How to Build a Powerful Brand for Your Clinic

What is branding in healthcare?  

Healthcare branding is essentially the process of shaping how your clinic is perceived by your competitors, your team, and most importantly, your patients. 

Building a powerful brand ensures your clinic is perceived in a desirable way, for example, as a trusted and experienced industry leader. 

Why do clinics need a branding strategy? 

Nowadays, patients are more empowered with much more options. Branding for your clinic is more important than ever.  

A growing number of healthcare providers that have already adopted direct-to-consumer branding approaches offer patients numerous options and solutions to their healthcare needs.

It is thus essential for your clinic to differentiate itself from the competitors, to stand out in the crowded marketplace.  

Benefits of a strong clinic brand

How to build a powerful clinic brand

But cultivating a powerful brand is more than just tagline and logo. You need to know your clinic’s brand and how you want it to be perceived, build a cohesive system with branding strategy and positioning that evoke the elements and feelings you want to associate with, and most importantly, execute the consistent message across your brand’s touchpoints.

Do the following, and you will be well on your way to building a powerful brand for your clinic. 

• Conduct brand research to know your clinic’s brand perception 

• Identify the factors that make your clinic stand out 

• Define how you want to be perceived 

• Communicate your brand identity 

• Build your brand awareness consistently 

Conduct brand research to know your clinic’s brand perception 

Any successful branding practices are based on facts. Before making any move to rebrand your clinic, conduct in-depth brand research to know the market and how your clinic is already perceived.  

Do an audit of your brand’s top competitors. You need to understand your market so as to grasp meaningful opportunities for differentiation. 

Conduct online surveys and in-depth interviews with your staff and patients to know how the stakeholders perceive and experience your clinic, which is also the definitive measure of your brand’s performance.

Remember to get insight into what your patients perceive to be your highlights and uniqueness. These can be key elements of your branding that make your clinic stand out amongst competitors. 

Based on the evidence gathered in brand research, rebrand your clinic in a way that better suits it. It is much better than struggling to maintain a brand that doesn’t seem right to you. 

Identify the factors that make your clinic stand out 

After thorough research, take a step back and analyze your clinic to identify what makes your clinic stand out from the rest. 

You might have some solid highlights gathered from your patients. Besides those, start with the reason why your clinic even exists in the first place.  

Bear in mind your patients’ demographics. You should always identify the patients you set out to serve and know your current as well as potential patients. Your differentiating factors should always attract them, meet and even exceed their expectations first. 

Look for elements that make your clinic truly unique in this field and industry. Are you a specialty clinic focusing on improving total wellness for all your patients? Do you go beyond the norm in diagnosing and treating your patients’ conditions?  

After you pinpoint the unique aspects and factors of your clinic, interweave those elements into your brand presentation.  

One successful example is Mayo Clinic that has built itself a strong services brand and a leading healthcare brand in the U.S. It clearly identifies the factors that make it stand out as shown on the home page of its website. While the factors clearly convey the brand as a strong service provider, they are also based on facts.

Define how you want to be perceived 

Remember your clinic’s brand is a promise to your current and potential patients – a promise that’s different from your competitors. 

With the uniqueness of your clinic in mind, set your brand strategy and positioning to define your promise. The framework of brand strategy and positioning should communicate who your brand is, why it exists, and how it engages with the patients.  

The goal of positioning is to define the fundamental building blocks of your brand, and the strategy is the process of charting a course for success.  

What is critical to strategy and positioning is building a brand compass around your brand’s core messaging. It requires defining elements such as your clinic’s purpose, vision, mission, and values.  

For example, Mayo Clinic clearly articulates its mission, vision, and values on the “About Mayo Clinic” page on its website. While it defines itself as the medical centre that focuses on integrated clinical practice, education, and research, it also emphasizes its “patients’ needs come first” value, reinforcing its brand image as a strong medical service provider.  

With core messaging in your head, you can thus create a brand compass with which to navigate the road ahead. Make sure your team is also highly aware of the core messaging of your brand.  

In addition to core messaging, strategy and positioning require you to figure out elements like your brand’s personality and culture, key differentiators, and the tenable marketplace position to stake out. 

Communicate your brand identity

Your brand identity is what many patients envision when they think of your clinic, which should be deeply informed by the research and strategy that you’ve already done.  

It is important that your brand identity presents your brand’s vision, mission, and personality while differentiating your clinic from competitors.

The first thing people see always plays a critical role in triggering their feelings towards your clinic. Visual elements, including logo, color palette, typography, and iconography, thus embody your brand identity in the first place. Your design of the visual elements should always look professional and promote a sense of trust among your patients.

For example, the Q & M Dental, their distinctive brand identity is being widely accessible throughout Singapore with more than 70 clinics in Singapore, serving a wide majority of Singapore’s population. Their brand name - Q&M, or 全民 in Chinese, means ‘all people‘, further enhances their identity as an easily accessible clinic for all populations.

Besides visual elements and brand names, you should have a larger continuum in which your brand identity exists, known as broader brand expression. For example, the language in addition to the visual imagery on your website, your marketing collaterals, and social media posts should always communicate your brand’s value propositions. Meanwhile, make sure your brand expression captures your brand’s essence.

The easy first step to communicate your brand identity is to have an immediately recognizable logo and tagline that are presented consistently online and offline. Although your logo and tagline are not the only embodiment of your brand identity, they convey information about your clinic to your patients with a single glance. 

Before launching the design, test your intended logo design and tagline with several of your trusted existing patients to understand how those elements might influence their perception of your clinic.

Build your clinic brand consistently

A robust branding strategy depends on how you create a consistent offline and online presence across all websites and social media platforms.  

The messaging of your marketing collaterals, website, social media accounts, and blog posts should all align with your brand.  

Not only should visual elements follow the messaging, but the language and tone must also be consistent, strong, and professional. Altogether, they present your clinic as a trustworthy expert in the field that patients can rely on. 

Meanwhile, don’t forget to use social media platforms to consistently interact with your current and potential patients and project your clinic as an industry leader. Check out our complete guide on social media marketing for clinics that offers you great insights on how to engage your patients meaningfully online!

When you are building your brand awareness consistently, be careful when dealing with trends. Don’t let your clinic’s brand become a slave to trends.  

Your clinic can participate in trends, but only when it adds value to building meaningful brand awareness or is part of your brand values. Don’t participate or comment on a trend simply for traffic.  

Conclusion

Undeniably, today’s healthcare industry is increasingly competitive. Branding your clinic becomes essential to stand out from the crowd and develop lasting relationships with your patients. 

There is no shortcut to building a powerful brand for your clinic. Always remember the key is to differentiate your brand from your competitors. Use appropriate positioning strategies and tell your brand’s stories consistently.

Let’s build a powerful clinic brand together!