How To Build a Successful Brand in the Medical Field
Most people think of product-oriented business when it comes to brands, but you can build a brand in the medical field as well, see how in this post.
Photo by Marek Levák on Unsplash
Operating a business in the medical field can offer great opportunities to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. You can also find it’s a sector that can be particularly lucrative. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that in order to make the most of both of these areas, patients, clients, and consumers need to know who you are and what you do.
As medical fields are particularly competitive, this can be challenging. Navigating this process tends to require a commitment to building not just a practice or a company, but developing a brand. Your success in marketing your enterprise in this way can ensure that you’re able to reach the people who can benefit from your service and gain a prominent professional profile in the industry.
Here are some of the key components of building a successful brand in the medical field.
Solidify Brand Values
For many private medical practices, the primary intention of branding is to improve patient retention. To be effective here, consumers need to feel that the brand messaging reflects the truly ethical and social values of the business. When the company, staff, and patients genuinely share core values, this helps to build stronger, more meaningful, and longer-term relationships.
One of the priorities in this area is consistency. If patients and consumers notice discrepancies in how values are applied in your brand messaging, this can affect trust and engagement. It is, therefore, important to solidify what the brand values are and how they’re applied. If you and your staff can’t easily talk about what the core values are, they can’t be an effective part of your branding.
You can, of course, start by performing data analysis about your key patient demographics. This can help you to ascertain precisely what values consumers consider most important when it comes to interacting with businesses. However, as leadership, marketers, and staff alike must represent these components, it’s important to get the whole team involved in the development process. Establish the key principles upon which the brand is built. Formalize these in company documentation for future reference. Be sure that all marketing is designed to reflect these elements.
Utilize SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important tools for growing brands. As the digital landscape has become more prominent, patients and consumers are more likely to search for medical providers online. As a result, it is important for your business to adopt measures that improve the potential for your brand’s website and materials to be among the first results that appear in online searches.
In general, there is a range of good SEO practices you can utilize to build your brand online. Primarily, your marketing team should regularly research the keywords and terms your target demographics use when looking for services like yours online. This isn’t so you can flood your website with these specific phrases. Rather, it enables your marketing team to create materials that feature these topics and contextually utilize words and phases in copy and HTML tags.
Another component of SEO is encouraging consumers to leave good online reviews for your business. This both helps bolster patient confidence in your brand and allows search engines to recognize that yours is a trusted service. Patients can leave reviews connected to search engines — like Google Customer Reviews — and your team can embed reviews on your website.
Remember that your SEO approach shouldn’t just be focused on ranking highly in general. If your medical business is serving nearby patients or medical facilities, you should also be aiming to localize your SEO efforts. This can include creating a Google Business Profile for your company, using locally relevant keywords, and creating specific local landing pages.
Be Authentic and Transparent
Consumers are increasingly savvy about how authentic the businesses they interact with are. They tend to have little patience for brands that act dishonestly, unethically, or in ways that are otherwise problematic. This is especially relevant to medical brands. Patients and clients want to know that when they connect with your business, they are interacting with a brand they can trust to keep high standards.
This is why it is so important to prioritize your authenticity and be transparent as part of your marketing strategy. While trends can be useful tools for building brands, you should only use posts related to them if these genuinely reflect the values and priorities of your business. Engaging with social cause hashtags and hot topics in ways that are clearly designed to boost the visibility of your business can disrupt the public perception of your authenticity.
Your marketing approach shouldn’t ignore or try to bury the mistakes you make as a brand, either. If members of your staff act unethically or there have been service missteps, own these errors. Use your marketing channels to communicate what the problems are and highlight the steps being taken to improve. This not only shows consumers that your brand is responsible and transparent, but it also demonstrates that you are genuinely prioritizing the interests of your consumers.
Leverage Quality Content
When building your brand in the digital marketplace, content is still king. This is because it is an agile tool that serves various needs related to marketing. It can be used to boost SEO by containing relevant keywords and including effective backlinks. Good content can also prompt meaningful engagement with consumers. You can bolster your credibility by creating posts that reinforce your expertise in specific areas of medicine.
