The 5 P’s of Pediatric Marketing: Know Your Audience

Pediatric marketing: A balancing act

If you’ve been around the marketing block, you’ve probably heard the advice to market to one reader, with one problem, about one solution. How nice would that be?

This isn’t realistic in healthcare. Your content often needs to connect with multiple audiences — each with different priorities and motivators.

Pediatric digital marketers play this challenge on hard mode. Your audience includes people with diverse backgrounds, information needs, and connection points to your hospital. And each one needs to feel heard and understood.

How can you connect with them all? First, document who they are.

Key audiences in pediatric digital marketing

When marketing pediatric healthcare services, you’re communicating with 5 key groups:

• Parents: Including all caregivers and family members
• Patients: From children to teens
• Providers: Pediatricians and other referring physicians
• Patrons: Donors who fund research (and sometimes, the care itself)
• The public: Community members who may one day seek care from your hospital

Your pediatric marketing personas should reflect each audience and its nuances. For example, a parent facing a pediatric oncology diagnosis will have profoundly different priorities and emotions than a parent searching for orthopedic care.

Let’s differentiate between each pediatric audience and what might resonate with them.

Strategies to reach pediatric audiences

1. Parents and families

Specialty and hospital care for children is rarely optional – it’s care they can’t wait for. Parents and caregivers are navigating fear and anxiety. There’s a lot of pressure to choose the “right” specialist and health system. The choice can feel almost impossible.

What resonates with parents:

Parents and families want to know if your pediatric hospital offers both the expertise to deliver quality care and the compassion to make it easier on their child. Give them signals to show they can trust your system with their child’s care.

Strategies for marketing to parents and families:

• Use a compassionate tone: Write with empathy and clarity (which is inherently empathetic). Provide reassurance, not jargon.
• Avoid overpromising: In trying to ease parents’ worries, it’s easy to accidentally overstate. Be transparent and prevent inflated claims from sneaking in.
• Highlight expertise: Have your surgeons performed this procedure hundreds of times with positive outcomes? Share that. Parents also appreciate a care environment where every provider specializes in pediatrics.
• Emphasize whole-patient care: Experience is pivotal in pediatric care. Highlight services that go beyond physical healthcare — like therapy dog visits and access to child life specialists — as well as services geared toward the family, like sibling support groups.
• Humanize provider bios: Include approachable photos, personal anecdotes, and tidbits that resonate with parents and children. Maybe a favorite Disney movie?

2. Pediatric patients

While pediatric marketers don’t market directly to children, you can create resources for teens and age-appropriate tools for parents to share with their kids. These tools help patients feel more comfortable in a care setting and help them advocate for themselves.

What resonates with children:

Visual resources are your friend. Create friendly, approachable video and visual content that “edu-tains” and helps prepare children for their visit.

Strategies for creating pediatric healthcare content for children:

• Build familiarity: Share photos and videos of the spaces and staff that patients will encounter.
• Collaborate with child life specialists: Partner with those who know your pediatric patients’ needs best to create useful tools.
• Feature the fun: Highlight activities like art therapy, adolescent and young adult programs, and therapy dog visits.
• Create kid-friendly videos: Offer comforting videos or medical animations to show children what they can expect at their first appointment or before a procedure.
• Speak to teens: Teens want to feel informed and involved in their care. They appreciate content that addresses them as active participants and answers their questions, like whether a parent must be present for certain appointments.

See an example: Watch Children’s Hospital Colorado’s* “What to Expect” video that features actual patients.

3. Pediatricians and referring providers

Primary care providers are often the bridge between families and pediatric specialists — a referral from a trusted pediatrician carries weight. Marketing plays an important role in building relationships with pediatricians, both local and not.

What resonates with physicians:

Primary care providers need to be aware of your services (especially unique or hard-to-find treatments) to make the referral in the first place. They also want to know your system will treat their patients with the same level of care they provide, as a great experience reflects positively on them.

Strategies for marketing to pediatricians:

• Highlight expertise and outcomes: Share case studies, data from clinical outcomes, and research findings.
• Collaborate with physician liaisons: Identify the kinds of content you can create to support them, like slide decks for lunch-and-learns.
• Make referrals friction-free: Ensure your referral process is easy to follow and contact information is easy to find.
• Be active on LinkedIn: Post provider-focused updates, like research insights and new service offerings. Rather than linking to your website, provide key information directly within posts. (This is called zero-click content — learn why it works.)

4. Donors

Pediatric research funding is limited compared with funding for adult-focused research. Philanthropy funds this critical research and improves access to care for all families — making it crucial to engage donors in your mission.

What resonates with philanthropists:

Donors want to see the direct impact of their contributions. They’re motivated by tangible outcomes and emotional narratives, like those in patient stories. Evidence paired with emotion inspires people to donate for the first time and encourages them to continue giving.

Marketing strategies to drive philanthropy in pediatric healthcare:

• Tell moving stories: Produce patient story videos that highlight the transformation, connecting the dots between donation and impact.
• Educate about pediatric-specific funding needs: Explain why children require unique treatments and devices and how philanthropy helps to supply them.
• Create dedicated giving pages: Publish streamlined landing pages with compelling CTAs and outcomes. (These are great spaces to spotlight patient stories.)
• Share gratitude: Celebrate the people who make your mission possible through donor spotlights and special events.

See an example: On Instagram, Children’s National Hospital highlighted a moving story about two families that bonded while their babies were in the NICU and now raise funds together to help more children like theirs.

5. Community members

Families’ perceptions of your hospital start long before they need care. They encounter you in commercials, on billboards, on the news, and at local events. Those impressions shape whether they turn to your hospital when they need services and if they’ll recommend your hospital to someone they know.

What resonates with the public:

People want to see your hospital actively uplifting your community. Genuine involvement and visible goodwill build brand trust and community pride.

How to build community trust in your pediatric health center:

• Showcase community programs: Does your hospital run mobile health clinics or flu shot drives? Highlight these initiatives on social media.
• Nurture ongoing relationships: Consistency drives trust. Keep your community engaged with your system through newsletters and appearances at events.
• Leverage local media and social channels: Share stories and photos of your team serving the community.
• Demonstrate your impact: Share metrics and testimonials that show how your efforts are improving pediatric health in your region.

See an example: In response to historic flooding during the summer of 2025, Texas Children’s Hospital shared resources about processing grief and created the Texas Children’s Central Texas Flood Hope Fund to support the victims.

Aha Media Group would like to thank Jennifer Flax, Manager of Web Content and Strategy at Children’s National Hospital, for lending insights from the field for this article. Our mission to connect patients and families with reliable health information is strengthened by the magic that happens when healthcare marketers collaborate.

*Aha Media Group current or former client.