The Art of Differentiation: 5 Steps for Leveraging Your Healthcare Brand Identity
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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.
In the competitive realm of the healthcare market, establishing a brand identity that not only resonates with your audience, but speaks to your competitive advantage (your unique value proposition) is essential to building success in a crowded market. With countless providers, biotech advancements, and healthcare treatments available, patients and clients are often overwhelmed with choices. Especially in a care-centric industry, where many companies speak to similar values of compassionate care, but not necessarily with strategic messaging that speaks to the unique value you bring to your target client/patient. So, how can you refine your brand presence to speak authentically to your brand identity and unique value proposition in your market? Well, we’ve got a few answers for you!
This blog is going to explore some critical questions to consider when crafting your brand identity, and building a strategy for communicating your value to consumers…How can you speak to and reach your target audience in a unique way? What makes your healthcare product/service stand out compared to others, and how can you effectively communicate that value in your market? How can you highlight your competitive advantage to stand out amongst competitors?
Learn how to carve out a unique space for your company in the healthcare market, ensuring that your messaging not only reaches your target audience to enhance client conversion, but also builds a cohesive, recognizable brand presence across all platforms.
Understanding the Significance of Brand Identity in Healthcare:
Brand identity (especially in healthcare) transcends logos and color schemes; it's the embodiment of your organization's mission and values, and a promise to your patients and clients when it comes to the kind of care-centric experience they can expect at your company. It's how you communicate not only your unique approach to healthcare and competitive edge compared to market competitors, but also your commitment to the patient/customer. In a sector as personal as healthcare, a well-crafted brand identity can be the deciding factor for individuals seeking care and services when deciding to trust your company and services. So, of course, when it comes to reaching your target audience, your branding must go beyond building a logo; and when it comes a market as saturated as healthcare, it must go beyond the typical values and mission familiar to the healthcare market. Let’s dive in…
Building a Unique Brand Identity:
1. Define Your Core Values and Mission (and keep the patient at the core of your messaging)
An easy way to define, revisit, or confirm your values is to identify what your organization stands for—what baseline values can every patient expect from their experience using your healthcare services or product? Next up, let’s talk mission. What’s the purpose behind your services or product? Why do you offer these services/products, and in what ways do they benefit your customer/patient? Defining and continuing to revisit these foundational elements is crucial to building a strong brand identity. Why? Because your mission and values impacts every aspect of your branding, even down to the colors you choose in your visual brand elements. For example, if you’re hoping to amplify client trust by communicating your company’s value and investment in hiring only the best medical experts in your field, maybe you choose the color blue as it’s associated with stability and confidence. But, here’s another why it’s so important to ensure that every touchpoint of your brand communicates your mission and values to your target audience:
“People will only spend 10 seconds on your website before leaving if they don’t connect to your marketing message.”
With only a 10 second window to connect with your target audience, ensuring that your brand’s presence is effectively communicating your values and mission as a starting point, is critical to peaking your clients/patients interest to explore more!
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2. Identify Your Unique Value Proposition (and lead with UVP in your messaging)
We can’t emphasize this enough: your messaging should ALWAYS speak to your key differentiators. It’s one thing to speak to your values—while your values are important, they might be similar to other competitors in the healthcare sector, so focus your messaging on your unique value propositions. When defining your unique value proposition (or the competitive advantage you bring to your market, ask yourself: what makes your healthcare organization unique? Is it your cutting-edge technology, your customized patient-centric approach, or perhaps your legacy in your regional community? Identifying and clearly articulating your UVP is key to differentiating your brand in a crowded market!
3. Know Your Audience (and leverage your messaging to speak their individual needs)
Here’s the next piece of the puzzle when it comes to defining and leveraging your brand values, mission, and messaging to reach your target audience. Your mission and messaging needs to not only speak to your unique value in your market, but needs to do so in a way that stands out to the right people, or your target audience. This will take some research (or hey! even easier, collaboration with a third party like EnticEdge, who will do the research for you), but trust us when we say the ROI on investing in creating a comprehensive understanding of your target audience, and the best ways to reach them, is worth it. When it comes to understanding your target audience, consider their specific needs, preferences, challenges and what factors impact their decisions in your specific healthcare sector, as well as what digital marketing strategies are most effective for reaching your audience. Coupling your brand identity and strategic messaging with research around the best and most impactful ways to reach that audience is a recipe for successful client engagement and growth.
4. Craft a Consistent Visual Identity (as a way to build client recognition, trust, and loyalty)
Now, we’re getting to the “fun” stuff. Remember when we brought up the qualities associated with color blue in Section 1? That might have sounded a little cheesy, but understanding the value of crafting your visual brand identity and choosing the color palette, typography, and imagery that not only reflects your brand's mission, values, and UVP, but speaks to your audience is, in fact, a crucial aspect of building a successful brand identity.
“Color can increase brand awareness and recognition by 80%.”
Visual elements should be consistently applied across all marketing materials and digital platforms. Since establishing trust with patients/clients is a crucial part of building loyalty especially in the healthcare space, building consistency and reputable brand recognition in your visual marketing efforts is critical to differentiating your company in a crowded market.
5. Align Your Team
Ensure that your entire team has a clear understanding of your holistic brand identity. Another way to foster trust among patients is in ensuring that they have consistent and positive experiences at every touchpoint or company interaction, whether online or in person. The first step? Making sure that your team has a clear understanding of your values and mission, and understands how to communicate them effectively! This is especially true when it comes to healthcare, where building a consistently positive customer experience is a significant part of increasing patient retention, referrals, and strengthening patient or client loyalty.
Building a distinctive brand identity is important to ensure that your company stands out and reaches your target patient/client in the healthcare market. By clearly defining your mission and values, building a researched and deep understanding of your audience and their specific needs, and crafting the messaging and visual branding to match (as well as aligning your team around your brand identity and the best methods to communicate your UVP in every client interaction), you will differentiate your organization and build trust among your patients/clients for increased client retention and loyalty!