If you aim to promote the services you offer, you need to understand your customers better in order to create effective promotional messages. It’s easy to make general assumptions about your customer base, which can lead you to use general promotional messages that may not be effective for anyone.

The basic level of understanding your customers is to identify the different groups people might belong to. These might include:

• Age (children, young mothers, young adults, middle-aged and older people)
• Address (local or not local)
• Disease state (asthma, heart disease, gastrointestinal symptoms, mental illness, skin conditions, etc).

If you want to take your understanding to a deeper level, you could look at the times at which these customers visit the pharmacy. This may then allow you to focus specific promotional messages to meet the needs of different customers at different times of the day or week.

Customers are not just the people who walk into the pharmacy. For NHS services, they might be better described as consumers. You have a range of customers outside of the patients who will receive services from you, directly or indirectly, and who can influence how people engage with the services you provide. In addition, doctors, nurses, health visitors, carers and social workers might be described as internal customers alongside the CCG/health board and local authority that might be funding some services.

Once you have a good idea about the services you offer and the customers who use your pharmacy, you can start to create the promotional messages and tactics that will make a difference.