5 steps to create a breakthrough healthcare brand

It’s not uncommon for healthcare companies to prioritize offering excellent care over marketing and branding. After all, there are few things more important than providing adequate care when a patient needs it most. But in the age of value-based care, organizations are finding that putting healthcare first isn’t enough to compete with the other providers in their area. That’s why branding is so important today.

Introduction

It’s not uncommon for healthcare companies to prioritize offering excellent care over marketing and branding. After all, there are few things more important than providing adequate care when a patient needs it most. But in the age of value-based care, organizations are finding that putting healthcare first isn’t enough to compete with the other providers in their area.

Today’s patients have more options than ever before, and they aren’t afraid to shop around. If you want them to choose your hospital or physician practice over a competitor, you have to create a brand that sets you apart from the rest and makes patients eager to seek treatment from your organization—and the only way to do that is by putting patient experience first.

That starts with turning every aspect of your patient experience into an extension of your brand, including every phone call, email exchange, and even parking lot sign. And while building a healthcare brand might feel daunting at first, it can be simpler than you think.

What is a healthcare brand?

Before we get into giving you the tips, it’s important to really understand why it is so important for your healthcare business to establish itself as a brand. A brand allows customers (remember today’s patients are customers first) to build trust and loyalty. When customers do not associate the purchase of services and products without a strong brand presence, customers lack the necessary ‘anchor’ to build loyalty and engagement with. There’s a big reason that companies and brands spend billions on branding and marketing today so that every experience (hopefully all good) is associated with their brand. The bigger the brand name is, the more people trust that brand just based on the name alone.

A healthcare experience is defined as the sum of all interactions with patients, doctors, and caregivers. It’s about more than just the product or service that you provide. Similarly, a healthcare brand is also the sum of all interactions with your brand but surmised into thoughts and feelings. A healthcare brand is how people feel about your company and what it stands for.

A great example of this is Johnson & Johnson’s iconic “No More Tears” baby shampoo. They didn’t invent a new formula; they simply positioned their product in such a way that parents would remember them when shopping for their child’s needs. Over time they’ve built up an association between J&J and quality products that make life easier for families with young children. This helps them stand out against competitors who may offer similar products but don’t have a strong brand identity behind them.

How do you define your healthcare brand? Your healthcare brand may be positioned in a way that you can define healthcare brand to satisfy the needs that patients have today.

Why do you need a healthcare brand?

As we mentioned briefly, you need a healthcare brand in order to enjoy several benefits that you won’t be able to have without establishing a strong brand. Firstly, a brand helps you to define your organization and set it apart from competitors. In a world of hundreds of healthcare organizations, where competition is only ramping up, it is always important to start differentiating yourself from the competition. One of the best ways to do this is by start emphasizing your brand’s commitment to delivering great patient experiences.

Building a healthcare brand also allows you to create a unique and memorable experience for your customers. Through the use of reinforcement techniques, and honing down your healthcare brand’s mission, the experiences that you do give are going to have a larger impact. It’s the difference between just any old theme park and Disneyland’s famous Disney magic.

Finally, building a brand is the way to start earning the trust and loyalty of your customers. To create a brand that will be trusted, you need to start focusing on providing memorable experiences and services. But providing those things without the backing of the brand often results in wasted effort.

How do you go about creating a brand?

So here are 5 steps for you to start working towards building a healthcare brand that can help you succeed in a highly competitive medical industry. While you may believe that creating a brand can be an extremely tough proposition (after all that’s what many healthcare advertising agency exist for), it doesn’t need to be that way. Just follow the steps we laid out so that you can build your brand in the easiest way possible.

Define your mission statement and values

The first step towards building your brand is understanding what drives your organization and what values it is trying to espouse. The brand is the sum of all your experiences and perceptions of a company. It is about more than just a logo, a tagline, or an ad campaign. Branding is an ongoing process that requires deep thought and strategic planning from the get-go. But you will get nowhere if you don’t understand that in this world of many absurdities, what certainty does your healthcare organization stand for.

It doesn’t have to be that philosophical either. Your brand’s mission could be something as simple as expanding the ease of access to healthcare services in a particular community. And the values that your organization cares about are empathy and compassion. Whatever the case may be, understanding the basic building blocks of branding will help you form experiences that reinforce these very ideas during the entire healthcare journey.

Create an overarching narrative
The next step is to start forming a narrative that connects your products or services with this mission statement and values. If you are a healthcare brand that values transparency then it would make very little sense if your medical bills were opaque and your customer complained about being confused about their payment processes.

That’s why you need to think carefully about how the products and services that you provide and how can reinforce your brand, and not be incongruent with it.

Develop a visual identity
Finally, you need to start developing a visual identity that will tie your entire brand in. While you can go very detailed about the narrative and mission that you are trying to emphasize through your visual identity, you just need to again ensure that there are no incongruencies between the visual storytelling and the rest of your business. You can take the help of logos, color palettes, and more that can not only set your brand apart from the competition (an important factor) but also tell the story of your brand in a short span of time.

Brand Implementation
Now that you’ve built your brand, it’s time to make your healthcare brand a reality. This is the process of taking your brand and turning it into an actual asset that patients, doctors, nurses, and other stakeholders can relate to.

It’s during this phase that you’ll be able to take what you’ve learned about your target audience and apply it to the actual implementation of your healthcare branding.

You will need to start implementing your brand through processes like:

The design of collateral materials like pamphlets, business cards, or other marketing material
The layout of websites or mobile applications
How medical practitioners are trained on how to speak about their practice in terms of its overall mission statement

Brand Management

When it comes to branding, marketing, and managing all the things that come with these, healthcare organizations face unique challenges. The healthcare industry is highly regulated. While regulation can help protect consumers from unfair business practices or unsafe products, it also requires a lot of time and resources for compliance—and those are two things you don’t have much of when trying to build a new brand image!

Plus if your brand doesn’t fit into existing regulatory standards (like HIPAA), then you will likely have difficulty getting new patients on board unless they feel confident that their information will remain safe at all times while using your services.

The healthcare industry is very diverse and has many different segments within it including Long Term Care Facilities (LTCF), Behavioral Health Care Facilities (BHCF), Medical Clinics/Offices, etc. Each segment operates differently due to differences in how care providers work together versus how individual physicians work independently; some operate exclusively through partnerships whereas others could not operate successfully without them. Each segment needs its own particular solutions when it comes to branding and marketing the brand in a proper way.

The healthcare industry is under constant change. Technology plays an important role here by helping providers deliver better care faster than ever before but also creating new challenges such as access issues or lack thereof depending upon where patients live relative. Your brand needs to understand how it will be interacting with technology and then adapt accordingly.

All of these factors come under the larger umbrella of brand management. It is only through brand management that healthcare brands can find their way to longevity and success.

Conclusion

Healthcare organizations need to understand that it is essential to have a brand, and the process of creating one can be challenging. However, they also need to know that it is possible. The key is to understand your business and its goals, then build a plan for success. By taking the time to learn about what makes them stand out as well as their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, companies can create a strong marketing strategy that will help lead them in

The healthcare industry is extremely competitive. When other industries are seeing a decrease in competition, the healthcare industry is seeing an increase. To survive and thrive within this environment, you need to be innovative and bold. This can only be achieved by having a strong brand identity that connects with your customers emotionally.

BraveLabs offers custom digital healthcare marketing solutions that help healthcare brands superpower their branding efforts and find long-term success.