This short YouTube presentation by Will Humphreys (part 2 of a 10-part series) explains how to identify a target market when launching a private practice. Humphreys advises researching local competitors and demographics, surveying community/medical offices to learn needs, and then creating a detailed customer "avatar" (a named fictional person with demographics, job, fears, hopes) to focus messaging and marketing.
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Welcome back to the HBA and video two of this ten part series in helping you launch your private practice. In video one we talked about the importance of building a purpose, values and a vision statement as a foundation to your practice. And in this video we're going to talk about identifying your target market. So let's get started. So what does it mean to identify your target market? Well, your target market is another way of saying the people we really want to serve. It's a big mistake for new business owners to want to just take every insurance and serve all the people they possibly can because they're fearful of not being successful when the opposite is usually true. The more specific we are in our messaging to a very specific group of people has a greater likelihood of success. So you want to start by doing research in your area. You want to look at people who do what you do. Even though it might be similar, I promise you it's different. The because you have something different to offer. So you start by looking at competitors in the areas that you want to work. You do research on the demographics. You want to learn about the ages of those individuals, the conditions that you want to treat, what's needed, what's wanted. You can survey other medical offices. You can call and find out about what's needed and wanted in various ways. And then once you've done that, then you want to create what's called an avatar. An avatar is a pretend individual who embodies every trait of your perfect customer. You want to give them a name, you want to give them a marital status, you want to give them a gender, a job, what they like to do. Because when you get into the head of someone that would be your perfect customer, you can start realizing what their fears can be empathetically. You can also start predicting what their hopes and their dreams are. And by understanding those things, we can create messaging that will speak to them like it's just to them. That is how we get razor focused in our marketing efforts is by clearly identifying who that avatar is after we've done research on our target market. Now that you understand the importance of creating a target market, in our next video we're going to talk about funding.
