As the field of medicine is transformed and expanded every year, medical marketing is becoming more and more important for the growth and success of the clinic every day.
According to statistics, most patients will visit your clinic only if necessary. However, this does not mean that you are their only choice when looking for a place where they can get medical care. It is important for patients to know enough about you and your medical brand before they come to your clinic in order to show their trust in you.
Today we are slated to discuss the main aspects involved in healthcare marketing and branding, including:
- Your “why?” and values
- Brand personality
- Practice management software for branding and a bonus.
Medesk is an assistant for clinic managers, collects and presents complex statistics about the work of the clinic in a simple and understandable way, that makes it easier for the manager to make both operational and strategic decisions.
Learn more >>What Is Healthcare Business Branding?
Healthcare branding refers to the process of creating an appealing and memorable image, name, symbol, or design that represents a healthcare provider, his services and values. Effective branding can help differentiate a healthcare organization from its competitors, build trust with patients and stakeholders, and ultimately drive business growth.
Medical branding shows your target audience what you are worth. It should emphasize the strengths of your business.
Nowadays patients have turned to informed and empowered consumers. As a result, trustworthy branding becomes increasingly important. Consumers of medical services perceive brands as a combination of various factors: prices, reviews, the history of a brand, its values, even a design.
To stand out from the competitors you need to meet your patients’ expectations and deliver a high-quality service.
Effective branding must be guided by research and a clear strategy. Let’s learn how to do it.
5 Medical Branding Strategies for the Development of Your Healthcare Service
Medical branding is about patient loyalty, which has become a game changer for the healthcare industry. Competent branding efforts give you options to shape and improve patient satisfaction and experience. Here are some strategies to boost your performance.
Clinic brand research
Any work on creating branding begins with a thorough case study. Collect qualitative and quantitative data about your services, patients and competitors. You can use patient aggregators, review websites and analytics modules in your PMS.
Ask your existing patients about the criteria by which they usually choose a clinic. Be sure to ask how they perceive your clinic and how they would compare it to competing medical institutions.
Analyze your competitors and their branding and marketing campaigns, interview relevant industry experts, and talk to medical staff, patients, and reception staff. This step will allow you to find out whether a potential patient prefers your clinic to your competitors or not.
This way you will get an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and will be able to determine your next steps.
Brand positioning
It allows you to distinguish your clinic from other medical institutions. To do this, you need to consider the brand of your clinic in contrast to the brands of other clinics. Think about what you would like to excel at in the medical industry.
Develop a clear understanding of your healthcare organization's values, mission, and unique selling points (USPs). This will help you create a brand identity that accurately reflects your organization's personality and differentiators.
It is essential that you are flexible and ready to understand the needs of your customers and rebrand on the fly to meet them.
Learn more about actual preferences of your patients and make right decisions via Management Reporting Module at Medesk.
Learn more >>Bringing positive changes to the lives of your patients and the world around you is your brand promise. The key components here are your values.
Values are the restoration of self for every patient. If a patient has psoriasis or multiple sclerosis, he is looking for brands that fit in with his lifestyle.
A patient wants a brand that restores aspects of his identity in ways that help him to be himself.
What does it mean?
Different doctors have different brand values and identities based on their specialty. For instance, as a paediatrician, you may hold values such as:
- Love for children
- Honesty
- Patience
- You name it.
You should keep in mind that a patient picks a certain brand according to the values he would desire to see in a specialist. They are very straightforward.
- Intelligence
- Discretion
- Honesty
- Transparency.
Healthcare branding is catching up to consumer branding. Informed and empowered patients are becoming more prevalent. They are willing to participate in their own treatment, they want to receive full information about the flow of the disease. Successful brands use all the advantages of patient engagement and retention, including digital health and telemedicine.
Brand identity
Brand identity refers to the aesthetic component of your clinic and includes the style of your communication with patients:
- The tone of the message sent to them
- The choice of words for taglines
- And visual brand design that represents your clinic.
You need to strategically use logos, symbols, colors and fonts in order to evoke an emotional response and influence the decision of your potential patient.
Trust is conveyed through messaging and visual identity.
