Branding is often misunderstood. While sometimes, it’s considered synonymous with marketing, other times, it’s relegated to creating a memorable logo or a catchy slogan.
Many healthcare organizations are focusing on marketing or rebranding their practices to recover from the loss of trust caused by the pandemic. Branding should be the first step if you want to market your practice. In this blog post, we’ll explain why branding is an integral step in marketing and provide eight healthcare branding best practices to help you regain your patients’ trust.
Why is branding important for healthcare marketing?
Content marketing, social media marketing, PPC, or even website SEO, no matter how you plan to start your healthcare marketing efforts, you need to prioritize branding your healthcare organization or practice. Here’s why.
Differentiation
Healthcare is a competitive market. When the services and treatments offered are often similar, branding allows you to differentiate your healthcare organization and stand apart from the competition.
Branding helps you define your healthcare organization, practice, or clinic’s unique identity in the marketplace. While you can start with the logo, line, and colors, the essence of branding goes deeper.
Branding embodies your healthcare organization’s unique value proposition and establishes how it differs from other healthcare providers or practices. Does your practice stand for exceptional patient care, specialized treatments, or a commitment to innovation?
Branding gives your healthcare practice’s two-dimensional logo enough depth to make it synonymous with what it stands for. In effect, it paves the way for marketing.
Creating trust and credibility
Trust is the number one predictor of why a patient chooses one healthcare practice over another. However, marketing doesn’t create trust. Branding does. Effective branding connects you emotionally with your patients.
Your branding conveys whether your practice stands for professionalism, expertise, or reliability. A well-defined brand also inherently conveys a clear message about your values, mission, and the quality of care you provide.
You begin generating trust when this message is communicated consistently in visual identity and tone across all touchpoints, from your website to in-person patient interactions. In this manner, a consistent brand image across multiple channels gives you credibility and enhances your marketing efforts.
Attracting new patients and increasing patient loyalty
The main goal of healthcare marketing is to attract more patients. Patients in medically challenging situations seek healthcare providers they can trust. A well-established and trusted brand can provide immediate clarity and reassurance about the next steps during challenging health crises or medical emergencies.
Branding also enhances patient loyalty by creating an emotional connection. When patients become familiar with your brand and start associating your brand with quality care, they are more likely to return in the future and recommend your services to others.
A consistent, positive brand experience reinforces patient satisfaction. This can turn one-time visitors into lifelong advocates.
7 healthcare branding best practices to follow
If you’re ready to execute your healthcare practice or organization’s branding, you’ll find eight best practices below. You can also consider these strategic steps, which build upon one another to form a cohesive branding campaign.
Understand your patients
Everything begins with the audience. Who is your healthcare practice serving? Saying ‘patients’ is not nearly enough. You need to delve deeper. A target persona is a detailed profile of your ideal patient or client, including demographics, needs, behaviors, and motivations.
Start by gathering data through patient surveys, interviews, and analytics. Identify common traits such as age, location, health concerns, and preferred communication channels. Does your practice serve older adults and clients concerned with longevity, or does it provide pediatric healthcare?
Understanding and creating unique personas that adequately cover every patient your healthcare practice serves informs the next steps in developing your unique healthcare brand.
Develop your healthcare practice’s unique mission and values
Once you understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and challenges, you can craft a mission statement that aligns with their priorities. Conventional branding steps emphasize developing your unique selling proposition (USP) at this point.
While this works in other industries where businesses compete on unique selling propositions (USPs) like pricing or product features, healthcare brands must prioritize mission and values to build trust and convey genuine care.
The difference between a value proposition and a mission is scope. A business’s USP answers ‘Why choose us?’ whereas its mission and values delve deeper, explaining ‘why we exist’ and ‘how we conduct ourselves.’
Begin by asking, ‘What sets your practice apart?’ and ‘What do you want patients to feel when they engage with your services?’. For example, a family-focused clinic might highlight a commitment to personalized care, while a cutting-edge medical facility could emphasize innovation and excellence in treatment.
Work on your healthcare brand identity
Once you’ve defined your users and created your mission, your brand identity is the next element to focus on. Your brand identity brings your mission to life, creating a consistent and recognizable image that resonates with your audience.
Brand identity includes visual elements like your logo, color palette, typography, and imagery. These should align with your brand’s emotional tone. Your brand identity should stand at the intersection between your audience’s needs (target persona) and what you offer (mission).
However, it’s also important to consider other stakeholders, such as suppliers, insurance providers, and referral partners. These relationships are crucial to your practice’s success. A strong brand identity should communicate professionalism and reliability to cultivate trust among business partners and further your B2B relationships.
Prioritize trust, transparency, and care in your brand voice
While your brand identity focuses on what your patients see, i.e., logos, colors, and typography, your brand voice is the personality. Brand identity captures the ‘look’ of your practice, while brand voice defines how your practice ‘speaks’ to patients, partners, and the community.
Creating a strong brand voice is essential because patients seek reassurance and empathy when making critical health decisions. At the same time, the voice needs to be warm and compassionate enough to bridge the gap between professionalism and human connection.
Also, while it needs to be consistent across channels (more on that below), it must be adapted to the specific communication at hand. For example, a warm and compassionate tone can reassure patients emotionally, while a clear and authoritative voice can build confidence in complex medical discussions.
Create a consistent brand presence
Once all the critical pieces are in line, you can start marketing your healthcare organization. When you start, it’s essential to maintain uniformity across all platforms and online materials to reassure patients and strengthen your brand identity.
One of the easiest ways for a healthcare organization to market itself is through healthcare content marketing. To maintain brand consistency while creating content, start by developing clear brand guidelines. These should include:
- Your logo and usage guidelines
- Color palette
- Typography
- Guidelines for tone of voice
- Messaging framework
Share these guidelines with all team members to ensure every piece of content, whether blog posts or brochures, aligns with your brand identity. Regular audits of your marketing materials can also keep things on track. The same holds if your marketing strategy leans towards social media marketing for your healthcare organization.
Build a branded and SEO-friendly website
Another key place to highlight your branding is your website. Patients increasingly turn to the Internet to research healthcare providers before booking appointments. The key is building a strong website that cohesively uses your brand elements.
Your website experience is an extension of the customer experience you provide through your healthcare services. This is why you want to invest in a branded and SEO-optimized website. SEO optimizing your website boosts all your branding and marketing efforts.
When your website and the content are SEO optimized, they show higher and more prominently in front of patients when they search for services online. This reinforces your branding efforts and propels your brand from brand awareness to the brand recognition stage.
Keep working on your branding
Branding is not a one-time effort. It’s an ongoing process that requires regular effort, assessment, and refinement. Content creation keeps your branding efforts going. Fresh, high-quality content—blogs, videos, social media posts, and email campaigns—reinforces your brand’s presence and values.
However, you should revisit each step of your branding—target personas, mission and values, brand identity, and voice—to ensure that it still aligns closely with customer feedback and evolving trends in healthcare.
Partnering with an SEO content agency can be invaluable for creating continuous content that aligns with your brand. An experienced agency will understand your brand’s unique tone, mission, and audience, helping you produce impactful and engaging content at scale.
Need help boosting your healthcare branding online? Ranq can help
A one-time branding campaign is usually not an issue; it’s long-term branding and marketing efforts that cause healthcare organizations to suffer and need help.
If your healthcare practice needs content that can capture your brand identity, mission, and values and convey them effectively in your brand voice while amplifying their impact through website SEO, Ranq can help.
We’re a content marketing agency that understands the healthcare industry and how to market healthcare organizations effectively. We create high-quality, SEO-optimized content to boost their impact online. Get in touch with us today.