It’s a challenging world for healthcare organizations — large and small, nonprofit and for-profit, urban and rural. You’re seeing increased competition from people visiting independent urgent care instead of primary care physicians, changing providers based on insurance coverage, or switching to other organizations for treatment. People think that big institutions are too big and too impersonal to be trusted. Nonprofits fight to cut through the noise. On top of that, margins are tighter than ever.
It might feel like a less than ideal time to undertake a branding project.
We’d argue that it’s actually a great time to re-evaluate whether your brand is working as hard as it could, especially, for example, if there are misconceptions about your organization internally and/or in the marketplace, or competitors are scaling back or struggling to gain traction.
Is it time for your organization to tell a new story? Updating your brand strategy is the way to go.
When you’re deep in the weeds of marketing work for a healthcare organization, it’s easy to lose perspective on how effective your brand is. Our comprehensive brand audit helps clients diagnose the ailments in their brand strategy. But even before we conduct that analysis there are signs you can watch out for, including:
— Your campaigns don’t deliver expected results because your messaging doesn’t connect with your audience
— Different parts of the organization create their own campaigns that don’t coordinate with one another
— Media coverage or community feedback shows that people don’t understand or have confidence in your services
— Recruiting efforts aren’t bringing in the high-caliber job applicants that you’d like.
It’s a misperception we run into often: the brand is just the logo. But it’s more than your logo, color, and fonts; it’s your organization’s character, reputation, and potential. It’s the feeling the community has when they think about who you are and what you stand for.
Brand strategy is a long-term plan that outlines how an organization positions itself in the market to achieve its business goals. You have to define how your organization is unique, the type of persona or audience you’re targeting, and the way your organization acts and communicates. Defining these elements well enables you to stand out from your competitors and build awareness of your mission, values, and services. People will begin to recognize, trust, and build an emotional connection with your organization. A strong brand strategy also provides guidelines for communications and how your brand is perceived across different channels and touchpoints.
That’s what a strong brand creates: differentiation, awareness, and trust. And in a complex business environment like healthcare is experiencing now, those outcomes of a brand are essential to business success.
Done right, brand strategy starts with business and marketing goals, competitive landscape and audience analysis, mission and vision and more — and only then do we start talking about what the business cards and website look like. We treat the brand like a person, with values and a personality and points of uniqueness and positioning.
Your healthcare brand shows up in countless ways: on billboards and brochures, social media campaigns, radio and print advertising, event promotions, and more. Every touch point has to coordinate, and that’s why it’s so important to have a strategy at the top that guides everything.
Branding the right way takes time and collaboration. We start the process with a brand audit and a total brand assessment, which helps us do our due diligence to understand the brand and where it needs to go, and it also helps the client team see the gaps. Marketers might think the messages they create are aligned internally and externally, that they have the right kind of consumer insight, and that everyone is focusing in the same direction for the marketing and business plan. Often, we find that’s not the case. Our process of distillation and strategic thinking sets the stage for a stronger brand. (Here’s an inside look at our branding process.)
In an ideal world, a healthcare marketing team works to nurture the brand along the way and keep it healthy so you don’t have to rebrand in order to dig yourself out of a reputational hole. Practically speaking, though, a brand inevitably gets diluted over time as internal brand stewards leave, brand guidelines fall by the wayside, templates are too hard to use or simply ignored, and a lack of diligence about maintaining standards sets in.
A strategic brand reset may seem like a financial stretch. Budget is always an issue for marketers, even more so when times are tight. Major initiatives like rebrands tend to go by the wayside. But we would argue that it’s time to double down, especially if your competitors and peers are scaling back their marketing or struggling to gain traction. As a marketing leader, you can build a better case for the work because you can show the ROI.
We have the strategic and marketing chops to build great brands — plus relevant expertise in the healthcare field. Let’s talk about seizing the opportunity to set a strong course for your brand.
Tenth Crow Creative is a brand marketing agency that creates, aligns, and promotes messaging for health and wellness organizations. Through insightful branding, engaging design and compelling marketing campaigns, we help these essential organizations find their identities and effectively communicate with their stakeholders so they can fulfill their missions.