This isn’t to say that just posting any old content will help the success of your brand. You need to be committed to producing high-quality materials. This should be on a technical level, with clear images, high-definition videos, and well-written blog posts. But the quality must also extend to how much value you provide to your audience. Content should answer relevant questions and provide credible healthcare information. Google requires content on medical subjects — termed Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content — to meet high quality and credibility standards.
You should consider, too, that great content doesn’t tend to come from improvisation. Rather, creating an effective content strategy can help you gain better outcomes for your marketing campaigns. It also ensures you can achieve peak quality standards by taking an organized approach.
Start by gaining some clarity on what your campaign goals are and matching these to the types of content that can best meet these. Make sure you carefully plan each piece of content, both for impact and to reinforce credibility. Building a content calendar well in advance also enables you to carefully implement the creation process and arrange posting for when consumers are most likely to engage with it.
Collaborate With Influencers
Influencer marketing is too often overlooked by brands in the medical field. This is because the method is more closely associated with retail spaces or fashion businesses. Yet, influencers are well-designed to meet the priorities of medical businesses. They are great for leveraging the trust they’ve built with the audiences and they can create personalized content that fits the needs of consumers.
That said, it’s important to recognize that you’re unlikely to be effective with general influencers, even if they have a significant follower count. You’ll find that your brand development efforts are better served by collaborating with micro-influencers — those with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers — that focus on lifestyle, wellness, and medicine niches. In general, micro-influencers also tend to have better engagement rates than their mega-influencer counterparts.
When looking for an influencer, it’s important to treat the process as a true collaboration rather than using work for hire. Find creators that reflect your brand values and the tone you are seeking to set for your business. Work closely with them to establish types of content that fit into your wider marketing campaign strategy. Wherever possible, seek to build a long-term relationship with them.
Connect With the Community
The medical industry holds a unique position within communities. Practices and professionals become an intimate part of patients’ lives and often serve families across generations. Medical businesses assist individuals and neighborhoods alike through healthcare crises. It is, therefore, an important part of brand building for your company to emphasize and develop your connection with the local community.
This can involve having a presence at key local events. Sponsoring festivals can be a good start and certainly improves brand visibility. However, it’s also worth playing a more active role. At local sports events, provide booths to offer medical services or advice. Ensure key staff members are present and perhaps provide attendees with products — such as hand sanitizer or yoga mats — that help them maintain their wellness. Wherever possible, ensure these items are branded with the company logo.
Alongside commercial events, be a key part of important community initiatives. Some of these may be medical in nature, such as raising awareness of prevalent illnesses in the local area. Others may be more focused on wider issues, such as environmental clean-ups, soup kitchens, and refugee assistance. Being meaningfully involved in these and talking about them in your marketing communications channels helps show consumers you care about having a positive impact in the area.
Be Active on Social Media
There are various effective brand-building tools that have developed from the rise of the digital landscape. Few, though, are as impactful as social media. These platforms have become familiar and even a central part of many people’s everyday lives. This provides an invaluable conduit through which medical brands can maintain a meaningful presence in consumers’ personal activities and be positively impactful.
To make the most of social media marketing, there needs to be a commitment to posting regularly from the brand accounts. Consider which platforms are most popular with your target consumers and create posts that best suit these accounts. This could include short videos on TikTok that reveal interesting and entertaining insights about your area of expertise. You might create informative images for Instagram that provide brief healthcare advice. YouTube accounts could host longer videos related to more in-depth wellness subjects.
Alongside your posts, it’s also vital that you interact with your followers. Social media tends to be more effective for brand building when it’s treated as a discussion rather than a one-sided statement. Reply to comments and questions your followers submit under your posts. Ask followers for their opinions on subjects you’ve created content on.
In some instances, this can also be an extended form of customer service. Though, it’s important to still maintain high levels of patient privacy. Invite commenters to contact the practice privately if they need to discuss medical history or are seeking specific treatment advice.
Conclusion
Building a successful medical brand requires research, planning, and commitment. Tools such as SEO, digital content, and social media help to both get you noticed by consumers and engage with them. Nevertheless, it’s important to approach this in a meaningful way, basing your efforts on strong values, ethical authenticity, and a true community focus. By establishing strategic methods to bolster your brand, you can ensure your practice or business has a positive impact on everyone involved.
