3-Part Framework for Building Better Personas in Hospital Marketing
If you’re a healthcare marketer, you’ve probably worked with consumer or patient personas before. You or your partners may have built them around search behavior, payer mix, demographics, referral data, claims records, and similar quantitative tools. These behavior-based personas and demographics are useful, for sure—and we use this method at LIFT. But this is a tactical approach—they help you run better campaigns, but they rarely give you a deeper understanding of the patient journey or the lived experiences of the people you’re trying to serve.
At LIFT, we have a second method for building patient personas that elevates the usefulness of personas and the resulting strategic and creative tactics.
We call it building “purposeful personas”—personas that are grounded in lived experience, shaped by emotional truth, and designed to drive strategy and inform voice. They don’t just support audience segmentation or help you target patients; they help you understand them and speak to them.
Here’s a three-part framework you can use to build more meaningful patient personas inside your own hospital or health system.
A Three-Part Framework for Purposeful Personas
1. Foundation: Begin with What You Know
Start with the data at your fingertips. Use demographics, utilization patterns, referral sources, payer mix, or digital behaviors to sketch out initial personas. These low-fidelity profiles are a good first step—they give you a broad sense of who’s engaging with your system and how.
But don’t stop there.
These foundational personas help you see what consumers are doing—but not why they are making the choices they do. And without understanding the “why,” your messaging, outreach, and strategy will always struggle to influence patient and consumer behavior.
2. Immersion: Spend Time with Real People
To build truly strategic personas, you have to leave the spreadsheets and enter the real world.
That means spending time with:
- Patients and caregivers navigating the system
- Internal stakeholders like doctors, nurses, operations, and other staff
- Community leaders, advocacy groups like public health agencies or the local Heart Association.
This part of building patient personas requires an organized approach to empathy. You need to listen, observe, and open yourself to perspectives that aren’t always reflected in survey data or patient portals. You must engage with and see the person you are spending time with as the expert on the topic… because they are!
At LIFT, we call this understanding the truth at ground level. You will learn a lot when you take the time to listen and feel—and you will collect a plethora of valuable data!
To help organize what you learn, we use our proprietary framework: the Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth®. These five lenses allow you to make sense of what matters most in a patient journey or a person’s lived experience. Deploying frameworks like this for empathy mapping helps you organize the observations you gain through your qualitative research.
- Needs – What do they truly require to feel seen, safe, respected, or cared for?
- Motivations – What drives their actions and decisions about health and care?
- Fears – What keeps them from accessing care, or causes hesitation and mistrust?
- Hopes – What are they hoping to gain—not just medically, but emotionally and practically?
- Beliefs – What do they believe about health, hospitals, the system, or their own agency?
When you begin to understand people across these five dimensions, your personas stop being generic, data snapshots, or demographically heavy—they become familiar. You will start to feel like you know them, and you will begin to be able to integrate their voice into your brand strategy.
3. Synthesis: Build Personas That Drive Meaningful Communication
Once you’ve gathered these emotional insights, it’s time to synthesize. Go back to your initial personas—the ones grounded in quantitative data—and begin enriching them with what you’ve learned.
This is where purposeful personas come to life.
These richer personas help you:
- Speak in a tone that resonates emotionally
- Encourage people to play an active role in their own well-being
- Help patients enter the system at the right level of care, avoiding costly overuse or dangerous delays
- Successfully address social determinants of health that may be influencing patient behavior.
- Support informed decision-making about providers, treatment plans, and self-care
- Create trust by using language that reflects the needs, expectations, language, and reality of the people you serve
Don’t stop with individual personas.
In healthcare, individuals interact constantly. Caregivers engage with clinicians. Patients rely on clinical staff and administrators. Parents coordinate with pediatric teams. Spouses champion loved ones, and family members have a voice. These are complex intersections.
To understand these moments, we use a second LIFT framework: the Intersections of Common Human Truth®. This tool helps you identify the emotional and practical overlap between personas—where shared fears, hopes, or needs create tension, connection, or opportunity for clarity.
By identifying these intersections, you don’t just create better messaging—you design better experiences.
From Insight to Impact: Why Purposeful Personas Matter
When you ground your personas in truth, you can build strategies that align with what we at LIFT refer to as The Three Rails of Healthcare Marketing:
- The Financial Rail – You reach the right people and drive the right utilization
- The Strategic Rail – You position your hospital for growth and service alignment
- The Economic Rail – You embed yourself into the health and well-being of the broader community
You stop guessing and you start leading with clarity, empathy, and purpose.
Want Help Getting Started?
If you’re ready to build personas that do more than check a box—personas that actually inform healthcare marketing strategy and communication with human-centered design—we’ve created a free Persona Workbook to guide you.
It walks you through:
- What personas are
- When and why to use personas
- Synthesizing insights into usable, actionable personas
- Dos and Dont’s
- Sample Personas and a Persona Template
Fill out this form and take your next step toward building personas with purpose.
