with clinic owners. They can often tell you more of those pain points that a patient comes to them with. Hearing what they talk to their patients about, hearing reasons why someone doesn’t to stick with a clinic or a small healthcare business, those pieces are really important as well. Those could be easy and interesting ways for you to start your process in thinking of what to ask people.

Lauren: You mentioned using data like what’s going on your website. I want to dive into that a little bit more. There’s your analytics, which you can see what pages are people visiting, what content are they getting to, but I think there’s some other powerful tools out there related to website. If you have the ability to, if the data exists or the tools exist, what else do you like to use on that front?

Jean: Heat mapping and any small onsite surveys that are relatively limited, nothing too complex. Those can be really easy ways to start to understand how users are experiencing your website and how they’re engaging with your brand digitally. Heat mapping is really interesting because it allows you to see how far are users willing to explore or scroll on your page. It gives you insight into things that matter.

Eye tracking is really good as well. For similar reasons, it allows you to see what is grabbing your user attention. There are a lot of really cool technologies now that allow you to marry all of those analytics together and essentially tell you, “Hey, are there rage clicks. Did someone get lost?”

Lauren: Clicking here because I’m frustrated.

Jean: Yes, just click everywhere. Are they engaging with the navigation as expected? Is there a primary button that you’ve put somewhere that no one is even looking at? Those are the questions that you can start to get answers to through heat mapping, scroll mapping, and some of those technologies. Also, being able to put a survey on your website is a very easy way to get new users and engage them to potentially have conversations with them. I’ve used that as an opportunity to ask broader questions, very basic one answer questions about, “How’s your current experience on the website?”

I’ve used on-site surveys to also gain a wider share of users to have qualitative conversations with or even to grow a pool of people who may be interested in potentially giving their opinion for more of those one-on-one interviews, again, for the purposes of qualitative research.

Lauren: The other one I really liked, and this is probably a little bit more downstream. It’s not quite like I’m starting my user research, but I like the five-second test. It’s like pressure testing a strategy once you’ve devised it. It’s like, “I’m going to flash this up on the screen for five seconds, I’m going to take it down and then ask the user, what was the primary message of this webpage, or what is the service?” The primary service category for this business site that you were just on. If they can’t get it that quickly, your real users are not going to get it that quickly. It’s a cool tool.

Jean: I love the simplicity of that. I think oftentimes we forget that there’s usually just one main goal we’re trying to answer. Oftentimes, it’s as simple as that, is your main message getting across. I love that.

Lauren: Another point before we get into then mapping the journey and what we do with this information, I think I see a lot of groups using is just mining public or private reviews or feedback for information as well. I know, of course, we can all see what’s available on places like Google My Business, and then you’ve got a lot of groups doing, NPS and other types of more robust surveys too. Do you get your hands on those and find those helpful?

Jean: I think NPS as a general metric is a helpful one to keep your eye on. Not necessarily. It’s hard because so many variables impact that, but I’ve seen many brands and many clients use that as their KPI, their main KPI for their user experience as a whole. On the other side of things, being able to access review data and testimonial data is also critical. To your point, that’s also what oftentimes your prospective patients are seeing.

Being able to address those, making sure that any commonly asked questions are prominently displayed on pages that are relevant to that type of user. Those are really good ways to take that body of information and essentially create something actionable from it. I really like that method and it’s free.

Lauren: It’s a free one, yes, minus the time. If you have nowhere else to go, start there. It’s there. It’s in the public domain and you can get a good sense of what people like and don’t like about interacting with the brand. We started with identifying who our primary personas are. That all lives in the data. We’ve got, the primary people that engage with me are mothers, and their children are these ages, and they live in these geographies. Then, we take that subset and we want to understand what matters to them. Then, we’ve done the quantitative and qualitative research. What are we going to do with that information? How do you find it’s best to translate that into a patient journey map that then informs maybe a website experience, a landing page experience, a full funnel social campaign? I think this is where a lot of groups tend to struggle is just information overload. Then you want to take every bit of information you found and put it in a bottom funnel campaign and you don’t really think about where the user is at when they first interact with you.

Jean: I think one of the most important things as you’re going through research is having a goal in mind as to what you do with it to some extent. It’s very rare where someone’s conducting research for the sole purpose of conducting research. Typically speaking, it is meant to either inform a broader project where you are completely rethinking the design of your entire website or you are testing out a new campaign and market with maybe a new target audience and you need information about that. That is when I tend to find research plays the biggest role.

Obviously, there’s always a role for research, but usually that budget is attached to those types of projects. Along those lines, there are different methodologies, of course, then in how you take the goal for a website versus a campaign. Thinking through the broader objective of the campaign or a net new website, those are pieces that I think essentially inform how you go about it.

With a website, attacking it from all major personas that are going to be engaging with your brand online is something that really matters. This is where it’s almost more of that drinking from a firehose approach where you do want to be considering all of your personas, their unique experiences when it comes to your brand touchpoint through digital and figuring out how to essentially make sure that the things they’re looking for on your website are available to them and that their journey is supported, whether that means through their emotional process for getting a diagnosis or through aftercare, that’s where you would take that information and go wider with it with a website project.

In terms of more of a campaign, though, there’s a lot of opportunity to be more granular there, so asking your users within a specific demographic rather than all demographics, that plays a role certainly for more of your digital campaigns there. That’s where you can also test, for instance, “I have a unique value proposition. I have five of them. I’m going to test them against this net new target audience and essentially figure out a roadmap for how I tackle this new audience in digital.

