Let me be honest the ideas here in terms of application might be mine , but this models been developed by Mr. Avinash Kaushik , author of Web Analytics an Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0 . i haven’t had the privilege of reading these books as of yet however i do frequent his blog Occam’s Razor and i would suggest that having read this do visit his site. Its a highly intelligent and informative blog and a must for all marketers. You could visit his site before hand and develop your own thoughts about the model too.
So lets get started whats the SEE-THINK-DO framework all about.
We all know how as marketers we view the purchase decision / Funnel , be it the AIDA concept (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) or the CAB (Cognition, Affect, Behaviour) or any other but that’s basically it. I would say See – think- Do is the same thing but its thinking from the consumer’s point of view. The other two are very marketer oriented terminology, and believe you me terminology at times can change our thought and behaviour. Also when it comes to Healthcare other than maybe some cosmetic procedures and maybe birthing , the desire is usually amiss. However the decision funnel still retains the same shape. We as individuals do consider which hospitals we would like to go to, be it consciously or subconsciously.
So in the SEE phase are people who will require healthcare, specifically the specialities you cater too. this is a very broad category, and a very large part of the population will belong to this category . The purpose of this categorization is not inclusion but rather exclusion people who will not use your services must be excluded. So maybe a generalist target population could be considered here
The Think phase has people who use healthcare services and are thinking about it, this is evident by even a slight intent . They necessarily are not planning to use healthcare services immediately but think they might do so sometime in the future. this is a part of the see population. So might be people who are health aware , who seek out information regarding health.
The Do segment are people who are actively seeking healthcare providers. Who are shopping for care and are in need for it. this is a subset of the think people eg If it’s an elective procedure we actively assimilated information, listen talk and shop.
So we have these stages what next. The whole point to this framework is that it allows for us to consider each of these segments in our marketing plan, it helps us in creating content which is specific and yet broad enough for these categories. It allows us to select channels which would be most effective. Now remember this is not a prescriptive frame of reference like all frames of references its basically a concept an idea to increase your understanding of your customer and for optimising your marketing plans and strategies to maximise benefit. The key word here is yours.
Basing our Content Strategy around The Framework
Before we go to market and decide on what channels we will engage in its important to have a definitive content strategy based around the Framework. If your call to action at all times is buy buy buy , then you are catering to a very specific do segment. This is a small segment and you would lose out on the opportunity to engage the Think and to attract the SEE people. Thus your content the way it’s housed or structured needs to be as broad and as specific as possible . This is much easily achieved on a website , however offline media is a slightly different ball game however , i do believe depending on whom you are reaching out to there are components that can be added to your print advertisement or bill board which do more than just cater to one single segment.
Eg Heart Care, lets say we are targeting a very specific cardiac care population, while you run a general solid copy introducing care “1000,000 hearts beat under our care”, for the see public you could also integrate a Facebook / blog address for the think population to connect with our stories visit and integrate a website and telephone for the do population simple facts but are we doing them. Digital media provides us with a much better opportunity to create these touch points and must be considered while creating our content structure and design. And then there could be specific campaigns which cater individually to each of these segments individually for the see stage the campaigns will be brand oriented, for the think stage they could be narrower speciality or disease oriented and for the do stage they could be action oriented and need to be further narrowed down .
Basing our Channel strategy around the framework.
We need to consider what channels are we looking at to help us in reaching out to our target population and more importantly which segment are we looking at reaching out to through what channels. these will dictate the creatives we go ahead with.
Also probably an important thought here would be can we actually increase the utility for a particular channel to go across multiple segments through maybe changing our content.
The end result should be more effective campaigns and better utility of channels.
Eg again ill take it offline bill boards when we enter a market at times you might have basic billboards which initially are for the see population but with time these can be effectively used to engage.
Similarly your keyword clusters would be perfect for the same , broader keywords for the see population and narrower keywords for the think and do population.
Basing our measurements around the framework
The third stage would be to measure for what we are trying to achieve. Somehow we tend to focus on one core measure and that is conversion. Thats all we talk about that’s all we know that’s all we measure against. But as was stated before if the core purpose of the campaign is to target the see population then how can we expect them to convert , conversions might happen and probably will happen but in exceptional cases in this case conversions is not the right measure. As Avinash states we cant really judge fish on their ability to climb trees, lets measure them on their ability to swim. The major concern here is that perceived failure leads to squashed campaigns and then there’s nothing left to do we and we miss out on an opportunity to engage a potential customer because we were measuring for conversion. So its important to develop metrics for each of these stages
eg See – brand awareness, increased community, site visits, conversations
Think – interactions, query resolution, blog hits, call ins , page depth , conversations,
Do – the part we love conversions, revenue, cost per conversion an likes.
Well now you have the tool to measure the performance of any particular campaign and if id doesn’t work kill it and if it does hit it. Also i think some of these considerations can then further be applied to other sales channels such as doctor referrals, what stage is the doctor at and what particular strategy we will have for him. Is that not brilliant would it not naturally work much more efficiently.
So do try it and see of t works, whats there to lose if we engage with our customers as we do currently im certain a time will come where nothing will work and people would just be put off because we are not sending out a message that they are ready for. Anyway with social media and other reciprocal channels coming in people are selecting what they choose to listen to , so lets base our campaigns around our clients needs rather than ours and lets cater to their selective attentions.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are my own and are not meant to be derogatory to any institution or organisation. These are just my thoughts and these are open for further discussion and development. Please do comment and share and let’s get some universal cognition into this. Thank you for your patience and tolerance.
Hospital Speak 