The Art of Differentiation: 6 Ways to Focus Your Brand Identity as a Mental Health Organization

How to stand out in the mental health field, making it easier for people to access the care they need.

In a world of choices, your brand identity matters in the mental and behavioral health space, which has become increasingly crowded, and options for patients are only growing. Establishing a brand identity to demonstrate to potential patients, and your referrals and partners, what you stand for and why your care approach is unique, matters. To build success, some top priorities of your brand are to make sure that it:

• resonates with each audience you’re trying to reach, 

• has a human-centered and accessible approach, and 

• speaks to your competitive advantage. 

With countless providers, new clinics, online options, and varying treatment approaches available, patients/clients are often overwhelmed with choices. This is especially true in a care-centric industry with many companies speaking to similar values of compassionate care, but not necessarily with strategic messaging that speaks to the unique value they bring to patients.

So, how can you refine your brand presence in the mental and behavioral health spaces to speak authentically to your brand identity and unique value propositions? Well, we’ve got a few answers for you!

Here are some critical questions we’ll explore that you should consider when developing your brand and strategy for communicating your value to potential clients/patients:

• How can you speak to and reach your target audience(s) in a unique way that resonates with their specific situation?

• What makes your healthcare service/product stand out compared to others who might seem similar to the general public?

• In what ways can you highlight these competitive advantages?

• Are leaders and all team members effectively communicating your value (consistently!) in the market? Are you effectively setting and meeting patient expectations?

Learn 6 key ways to carve out a unique space for your company in the mental and behavioral healthcare market, ensuring that your messaging not only reaches your target audience to enhance patient conversion, but also builds a cohesive, recognizable brand presence. Effectively conveying your commitment to patient care and family support will ultimately make it easier for them to seek and accept your help.

Brand identity transcends logos and color schemes; it's the embodiment of your organization's mission and values, and a promise to your patients, referrals, and partners when it comes to the kind of care-centric experience they can expect at your clinic/company. It's how you communicate not only your unique approach to healthcare and competitive market edge, but also your commitment to the patient, referring clinician, and to the community. 

In a sector as personal as mental and behavioral healthcare, a well-crafted brand identity can be the deciding factor for individuals seeking care when deciding who to trust. Emotions run particularly high for both patients and their families in this segment. When marketing your brand, it’s paramount that you remain mindful of your audience’s sensitivities and approach your clients with added compassion and accessible messages.

So, of course, when it comes to reaching your target audience, your brand strategy must go beyond building a logo, and it must go beyond the typical values and mission familiar to the healthcare market. Let’s dive in…

The mental and behavioral health industry is a particularly human-centered space and unfortunately, some negative stigma still exists. The purpose of the majority of organizations within it is to provide guidance and care to vulnerable audiences, and to help them progress in their mental healthcare treatment levels. Mental healthiness doesn’t happen overnight and it is a vital part of overall health, so sharing a vision of care with your patients is key. Your values and mission should align with your approach to mental health care to build a strong brand that serves as a vehicle to get people the help they need.

To define or reaffirm your values, ask yourself:

• What does your organization stand for?

• What baseline values can every patient expect from their experience using your services or products?

And for your mission statement:

• What’s the purpose behind providing your services or product? 

• Is there a story behind why you offer these services/products?

• In what ways do your services/products benefit your customer/patient?

Your values and mission are how you communicate to your audience why they should invest trust and time in your organization. At the same time, they make sure patients can easily access and understand your values, mission, and top value propositions, in comparison to competitors. 

Defining and continuing to revisit these foundational elements are also crucial to building a strong, overall patient-centered brand identity. Why? Because your mission and values impact every aspect of your brand, the work you do, and how your clients perceive your care, even down to the colors you choose in your visual brand elements. With only a 10-second window to connect with your target audience (and we’d argue it’s actually even lower than 10 seconds), 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 and get the care they need.

We can’t emphasize this enough: your messaging should ALWAYS speak to your key differentiators. It’s one thing to speak to your values, but, while your values are important, they might be similar to other competitors in the healthcare sector so it’s key to focus your messaging on your unique value propositions (UVPs) as well. When defining your unique value proposition (or the competitive advantage you bring to your market), ask yourself: 

• What makes my mental healthcare organization’s services or products unique, or why do we stand out? 

• What do our patients appreciate about us and why do they remain loyal clients?

• What do we offer that our competitors do not?

• What do we do better than our competition?

While qualified professionals are a competitive necessity, meaning patients tend to expect that, personalized care teams, a holistic approach, or the accessibility of your service might be your UVP. Identifying and clearly articulating your UVP is key to differentiating your brand in a crowded market!

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 each of your target audiences. This will take some research (which we’ll delve into later) but trust us when we say the ROI on investing in creating a comprehensive understanding of your target audiences, and the best ways to reach them, is worth it. 

When it comes to understanding your target audiences, consider their specific needs, preferences, education levels, and what factors impact their decisions to accept help, as well as what digital marketing strategies are most effective for reaching each audience. For example, the language and messaging you might use toward a parent with a young child seeking support should be different than that used toward a college student. 