Lauren: Let’s take a specific campaign, Jean, and we understand, we’ve identified our core audience and it’s moms of young children. Just because you’re a mom of young children doesn’t mean that I have a singular message and thing to say to you. They’re going to be at different stages of brand awareness, solution awareness versus just problem awareness. What are you looking for in building a creative messaging strategy to know, when do I serve this person this message? What even are the right messages?

Jean: Absolutely. What we typically do there is go through a journey map process. What we like to do with that process is to zoom in on the user that you mentioned, so a mom who is seeking care for her child, we first build out the persona, the scenario attached to her, and her major expectations when it comes to your brand, how she might engage with your brand. What we’d like to do then is to think through the broader process of, in this case, mom finding care for her child, the action consideration decision, and then re-engagement phase.

When we build out journey maps, this essentially allows us to follow the journey of that specific persona through these different stages. What I like to do there is not only to state the action, but to then think through what is her actual emotion during each of those stages. This allows us to build this map to start to think through, one, at what point is it even organic and meaningful for us to be a touch point. There are certain times where it is not appropriate for us to insert ourselves in messaging. We’ve seen that happen in digital before where you put something in front of a user, maybe at the wrong point in time, and it can actually really upset them or make them feel very negatively about your brand.

As we think through those emotional stages in the actions, it essentially allows you to then figure out, what are meaningful touch points throughout her journey that we can make sure we are there? Then separately, it then allows us to think through, here’s the touch point, here’s her emotional state, and here is the action that we can offer her to be a resource for her. It’s at that Venn diagram of sorts where all of those pieces play together, where I would say we focus on those points to have creative for, to make sure we have assets that appear in front of her at certain stages on digital for, and really to capture her leveraging that journey, leveraging the emotion, and really what she’s doing at each stage.

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. I think that plays well into then the final thing, and you mentioned it earlier, is extracting and knowing what your brand’s value to that end user is at every stage. A lot of brands talk about their USPs, and they talk about them singularly at the bottom of the funnel, like you’re going to act now and choose me because, and then I stand for these things, but the value that you have to bring to her, this mother demo that we’re talking about is going to look very differently if she’s never been exposed and she’s in that research phase.

You’re not going to say, “I have convenient locations, so that’s my USP and why you should choose me.” You’re going to say something like, “I want to empathize with how you feel and just make you feel seen and heard and exchange information for just your view. Nothing else. I don’t need anything else from you at this point in time.” How do you go about extracting the USPs? I think a lot of brands think USPs are just what I can offer, but when you go through a session with a client, what is the right way to go about identifying what is truly unique about your brand?

Jean: That’s a great question. There are a few ways to move forward there. A lot of them do go back to research to some extent or analysis of what you are seeing in terms of performance data afterwards. It’s very hard to move forward and just know, “Here’s the USP we’re going to give someone who is not familiar with our brand in the research stage. Here is something we’re going to give the same person who is familiar with our brand in the research stage.” I do think, by the way, that it’s meaningful to make sure that you’re thinking through that piece too, like brand familiarity, and then again, the journey that we had talked about.

In terms of user research, there are a lot of fast ways in order to get that information that are available. This is potentially an area where if a brand feels really confident in their full body of value propositions or unique selling props, that they can essentially list them and use surveys to force rank. I think that that’s a really interesting way to do so. It’s something that you would never actually see play out in real life, but you get meaningful data when you put it in front of a prospective demographic, for instance, in a survey format to see what they say.

Alternatively, you can, of course, use those interviews, those user interviews that I had mentioned to talk through that. In that case, you might start more open-ended. What is valuable to you at this point in your process? What is valuable to you for the actual decision-making process? Then potentially layer in, how important then is this value proposition to you after you lead with that open-ended piece?

I think what we often do though, at least within digital is we take a look and we’ll put multiple things into market, so, “Let’s test within meta three different value propositions that we think would be impactful. Let’s keep them as very similar assets with essentially only variation in USP, and then see the actual performance that comes back based on our target audience, for instance as to what performs best.” I think that that’s a really easy way for us to move forward. I also think that brands and clients tend to get on board with that best because it’s very hard to argue with that type of data.

Lauren: The one thing I’ll say in closing us out here, when you think about your truly unique USPs, go to Google and search your broad category head term and just look at what the other ads say. If your copy says the exact same thing, it’s going to be extremely hard. I heard a statement that an individual cannot see how one thing is better than the other, they can only see how two things are different, like when they’re processing that information. You’ve got to say something different.

You can pull in themes that to give you parity, but to only have these parity USPs is never going to help you get chosen. It’ll end up being what’s most convenient to click scenario and nobody wants to play that game in an expensive paid search world. I just always I think that’s one of those obvious things that we just forget to do, like what is everybody else saying about themselves?

Jean: One last thing with USPs that I’ll mention, oftentimes I do see clients or brands offer more of a generalization. We are the best blank. I find that while I’m sure that messaging means well and performs to some extent, being able to back it up with data, accolades by big companies or accreditations, those are the pieces that do resonate most. I think the average consumer now takes everything with a grain of salt. I’m the best blank. What does that actually mean? I would say in terms of actually putting something forward, having those data points is really, really impactful.

Lauren: Yes, don’t tell. Every time I read a headline that is a statement like that, I said, “How do I know this. Show me something that tells me this. It could be a testimonial, it could be our outcomes are X and that is better than the field average, or we have 4.9 stars on Google. Find a way to show the user that instead of just telling them. Jean, thank you so much for joining us on Ignite.

For all of you listening, please download, comment, share. Stay tuned for our upcoming episodes. I believe we might have a week or two off coming up for our conference, but it’s been great having you and we’ll see you next time.

Jean: Thank you so much.

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