The Language of Medical Branding: Crafting Clear and Compassionate Messaging
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Five steps for a successful medical or healthcare brand
How to identify your unique value proposition in healthcare (UVP)
Understanding your audience
How to craft clear and compassionate messaging
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At EnticEdge, we are healthcare and wellness business consultants dedicated to helping companies clarify and align around their competitive advantage, which we call your authentic edge. Our team brings 30+ years of healthcare expertise in strategic advising, value mapping, business consulting, client experience, team and cross-departmental alignment, and more, all tailored to helping teams achieve mission-driven growth. Meet with a strategist to learn more!
Why is Branding Important in Healthcare?
In today's crowded healthcare market, both independent medical practices and larger healthcare organizations face a critical challenge: communicating a consistent, recognizable message to the public.
This challenge is intensified as patients are increasingly exposed to healthcare noise — both from medical competitors and, troublingly, from those outside the field offering alluring if unsubstantiated alternatives to proven care models.
Your messaging, and by extension, your healthcare brand identity, matters a great deal beyond the benchmarks set by your marketing team.
Ineffective medical branding means potentially life-saving information could get lost in a storm of conflicting health information. On the other hand, strong branding in healthcare marketing means cutting through the noise and bringing patients in for transformative care.
As you plan your initiatives, dialing in your brand messaging is one of the most important things you can do to further your mission. Keep reading for a primer on how to master the language of medical branding.
What is Medical Branding?
Medical branding, also known as healthcare branding, is how you bridge the gap between who you help and your mission. Think of it like telling the world who you are through every tiny touchpoint, from the colors in your logo to the language in your advertising to the experience in your waiting room.
Each small piece adds up in a patient’s mind to create a perception of your organization. If you are intentional and consistent with these touchpoints, you can craft an accurate image of quality, driving home why people should choose you.
These are the five steps we recommend clients take when developing their healthcare branding strategies:
Define your core values and mission (your why)
Identify your unique value proposition (what makes you different)
Know your audience (who you’re talking to)
Craft a consistent visual identity (your logo and color palette)
Align your team (make sure everyone is on the same page to keep it consistent)
The steps most healthcare organizations go wrong with are the second and third: finding your unique value proposition and knowing your audience. So let’s dig a little deeper here.
Finding your unique value proposition (UVP)
Your UVP, or what makes you unique, is essential for clear and compassionate messaging that gets noticed in a crowded health information market. Without clear differentiators, you risk saying the same thing as everyone else — a surefire way to get lost in the noise.
We help our clients find their UVP through a process we developed called Value Mapping. It involves hefty market research and deep competitor analysis. But if you’re not ready to bring in experts like us at EnticEdge, you can start by thinking through these key questions:
What services does my company provide that my competitors don’t?
What resources or characteristics make my company special?
In what ways does my company interact with clients better than my competitors?
Which unique qualities do my employees or team have to offer?
How does my company create value in a refreshing way?
Understanding Your Audience
The work doesn’t stop with identifying your UVP. Now you must communicate it in a way that your patients will appreciate. This is where understanding your audience comes in. Without audience clarity, your brand will struggle to take shape.
Understanding your audience begins with gathering insights directly from patients or potential patients. This could include interviews, surveys, and feedback requests — plus conversations with frontline staff who interact with patients daily.
With enough qualitative data about your patients, patterns will begin to emerge. You’ll start to recognize similarities in what patients are struggling with, why they chose you over other options, and what their lives are like.
You can take these patterns and use them to create a detailed profile of your ideal patient. We usually recommend clients work with a third party, like our team at EnticEdge, to manage this research and audience refinement process, rather than an internal team. It’s difficult for those closest to the organization to be objective and not fill in gaps with their own bias.
Importance of Clear Messaging in Medical Branding
Clear messaging is the critical bridge between your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) and your audience. And today, clear healthcare messaging has taken on a renewed urgency, no longer just about winning in patient acquisition but about combatting dangerous health misinformation.
Because while healthcare itself is inherently complex, the healthcare myths that gain traction can be deceptively simple. As Abbie Richards, a research fellow at The Accelerationism Research Consortium told the Association of American Medical Colleges, “Misinformation often offers very simple explanations for very complex problems.”
The antidote? Make your healthcare message clear and consistent enough to cut through the noise.