Manage the sensitivity surrounding the mental and behavioral health space in your marketing messaging. Your potential patients may have unique psychological or emotional experiences, so to communicate trust and comfort toward them, you must acknowledge and respect their situation and meet them where they’re at with your messaging. It’s a challenge because you’re likely serving a lot of goals here beyond those of your company; for instance, you are likely still having to destigmatize mental and behavioral health, while helping people understand the need to commit time to the proper support and guidance levels they need! It is possible, and coupling your brand identity and strategic messaging with research around the most mindful and impactful ways to reach an audience in need of support, is a recipe for successful patient engagement and, ultimately, company growth.

Some questions your team can ask to make sure your messaging is patient-centered:

• Does your team have clear understanding and alignment on who your target audiences are? Both audiences, b2c (parents, young adults, geriatric community as examples) and b2b (referral sources and partners as examples) should be considered here.

• Does your messaging use appropriate language for each audience’s situation? Watch out for jargon, acronyms, and potentially complex clinical language when speaking to potential patients.

• Are you frequently testing messaging and gathering feedback from patients and partners in order to adjust and grow?

Now, we’re getting to the “fun” stuff. Understanding the value of crafting your visual brand identity and choosing the color palette, typography, and imagery that not only reflect your brand's mission, values, and UVP, but speak to your audience are, in fact, crucial aspects of building a successful brand identity.

Consider the context in which individuals who are seeking mental and behavioral health support are visiting your website. Many are in a state of stress, fear, or are overwhelmed, and are looking to allow external help into their very personal situations. The visual components of your brand can allow you to convey strength, calmness, comfort, or any other valued characteristic of your business without directly including it in your messaging. Be strategic with your visual identity and user experience; and, think about how your brand can relieve initial stress and despair as they easily navigate your site to find the best care option for them.

Once you nail down your visual identity, be sure to keep it consistent 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. 

A few more tips for your team to build a focused and engaging user experience (UX):

• Be open to feedback. To create a strong user experience, take into account real user insights and reviews. 

• Make periodic changes. As users, trends, and technologies advance, update your visual components and UX accordingly.

• Document your design system. To help maintain consistency in your visual identity, construct a concise outline of the typography, colors, design elements, etc. that your team can refer to for UX and marketing purposes.

Ensure that your entire team has a clear understanding of your holistic brand identity - a little training goes a long way. Another way to foster trust among patients is to ensure that they have consistent messaging and positive experiences at each company touchpoint or interaction, whether online or in person. The first step? Make sure that your team has a clear understanding of your values and mission, and understands how to communicate both of those and the key messaging effectively! Some ideas for how to ensure your messaging and mission stay at the forefront of your team’s minds and that everyone can feel confident in communicating them:

• Include representation across all key teams, across all departments and levels, when soliciting feedback to develop messaging, so that everyone knows their voices are heard and the perspective of the entire patient journey is considered. Culling all of those inputs can be a challenge, but when everyone knows they were a part of the journey, it makes a difference.

• Explain why consistent messaging is important in establishing trust and in building a business.

• Organize regular interactive team trainings, focused on your messaging and mission.  

• Use team messaging tools to deliver reminders of your mission and values to ingrain them into daily operations and work.

Team alignment is especially necessary when it comes to the scope of mental and behavioral healthcare, where building a consistently positive and safe patient environment is a significant part of increasing patient retention, referrals, and strengthening patient or customer trust and loyalty.

Perfecting your brand is an iterative process. Your clients’ needs, partners’ expectations, and even your business itself may change, so implementing strategies to recursively realign your brand is a must. How can you continuously check in with your audiences? Build a dynamic feedback loop to collect and act on these external insights. Feedback can come from a variety of methods and sources – here are a few:

• Client and referral surveys can be used as a regular, low effort tool to open your business to patient and referral feedback. Making a form accessible during all stages of a patient's transaction or treatment process (and before and after a referral) can call attention to overlooked areas for improvement. 

• User interviews are a great way to get clear, detailed responses. 1:1 interviews allow you to delve deeper into particular issues regarding the user experience of your platforms and the patient experience of your services. 

• Follow-up calls to patients can add a personal touch to how you collect feedback. It can show your patients a sense of true care and that their experience and opinions are valued. 

• Outcome data from your product or service can highlight areas of friction and needed improvement that can be further investigated to consider changes.

It’s crucial that brand changes are driven by feedback from your stakeholders and not solely by your intuition or internal discussions. For example, if your business caters to those seeking mental health services, then find research and data from them that can educate you on how to optimize your branding to them. It’s easy to succumb to leader’s or founder’s bias and get stuck on your initial intuition, but reviewing concrete data can help. Establishing a mechanism for regular feedback and research can help break you from any tunnel vision, so you can stay attuned to your audiences’ needs and the modern market.

Building a distinctive brand identity is important to ensure that your company stands out in a differentiated way, and reaches your target patient/customer/referring clinician in the mental and behavioral healthcare market. By clearly defining your mission and values, building a researched and deep understanding of your audiences and their specific needs, and crafting the messaging and visual branding to resonate with them (as well as aligning your team around your brand identity and the best methods to communicate your UVP in each client interaction), you will differentiate your organization and build trust, for increased client retention and building a loyal referral community.