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Your brand is more than just your logo, it’s is the bridge between your services and your patients. It’s the art of representing your practice’s identity: who you are, what you do, your quality, and your reputation. To put it differently, it is the sum total of your patient’s perceptions, opinions, and experience. It is the face, personality, and the values embraced by your practice – and everything in between.
Your brand defines your practice
For starters, branding is way more than just colors and a logo. It includes everything you do, or claim to do as a practice. More importantly, every single facet of your practice should capture the essence of your branding and send an implicit message about you. Whether it be through your social media, the tone of your communications and/or the way you market and deliver your services.
Beyond that, your brand represents who you are, what you believe in and how you want to be perceived by your potential patients. That is why branding is so important to your medical practice.
What should your brand accomplish?
Your mission should be to get patients to see you as a thought leader who addresses their needs or problems with confidence, candor and hopefully does it better than anyone else in the field. Your brand should accomplish the following objectives:
- Deliver a clear and concise message
- Reaffirm your credibility
- Build an emotional connection with your patients
- Generate loyalty and goodwill
- Motivate your potential patients to take the next step
Branding Builds Trust
By establishing your brand and its credibility, you give your patients reason to consider you before turning elsewhere. Research shows that patients prefer to associate with practices with a credible, reputed brand over those practices that don’t – especially in the aesthetic medical field. As your patients get to know your practice (and your brand) better, they’ll start trusting you more. Combining expertise and authority with a great patient experience and a well-crafted social media presence can help build a brand with a high trust factor.
Branding creates an emotional connection
If you give your patients a good enough reason to feel strongly about why they should care about your practice, they have a better reason to get one step closer towards making a buying decision. This is an important point because, as research tells us, emotions (not logic) drives the purchase decisions of most buyers. Also, emotions score heavily over logic when it comes to developing brand loyalty.
Humans are emotional creatures fond of ideas, stories, even products that touch and emotional nerve. Branding should be a means of making an emotional statement every time your customers stumble across your practice or something that reminds them about it. Storytelling should engage your patient’s subconscious mind and build an emotional bridge between your story and your brand.
The human side of branding is something that will always be universally relevant, particularly when all we have is a few milliseconds to emotionally engage with our patients.