Healthcare branding that drives digital success

Article Highlights:

1. Success in healthcare marketing requires a sophisticated blend of cutting-edge digital campaigns and traditional approaches.
2. The best healthcare brands understand that patients are making personal decisions about their health, and those patients want to work with organizations that are transparent, trustworthy, consistent, and safe.
3. Healthcare branding is in constant flux, and what may have worked last year might not be as impactful this year
4. Healthcare brands that measure and invest in retention as carefully as acquisition recognize that lifetime patient value far exceeds the value of a single visit.
5. The right marketing partner can transform healthcare brands from competitors into category leaders

Leading healthcare organizations clearly understand the value of branding in healthcare to drive patient growth and revenue. Success in healthcare marketing requires a sophisticated blend of cutting-edge digital campaigns and traditional approaches to engage patients and deliver better results. Luckily, it’s not a huge lift to start incorporating some of the healthcare branding strategies that work for the biggest brands put there. We’ll break down the tactics that are helping leading brands stand out and outline how to make them work for your healthcare brand. 

What makes certain healthcare brands stand out? 

• Data-driven patient acquisition: The brands seeing the biggest returns understand they must leverage multiple sources of analytics to identify, attract, and convert the right audience. This includes tracking metrics from social media, local search, in-person events, traditional media, and more. Additionally, comprehensive dashboards tailored to the organization help to deliver insights across locations and campaigns, allowing for quick decision-making and ongoing optimization. Since marketing dollars only go so far these days, using multiple data sources ensures healthcare brands can target the right audience, act on predictive demand forecasts, and identify growth opportunities quickly. When brands use data, campaigns and strategies are based on actual performance, not assumptions, which can quickly point organizations in the wrong direction.  
• Personalization at scale: Closely connected to building trust, personalization at scale helps to foster a community, rather than making patients a numbers game. With help from AI and other marketing tools, healthcare brands can deliver personalized experiences to patients with much less work than ever before. The experience could be anything from sending specific health tips to different populations, customizing the patient portal, or sending birthday or special date messages, rather than just including a personalized naming convention on an audience-wide email. Personalization at scale does not mean the human touch is absent. It’s still important for your marketing team to understand patient needs, preferences, and challenges so they can tailor the content and experience appropriately, but automation is key to scaling. 
• Building brand equity through consistent brand identity: Brand equity is the process of creating value and recognition for your brand. It can be measured in different ways, but it is built through consistency, recognition, trust, and differentiation in a crowded marketplace. For multi-location healthcare brands, that means maintaining a sense of individuality at the local level, all while ensuring that each practice aligns with unified brand standards. No matter the layers of your organization, you’ll have to build a brand architecture that accounts for different locations and patient needs. Strong brand identity extends beyond logos and color schemes to encompass every patient interaction, especially in hospital branding. It’s what makes a large healthcare organization instantly recognizable for consistent standards in patient care. 
• Trust and communication: Healthcare is 100% about trust. Any brand not building trust with heir audience is liable to fail quite quickly. The best healthcare brands understand that patients are making personal decisions about their health, and those patients want to work with organizations that are transparent, trustworthy, consistent, and safe. Healthcare brands that can show community engagement over profit are those that will capture the largest market share. As a brand, credibility and trust are built through sharing educational information, showcasing real stories and physician or professional insights, and addressing patient concerns upfront and openly. Overall, the goal for any brand these days, healthcare or not, is to be more than just an “x” service or product provider; it’s to be a trusted source of valuable information and connection.  
• Focus on retention: The most successful healthcare brands focus on retaining current customers to build sustainable and consistent growth. It costs way less to retain a current patient than it does to attract, engage, and convert a new one. This requires an investment in everything outlined above, plus ongoing communication, incorporating patient feedback, and continuously improving the patient experience. Digital tools help large organizations implement retention at scale through loyalty programs, patient satisfaction monitoring, and seamless scheduling that makes it easy to return. The most successful healthcare brands measure retention as carefully as acquisition, recognizing that lifetime patient value far exceeds the value of a single visit.

How to get started on the most impactful healthcare branding strategies

You do not have to reinvent the wheel to apply some of the healthcare branding guidelines above. However, it is important to understand that healthcare branding is in constant flux, and what may have worked last year, might not be as impactful this year. That is why it’s important to constantly monitor and adjust as you go because your audience and your brand are unique and require a unique approach. 

1. Audit your current patient acquisition channels and double down on the ones that work and evolve your approach on those that don’t. 
2. Invest in performance metrics and dashboards that deliver relevant metrics in an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand format that can be shared across teams or locations.
3. Assess your brand identity, checking for consistency, brand equity, brand awareness, and presence.
4. Take a close look at communication strategies and platforms with the understanding that each requires something slightly different, and you should be focusing on the platforms that are most relevant to your audience.
5. Review retention metrics with the goal to make more patients long-term customers.

The brands that are winning in healthcare are those that never lose sight of the human element at healthcare’s core, all while combining traditional marketing and digital sophistication.

Contact MDG for more information about our healthcare marketing services. We’ve helped leading organizations drive patient growth and scale sustainably.