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How To Ensure Brand Consistency Across Multiple Healthcare Facilities

Don’t let expansion and growth dilute your reputation and patient experience.

Let’s say you’ve built an excellent organization that has grown quickly and organically because of your quality of care, strong community reputation, and recognizable brand. To meet demand, you expanded into other communities. You are on your way to becoming a regional powerhouse.

But there’s a problem. Some of your new facilities aren’t finding their footing. Momentum isn’t happening organically, like it did with your first few locations.

And you might also be finding that as you bring on new hires for marketing and digital efforts, brand awareness is declining, even as you “do more.”

What’s going on?

The root cause of this struggle often lies in a single factor: brand consistency. Without a clear plan in place for keeping your brand strong and consistent across all your facilities and marketing channels, the experience and ability to communicate your value have become diluted. As a result, patients are reluctant to trust the new locations without that brand consistency.

If you’re still wondering, “What is brand awareness in healthcare?” this article will teach you how to ensure brand consistency as you expand, with multisite brand implementation.

What Is Consistency in Branding?

Brand consistency means everything your organization is known for is identifiable across every touchpoint. This includes qualities like quality of care, inclusiveness, excellent patient experience, and more — even across multiple healthcare facilities.

Ultimately, maintaining brand consistency makes sure patients have the same high-quality experience — regardless of which facility they visit in-person or which online touchpoint they interact with.

Consistency, Not Uniformity

Here’s an important caveat to brand consistency. Brand consistency does not mean complete and total uniformity. Your brand should be able to adapt across facilities to reflect the specific needs of the community each facility is in.

Is a location in Washington DC, a commuter and transient community? Or is it in Miami, with a large Spanish-speaking population and unique culture? Make sure each facility is empowered to adjust the experience to serve its community, while still adhering to core brand expectations.

The Importance of Brand Consistency in Healthcare

Imagine a patient who's been traveling 45 minutes to one of your longstanding physical therapy clinics, making great progress post-surgery. They’re counting on a new location closer to their home to get the same quality care — without the long commute.

But their first visit to the new clinic is disappointing. The receptionist is absent, so they have to wait awkwardly. Their new therapist is a bit brusque and asks questions that feel somewhat accusatory. Even small touches they hadn't realized mattered — like complimentary herbal tea — are missing.

Your patient leaves feeling betrayed. They trusted your brand and were let down. Their confidence in recovery has evaporated. It's unlikely they'll return to this location, and even if they go back to the old location, their overall experience with your organization is now tainted.

This is the impact of not maintaining brand consistency: losing patients' hard-earned trust. Branding for healthcare isn't just a marketing initiative — it's crucial for patient care and confidence.

How To Maintain Brand Consistency: 6 Key Elements

There are countless brand consistency examples out there, but we recommend starting with these six key elements to ensure brand consistency.

1. Patient Experience

Patient experience tops this list because it's crucial for a consistent brand. If your brand looks consistent across facilities, but patients sometimes feel truly cared for and other times feel rushed or dismissed, the other elements won't matter.

Patient experience is a robust topic that we often spend months fine-tuning with our clients. There can be so much to get into here, but we recommend starting with these four strategies for improving the patient experience:

Brand alignment (making sure every touchpoint reflects your brand promise, from the decor in waiting rooms to the language used in patient communications)
Team alignment (making sure all staff members, from receptionists to specialists, understand and embody your brand values in their interactions with patients)
Dynamic feedback loops for continual improvement (implementing systems to regularly collect, analyze, and act on patient feedback, like post-visit surveys or focus groups)
Current patient experience mapping (creating a detailed journey map of your patients' experiences, from first contact to follow-up care, to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement)

2. Staff Training and Protocols

As your organization expands, creating clear documentation for all facility staff on how to provide care and interact with patients becomes crucial for how to maintain brand consistency. We recommend to our clients that they create protocols for these key moments:

Onboarding (e.g. a standardized onboarding program for new hires)
Role-specific protocols (e.g. for front desk staff, nurses, and physicians)
Ongoing education (e.g. regular workshops around standards of care)

Consistency in staff training and protocols doesn't have to mean total uniformity. The goal is to provide a framework that allows your team to deliver your brand promise authentically and consistently, while still allowing for the human touch that's so crucial in healthcare.

3. Visual Identity

Think of the white background and bright red cross of American Red Cross. Theirs is a consistent brand identity even recognizable from a written description. Other consistent branding examples might be Walgreens, Advil, CVS, and Vicks — all strong visual identities that you can probably envision in your head right now!

Make your healthcare brand identity just as recognizable. Consistent branding includes the following:

Brand logo (the primary visual symbol of your brand)
Color palette (a specific set of colors that represent your brand)
Fonts (the typefaces used in your communications)
Associated icons or illustrations (unique visual elements that complement your logo)

Having these elements of your consistent brand identity clearly documented and shared with every facility is a good starting place.

