The medical practice provides essential services and therefore, you may feel squeamish about going all out to commercialize your medical practice. Unfortunately, there is stiff competition, irrespective of your field or specialty. Brand identity is what sets you apart and distinguishes you from the competition. Your competition is not just other medical practices in your speciality, within your vicinity. The technological evolution that is transforming how businesses are run is also your competition. You therefore must keep evolving to be able to beat your competition.
Oftentimes, patients have a wide array of choices presented to them via digital media. They, therefore, make their decisions based on their perceptions of your medical brand. It could be from their personal experiences, the experiences of their families and friends, your digital content, or online reviews. These perceptions and your medical environment can change over time, signalling that it is time to reposition your medical practice brand.
A strong, distinguishing, and dynamic brand identity is one of the most effective ways to reposition your medical practice, stay powerful enough to claim or reclaim your market share and build a formidable loyal community. All these are achievable without getting lost in the foray or confusing your patients. All it requires is strategic tactics.
What Is Brand Identity?
Your medical practice brand Identity goes beyond what your patients and prospective patients see. It includes what they feel when they come in contact with your medical practice, and the experience they take away from that encounter. This forms their perception of your medical practice.
Brand Identity is the soul and body of your medical practice. It is the values of your medical practice and how you express these values to your audience, how you want your target audience to feel when they interact with your medical brand.
The visual elements of your brand visually represent your values and identity using images, and other design elements. This is where the logo, website design, business card, colours, fonts, and other visual elements come into play.
The combination of all these visible and nonvisible elements is what makes up your brand identity. They collaborate to portray a certain image to the senses of your audience. They either perceive your brand positively or negatively and this affects how they identify with your brand.
A powerful brand identity can influence the behaviour of consumers way beyond the point of service. You must reposition your brand at the appropriate time so it will be distinguished and powerful. Therefore, your medical marketing strategy must include cultivating an improved compelling brand identity to reposition your medical practice brand exceptionally.
On the other hand, repositioning is the articulated process that a brand puts in place to totally or partially change its public perception. The essence is to cultivate a stronger public appeal and perception and increase brand acceptance and loyalty.
Why Do You Need to Reposition Your Brand?
A lot of reasons could necessitate a repositioning of your brand and they must not necessarily be negative. Sometimes, you need to reposition your brand for positive reasons. Some of the reasons to reposition your medical brand include –
- To Align With the Present Dynamics
The medical business environment, demand and supply, patient behaviour, competition, society, and technology are always changing. When these elements evolve to become different from what was obtainable in the past, then it is time to reposition your medical practice to reflect the present. For instance, the current level of technological advancement is colossal.
There is a great need to move from the way you used to run your medical practice to what is in vogue now. More and more of your patients are relying on social media and websites for diverse information. Robots and virtual reality are overtaking the traditional medical space.
To be able to flow with the trend and not lose out, you need to reposition your medical brand to accommodate these changes.
- To achieve greater growth.
This is one of the most common reasons that medical brands opt for brand repositioning. Low patient acquisition and retention rates, low revenue, low brand recognition, and awareness can all push a medical practice to reposition its brand. The brand repositioning strategy will target means of improving performance to achieve greater growth.
- Change in the Target Patients
Change in target audience can occur because your target audience has acquired new ways of doing things or due to a change in their income. The change can also occur because your medical practice has grown in capacity. It now appeals to either different target patients or a broader market or different segments of the market. Whichever way, the demographics and psychographics of these patients may change, likewise, the type of information they desire and the means of reaching them. This change may require delving into fresh audience analysis.
5 Ways To Reposition Your Medical Practice Brand Via Brand Identity
Brand identity is not only for the initial positioning of your brand. It is a crucial part of your repositioning process. You need a clear process and a strong strategy. Let me remind you that repositioning can only occur when there has been a solid positioning built on strategies and strategic actions. Otherwise, it is still positioned.
- Audit the Existing Brand Identity.
Take an in-depth look at your current brand identity – the visuals, the designs, audience perceptions and experiences. Successful brand identity auditing should unearth who your current audience is and what their needs are. It will also uncover your existing brand language and voice, and brand personality. The audit should not neglect the brand name and tagline, brand colours, designs, logo, messages and stories. The sum of this audit will throw light on what is working and what is not.
Big brands occasionally tweak their brand identity. Look at Google, Instagram and Axon, nothing dramatic but noticeable if you look closely. You can reposition your medical practice to reflect any new changes or introductions based on the outcomes of your brand identity audit.
- Stay Consistent with Brand Visuals
The audit will yield certain results but you cannot use this information without confirmation. To confirm the assumptions, conduct different ananalysesincluding audience, market and competitor analysis. Placing the two results side by side will help confirm the assumptions. What needs to be changed at this point?
Is the logo still unique and Minogue? Are the colours still catchy and communicative? Or maybe the tagline no longer reflects your medical brand’s promise? Whatever the no longer serving its purpose needs to be adjusted to reflect the current status. Determine the best ways to modernize your brand assets.
- Establish Unique Selling Proposition
Does the unique selling proposition still reflect the current purpose of your medical brand? Is it time to expand your services to reflect your USP? Your medical practice brand identity was built on a promise – your unique selling proposition (USP). Is this still relevant or is it time to tweak it?
- Know how to communicate with your target patients
Remember your audit ought to include your target audience. It becomes relevant now to understand your patient persona, their journey, where you meet them at the various points of their user journey and how to interact with them to successfully solve their needs.
Perception forms an integral part of your medical brand identity. It is therefore pertinent that your target patients mostly have a positive perception of your brand image. Audience analysis and audit will show whether you have new patients and if you need to find new means of communicating with your new and existing patients. Also determine the personality, voice and language of your messages to suit your target audience.
- Advertisements
Organic and paid advertising will communicate your new brand identity and repositioning strategies to your patients. This is the best way to announce the changes in the world. Revamp all your ads, online and offline to reflect and announce the changes.
Tweak your ad copies, keywords, content, sales page, and target audience to encompass the new brand identity.
Conclusion
Listen to feedback from your patients as you roll out your repositioning strategy. It will be unwise to build your strategy solely on your assumptions and ideas without involving your final consumers – your patients, knowing the power of brand identity. Repositioning your medical brand identity for whatever reason, using your brand identity is integral to the growth of your medical brand. However, you need to first determine why you need to reposition your brand at this point. Then you can follow these 5 ways we have mentioned above to record great success in your repositioning campaign.