Every medical writer - in an agency setting or freelance - has faced this scenario. You've received a brief from your boss or your client, but it has no description of the audience you're writing for. Is it cardiologists? Brand new nurses? Does the audience work in a specific setting?
You have no idea - and more often than not, this leaves your content a little lacking by no fault of your own. Knowing our audience and using storytelling techniques to draw that audience in are key to crafting compelling content, whether patient education materials or continuing education activities.
Let's talk about how to better understand who we're writing for especially if information about our audience is lacking, and how we can effectively get our message across.
Knowing Your Audience as a Medical Communicator
Medical writers often face the challenge of managing multiple accounts at medical communications agencies or handling multiple clients as freelancers. We're rarely as embedded in an account as the person writing the brief for us. So, our first tip is simple: remember to ask your client or account manager who your audience is. it.
If the client or the brief lacks clarity, there's more you can do to familiarize yourself with an audience.LReview other materials that your audience would use. If you're writing a paper for submission to a specific journal, look at other papers that journal has published and take note of their editorial guidelines.
Take note of the level of detail the audience expects and the terminology they use. This can help you establish what your audience is likely to know already (saving you words explaining concepts) and what your audience will want to know from your article.
We've said before that writing CME requires empathy, and this is true for any type of medical writing. Exercise that empathy by putting yourself in your audience's shoes.
Now, ask yourself:
- What is my audience hoping to learn from this piece?
- Why is my audience interested in this piece of work at all?
- What is my audience struggling with?
With these questions, identify what about your piece - be it a medical journal article or consumer health blog - will interest your audience the most. This can help you hook readers at the beginning and become a common thread throughout your piece. You can build your story around this thread and keep your audience engaged.
Speak with Subject Matter Experts
Subject matter experts (SMEs) play an invaluable role in medical communications. You, the writer, can speak to specific healthcare professionals to better understand how they function within their professional environment. SMEs are most helpful for you as a medical writer when you ask specific questions.
For example, instead of asking, "What do you do?" Or, "What do you do daily?" Ask, "Is this how you would act in this situation with a patient with a specific disease? If not, what would you do?"
Specific insights from healthcare professionals can help medical writers understand clinical practice more clearly, particularly if they haven't had much exposure, and help you understand your audience better.
Download the WriteCME Roadmap to start your medical communications journey in CME.
Engaging Your Audience with Storytelling
Once you understand exactly who you're writing for, keep them engaged. Whether you're writing for physicians or patients, it's easy to convey scientific information in a cut-and-dry way. However, people respond best to narrative - no matter what you're telling them. A compelling story triggers a positive chemical reaction in the brain, making it more likely that your audience will want to stay engaged with your content.
Writing a good narrative can be difficult, and it's definitely a learned skill, so here's a framework for you to work with as you continue to learn.
Five-Element Story Structure
You've probably heard of these before, but let's revisit them and what they look like in a clinical setting.
- Exposition. This is setting the scene and introducing characters. Examples include patients in a clinic or patients in need of vaccine access in a country without the resources to distribute a vaccine.
- Rising Action. Rising action introduces the conflict of your story, often through the choices your characters make. In medical content, this could be unmet patient or clinical need.
- Climax. The climax is your story's "turning point", when the action so far comes to a head. For example, you make a decision about how to meet your patient's need. This is where the fate of characters is typically revealed.
- Falling Action. Falling action involves tying up loose ends and resolving any remaining conflict. In medical content, this might look like ongoing investigations and implementation of new safety measures to understand the unmet need and potentially prevent it from recurring.
- Resolution. The resolution is the end—a good chance to show the next steps or peek into the future. In medical content, this is a good time for the audience to think about unanswered questions and future research.
As you consider how to tell a story in your medical content, it's important to consider everyone involved - not just the audience. For example, if you're writing CME materials for physicians, also consider the patients whom these materials will impact. If you’re writing a CME needs assessment, you’re writing for multiple audiences including both your client and the end reader—often an Independent Medical Education professional in a pharmaceutical company.
The Future of the Medical Communications Industry
Whenever we talk about medical writing best practices, we have to talk about how these practices are changing, too. As we continue to write story-driven materials for the growing medical industry, expect to see:
- AI used for research purposes
- More omnichannel communications
- Microlearning
There's no doubt about one thing: the need for medical communicators isn't going anywhere. Medical communications is an ever-evolving field, and there is always a place for writers in CME, patient education, and beyond.
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