Crafting Clear and Compassionate Messaging
How do you create a clear, consistent, and simple enough message to stand out … without oversimplifying the complexity that makes medicine credible?
Here are some strategies we recommend.
Use Simple and Plain Language
The AMA and NIH recommend that patient communication be written at a sixth-grade level — at the highest. This means that if you gave your marketing or patient education materials to an average 12-year-old, they would be able to easily understand it.
Yet, most healthcare materials are written at a tenth-grade reading level or above, making them too difficult to digest and understand. Chances are, your organization is making this mistake too.
We recommend using the Flesch reading ease score to test how easy your text is to read. Higher scores (closer to 100) correlate with ease of reading. You want to aim for your communications to score at least 60.
If your messaging is still too complex (scoring below 60), here are some tactics for simplifying it:
Shorten sentences
Reduce complex sentences (those with clauses)
Swap big words for smaller words
“Use plain language” may sound easy, but it’s tough for providers accustomed to medical language. That’s why our founder, Julie Weber Ugarte, broke this concept down in more detail during her main stage speech at the 2024 Mental Health Marketing Conference.
Incorporate Empathy and Authenticity
Trust in medical institutions is declining, meaning healthcare organizations have work to do in communicating with their audiences. Starting with empathy and authenticity will be key.
Here’s what we recommend doing to infuse empathy and authenticity into your messaging:
Address patient fears and anxieties before presenting solutions in marketing (i.e. empathize before selling)
Share real patient stories and testimonials (with permission and anonymity) that highlight challenges and positive outcomes
Highlight the human side of your practice by showcasing your care team's expertise alongside their compassion
Use FAQ sections in marketing materials or on your website to address common patient questions and feedback
Be Transparent and Honest
In an era where patients are increasingly skeptical of healthcare institutions, transparency isn't just about ethics — it's strategic. Here are some ideas for how to implement transparency in your communications:
Acknowledge healthcare's uncertainties rather than overpromising or oversimplifying
Be transparent about costs and expected outcomes when possible
Share your patient experience metrics and what you're doing to improve them
Use Storytelling To Connect
Statistics and facts may be most compelling to healthcare industry insiders but may fall flat for the average patient. As Forbes put it: it’s context over content that drives behavior.
Alongside statistics, weave in stories to illustrate the real-life impact of healthcare interventions or the way your organization uniquely approaches healthcare. For example, you might…
Feature patient success stories (with permission and anonymity)
Paint a picture of treatment at your facility
Highlight moments where your organization went above and beyond standard care
Use before-and-after narratives that emphasize quality-of-life improvements
Common Pitfalls in Medical Messaging and Healthcare Branding
As you refine your brand messaging, watch out for these common mistakes:
Overreliance on Medical Jargon
Even common medical terms like "chronic" or "acute" may not resonate with patients the way "long-lasting" or "sudden" would. Save technical language for provider-to-provider communication and choose plain language in patient-facing materials.
Inconsistent Messaging Across Departments
When different departments have their own communication styles, it confuses patients. A cardiology department speaking formally while primary care uses a casual tone sends mixed signals. We recommend you create clear voice guidelines that all teams can follow while maintaining your brand's core message.
Focusing on Features Instead of Benefits
Highlighting your new MRI machine's technical specifications means less to patients than explaining how it leads to more accurate diagnoses and better outcomes. Always share features in terms of meaningful benefits to patients.
Neglecting To Address Patient Emotions
Healthcare decisions are deeply personal and often fear-driven. Purely clinical messaging (like only sharing statistics) that ignores the emotional aspects of the patient experience misses an opportunity to connect with patients on a human level.
The Best Healthcare Branding Is a Positive Force for Health
As healthcare brand strategy experts, we'll be the first to tell you that clear messaging is the foundation for every marketing success, from patient acquisition to increased referrals.
But the importance of clear messaging and strong branding for healthcare, or branding for hospitals, runs far deeper than organizational growth goals. To invest in clarifying your brand messaging is to arm your organization in the fight against healthcare myths threatening your patients' well-being.
Ultimately, it's about making sure vital healthcare information reaches those who need it most in your community — and empowering them to make informed decisions about their health.
Your next step toward crafting clear and compassionate messaging that cuts through all the “healthcare noise”? Find an expert healthcare messaging partner you can trust. Click here to meet with a strategist today and see if EnticEdge could be a match.
