Women’s health and health tech are exciting sectors with constant innovation, launches and advances – it’s why we love it, right?
But among all that noise, there’s an underrated superpower that can enhance your marketing success – listening.
Unlike hearing – its passive sister – listening is intentional. It demands your full attention and a genuine desire to understand what the other person is telling you. To give a person the space and time to tell their story without jumping in with a solution (that bit comes later).
Hearing versus listening
Consider this scenario: You catch up with a friend who spends the whole time talking about themselves. When they ask about you, it feels more of a pause in their monologue than genuine interest. They’re hearing but not listening, leaving you feeling undervalued and disconnected.
Apply this analogy to your marketing.
Your one-sided conversation about your product or solution leaves your audience feeling unheard. Too much ‘we’ and not enough ‘you’.
How quickly will they drop you for someone who ‘gets’ them and makes them feel better about their challenges?
Beyond listing symptoms and treatment history, women seldom get to share the full story – what happens in tandem to physical illness.
What is the power of listening?
The thing about listening is it benefits both sides.
As a health brand or healthcare provider, you can discover:
- new problems to solve
- new ways to connect with customers
- and new angles for purposeful marketing campaigns.
By reflecting what you have heard in your content, you create genuine connection between you and your audience. And the woman being listened to feels heard, possibly for the first time.
Beyond listing symptoms and treatment history, women seldom get to share the full story – what happens in tandem to physical illness.
Research finds that sharing stories has a healing effect. The narrative medicine movement trains healthcare professionals to interpret patient’s stories – to shift focus from solving the problem to understanding it.
As women’s health and health tech brands, you have the capacity to do both.
How to listen to your audiences
The brilliant thing about women’s health brands is the determination to do things differently, to meet previously unmet needs.
But sometimes running a company takes over and opportunities to continuously catch insights get missed.
Here’s a reminder of how to tune in to customers and service users:
- Spend time with your audience – go to where they are – at live events, online forums, networking groups- and listen to them in equal parts to sharing your solution
- Sharpen your customer service teams listening skills and create feedback loops to marketing and product development
- Make changes in response to feedback and let your audience celebrate their impact
- Create advisory panels to test campaign ideas, products and digital experiences on real customers and service users
- Lean into AI tech to make it easier and faster to spot insights from open-ended survey questions
Are you ready to listen so you can be heard?