Your logo, your website, your social media channels, your office entrance should have entire colour coordination and the brand messaging.
Colors play a crucial role in the identity of your brand. For example:
Red is a bold and emotional color that is usually associated with love, care and comfort. In medicine, the red color is associated with the heartbeat, blood pressure, spine and musculoskeletal system of a person.
Blue color is associated with tranquility and relaxation. Like the sky and water, blue color creates a feeling of freedom, spaciousness and harmony.
Green is most often associated with health, cleanliness, freshness and regeneration.
Once you have an established brand, it’s wise to automate some of the visual branding tasks.
With Medesk, you can:
- Change the color of the interface of the platform to the brand colors of the clinic
- Put the clinic's logo on the interface and on the login page
- Add the clinic's logo and colors to its printed documents for patients
- Change the color and logo in the online booking module
- Change the color of the design, its style, and logos in emails sent from Medesk
- Send text messages on behalf of the company, not just randomly.
The use of Medesk intuitive interface doesn’t require a special training. The platform is convenient from the minute. Anyway, we are always ready to answer any questions of our clients and conduct trainings on the program.
Open the description >>Brand content
Even in the field of medicine, content is still the most critical element of a marketing strategy. Word-of-mouth still works, but it must be validated. Convincing, fascinating and, most importantly, useful content is the most enlightening element in achieving success.
Many clinics share inspiring stories of their cured patients. Use this tactic to increase the effectiveness of your medical branding.
Inspiring and life-changing stories of patients whose lives have changed thanks to your services are a powerful way to connect with a large number of potential patients.
Due to the individually customized reports at Medesk, you can always understand which articles and blog materials engage paying patients.
Learn more >>People remember stories more than they remember facts and figures. By using storytelling in your brand content, you can create an emotional connection with your audience and make your content more memorable.
Similarly, you can offer educational content on vital medical topics in the form of blog posts, videos and infographics. These tools not only attract attention, but also allow your audience to engage in self-study.
The brand's story convinces your audience that you have the right solution to their medical problems. It also increases your online presence, credibility and ranking in search engines.
Your healthcare brand experience should be consistent across all touchpoints and interactions with patients. This includes everything from the design of your physical space to the quality of your patient care.
Patient experience
Make sure that your brand meets the expectations and needs of patients, as well as the clinic's ability to serve them. Patients' impressions of visiting your clinic should be the result of complex efforts: from the friendly reception staff and a comfortable waiting room, to the quality of medical services provided.
If you show your patients that you are ready to listen to their comments on the quality of care in the clinic, you will most likely receive useful recommendations. You can ask them to post their reviews on your medical website.
According to a study conducted in 2021, about 94% of patients read reviews about doctors and clinics on the Internet.
Thus, getting both positive and negative feedback from your patients is good practice for all parties involved.
Creating an effective branding strategy for a clinic can be quite a difficult task. When developing a healthcare branding strategy, one of your goals is to establish healthy and strong relationships with patients. Professional branding services will help you achieve this goal.
Bonus: Top Tips for Healthcare Brands
We’ve picked out three interesting things we think service brands in the healthcare sector should be thinking about.
Empathy
A lot of brands talk about being patient-centric, or consumer-centric. But the trick is actually doing it. Design Thinking is a fascinating space in healthcare right now. Very few of the brands in the service sector have really picked it up and grasped it.
It's really about understanding the patient and their experiences and figuring out how you can design better services and support. And also delivering the right things at the right time.
Experiences
Creating better patient experiences has been shown to lead to better patient outcomes. But it's also really positive for the brand and its employees, for their own satisfaction.
On a day-to-day level brands should be thinking about how they're creating more consistent experiences that contribute to their sense of purpose and own ability. And also thinking about how those experiences can be improved on a daily basis.
Empowerment
Patients are taking a much more active role in their own healthcare than they have ever before. There are tools and technologies available to help them accomplish that. So brands in this space should be thinking about how they can use that to their own advantage.
See the patient as a partner rather than just a participant in their own healthcare.
And ultimately the empowered patient should have access to real-time data and support that will help him help himself.
