Healthcare branding can be a great way to connect with patients and customers. It’s also an excellent way to build trust and credibility with potential patients and healthcare customers.
With many ways to approach healthcare branding, some key strategies include:
- Build a strong foundation: A healthcare brand needs to have a strong foundation to succeed. This means having a clear mission, vision, and values that guide everything you do.
- Create a unique identity: Your healthcare brand should be easily recognizable and have its own unique identity. This can be achieved through things like your logo, tagline, and overall design.
- Connect with your audience: Understanding your target audience and what they care about is important. Once you know this, you can create content and messages that resonate with them.
- Be consistent: Consistency is key in branding in any industry. Ensure you use the same visuals, language, and tone across all your channels.
- Monitor and adjust: Healthcare branding is an ongoing process that should be regularly monitored and adjusted. Be sure to keep an eye on your metrics so you can see what’s working and make changes as needed.
WHY IS HEALTHCARE BRANDING SO IMPORTANT?
Branding is essential to the success of any business, but we would argue it’s even more important in healthcare.
Generally speaking, the purpose of branding is to:
- Help clients instantly recognize your business
- Establish your expertise and authority
- Speak to the emotional needs of your target audience
- Build trust
- Attract new leads
You’ve probably already noticed why these elements are essential to healthcare branding: patients must trust their healthcare professionals more than any other profession.
Often in healthcare, patients come in anxious, expecting the worst, yet hoping for the best. They want to know they and their loved ones will be cared for, heard, and respected.
Branding is the first impression. Do you want to feed their fear with cold, fluorescent branding, or alleviate their anxiety with a hopeful, gentle style? That’s the power of healthcare branding.
WHAT IS A BRAND IN HEALTHCARE?
A healthcare brand is more than just a logo or tagline. The overall identity of your healthcare organization encompasses everything from your mission and values to your marketing and communications.
Your healthcare brand should be reflective of who you are as an organization and how you want to be perceived by the world.
HEALTHCARE BRAND VS. BRANDING
Branding is the ongoing process of representing your business in the marketplace in a manner that is consistent with your brand.
While the brand is the foundation, branding is interacting with patients and other providers, identifying potential opportunities, and positioning your brand concerning those communities and news events.
A brand can evolve amid new input; it is organic and, ideally, a crucial part of a wellness resource in the community.
HEALTHCARE MARKETING
Creating brand awareness is one of the most important aspects of healthcare branding. People who don’t know about your healthcare organization can’t become patients or customers.
There are many ways to create brand awareness, but some key strategies include:
- Advertising
- Public relations
- SEO and content marketing
- Social media
WHAT IS THE BRAND IDENTITY OF YOUR HEALTHCARE BUSINESS OR PRACTICE?
On a foundational level, your healthcare brand identity comprises things like your logo, tagline, colors, and overall design. In practice, your brand identity conveys who you are on different healthcare issues and what your practice promotes and advocates for.
As a healthcare provider, here are actionable steps to implement this.
DEFINE YOUR MISSION STATEMENT
As a healthcare professional, you have a personal mission statement and one around the business as a whole. The two should be separate yet complementary. The healthcare mission statement promises to provide certain levels of care, support, or service.
Your personal healthcare vision statement defines what you hope to achieve in the future in terms of a personal impact on your community’s healthcare.
HOW ARE YOU UNIQUELY QUALIFIED?
What is it, specifically, about your healthcare brand that makes you different from others in your field? This can be a unique focus on customer service, a proactive approach to wellness, a unique technology you use or employ, or an innovative healthcare delivery model.
These methodologies are uniquely your brand. Celebrate and promote that in a way that your ideal patient understands and responds to enthusiastically.
HEALTHCARE BRANDING EXAMPLES
The logos of healthcare brands, like Walgreens’ mortar and pestle or the red feathery logo of Cardinal Health (emphasis on the cardinal), speak to an image’s ability to spring a brand’s services to mind.
But healthcare branding is so much more than just a logo.
Excellent healthcare branding has these features:
- Consistency across all channels
- A clear mission
- A distinct look and feel that speaks to its target audience
- Professional design and messaging elements
Let’s use UnitedHealthcare as a case study. Their logo is both a U for “united” and a series of shields, signifying the protection they offer their patients. If you look deeper at their online content, you can see how their chosen words emphasize their mission: to help protect families.
Protection. Family. Help. Unity. These are the tenets of this brand and it’s evident everywhere they connect with their target audience. Just check out their Twitter or even their Instagram.
Branding Is Just the Beginning
Your branding affects everything from your website and social media content to the tradeshows you attend or sponsor and the individuals you hire. Contact us for more details on how we can help you develop your brand and online visibility.