4. Tone and Messaging

Your tone and messaging are as important as (if not more than) your visual identity for consistent branding. They help you stand for something unique and important to your target audience. Key elements include:

Brand positioning (how you want your brand to be perceived in relation to your competitors)
Value proposition (why patients should choose you)
Brand promise (the commitment you make to your patients about what they can expect from your organization)
Brand voice (the personality and emotion infused into all your communication)
Messaging hierarchy (the structure and priority of your key messages)
Defined and understood target audiences (a clear understanding of who your primary and secondary audiences are, including their needs, preferences, and behaviors)

Tone and messaging are so important that we’ve dedicated an entire article to help you align your messaging for ultimate impact — read all about how to build your own brand messaging framework here.

5. Digital Presence

Your healthcare brand identity should extend seamlessly to patients' online experiences. The importance of this can't be overstated: a patient's journey often begins online, with researching facilities or booking appointments from their phone or computer.

Patients are paying close attention to how your organization presents itself digitally, so your online presence is a critical touchpoint. As we often say to clients, your online user experience acts as a "secret ambassador" for your brand, silently but powerfully shaping perceptions and expectations.

Key digital touchpoints to align with your brand:

Website: every location website or landing page should be on-brand
Online patient portals: use a uniform patient portal, even across multiple locations
Social media profiles and content: location-specific profiles should adhere to the same brand guidelines
Educational resources and learning platforms: blogs and other content shared by every location should be aligned visually and tonally
Email communications: from appointment reminders to patient marketing, your email communications should always feel like they’re coming from one sender — your organization

A consistent digital presence reinforces your brand identity and builds trust with patients across all interactions, both online and offline.

6. Traditional Marketing Channels

Traditional marketing has an important role to play in marketing your brand, including marketing for each facility and community. Don’t forget to carry your brand foundations through to your traditional and location-specific marketing channels. Most commonly, these include:

Billboards: billboard advertising in every community should share a core message and recognizable visual branding
Hardcopy materials: materials given out at every facility should have the same look and feel, with the message adjusted for the local community
TV & radio: television and radio ads should adapt your core brand foundations for screen or audio

When patients experience your brand “offline,” it should mirror everything they’ve seen online and while receiving care: consistent messages, recognizable visuals, and more.

3 Steps for Multisite Brand Implementation

Now that we've covered the key elements of a consistent brand experience, let's discuss how to implement these across your healthcare facilities. Here are three brand consistency how-tos in action:

1. Develop a Comprehensive Brand Guidelines Document

When you're in growth and scaling mode, clear documentation becomes more critical than ever. Every single person on your leadership team and staff needs access to a guide that informs their decisions and behaviors, from marketing strategies to front office interactions.

A Brand Guidelines Document serves as the single source of truth your organization needs to make sure everyone is playing by the same playbook. This document should include:

Detailed explanations of your brand elements (visual identity, tone, messaging, etc.)
Examples of correct and incorrect usage of brand elements
Templates for common materials (presentations, emails, patient forms)
Guidelines for digital presence and social media

Your Brand Guidelines Document shouldn’t be a theoretical tool that gathers dust in a folder. It should be referenced across every department, as a roadmap for maintaining brand consistency across all touchpoints.

2. Standardize Internal Communication and Training

Standardizing your internal communication and training processes helps your brand values permeate every aspect of your organization, which will ripple out to patient experiences.

Consider implementing:

Regular brand workshops for all staff members
An onboarding process that emphasizes brand values
Internal newsletters or platforms that reinforce brand messaging
Mentoring programs to share best practices

When you align your internal processes with your brand, you create a cohesive culture that naturally extends to patient interactions.

3. Use Regular Brand Audits and Feedback Loops

You’ll likely continue to evolve and expand. So even with the best-laid brand consistency plan, we recommend building in brand audits regularly. This helps you make sure that all facilities are maintaining standards.

Use these ideas to create your own brand audit process:

Mystery patient programs to understand the real-world brand experience
Patient feedback surveys focused on brand perception
Staff feedback sessions to gather insights from the front lines

Use the insights from these audits and feedback loops to continually refine your brand guidelines and training programs. The goal is to allow your brand to evolve while maintaining consistency in branding.

Creating Your Brand Consistency

The siren call of expansion is strong, especially when you know there are communities out there in need of your care. It's tempting to dive headfirst into additional growth so you can help as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.

However, as healthcare business and marketing strategists, we urge you to resist that impulse. Our advice, culled from years of experience with branding in healthcare, is this: take a step back and think strategically about how to ensure brand consistency before making any expansion moves.

When you proactively protect your brand, you pave the way for a profitable, successful expansion. As a result, your healthcare organization gets better as it gets bigger.

Need expert guidance to create your brand consistency plan for expansion? Our value-mapping sessions are designed as the perfect first step for aligning your team around your brand message and identity. Meet with a strategist at EnticEdge to learn more!