Business Best Practices – Three Stellar Tips for Marketing Your Brand
- Posted on: Mar 31 2016
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All the experts say it – “you’ve got to market your brand.” However, generally, they don’t tell you how – and worse, they don’t even explain what your “brand” is.
Put simply, your brand is the image, the reputation – the buzz on the street – that defines who you are and what you do, especially in the context of prospective and current patients, as well as referral sources. For some doctors, their name is their brand – names like Dr. Oz and Dr. Gold are known across America, because those men have successfully marketed their brand. For others, your brand is the service you offer. If your practice is known as the Laser Surgery Center – that’s who you are, for good or ill. Good, because it attracts prospects looking for laser surgery, but bad, because it tends to drive away prospects who are looking for RF treatments, or conventional surgical face-lifts, or augmentations or … well, you get the picture.
Which brings us to Tip #1: Your brand should be that exclusive-to-you factor that best attracts the patients you want most.
Which brings us to Tip #1: Your brand should be that exclusive-to-you factor that best attracts the patients you want most.If you’re looking for more than laser treatment patients, don’t brand yourself as the Laser Surgery Center. However, if you want to specialize in the fast-growing specialty of vaginal rejuvenation, brand yourself as the “Intimate Image” doctor – or some other euphemism that effectively conveys who you are and what you do. Remember, if your brand isn’t attracting the kinds of patients you want, it’s time to re-brand you and your practice.
On to Tip #2: Your brand must be integral to all of your practice marketing and promotion, but also to your operations.
Your website should reflect your brand – it should be, up-front, all about what you can do for the “ideal” patients you most want to reach. This should also be illustrated in your signage, your letterhead, any ads you run, even the forms new patients fill out. A logo or logotype tied to your brand is a useful way of reminding people – but first, execute on your branding promotion until your logo or logotype becomes known – where your brand (and even you) are intimately linked to the image that defines your practice.
Tip #3 – Be uniquely your own.
If everybody is using the same image or concept, use something else – even if you feel that the image everybody else is using really tells your story, too. Your brand must stand out from the crowd. For example, nearly every aesthetic surgeon or dermatologist has a story to tell about how he or she is both an artist and a skilled surgeon or doctor. Again, once or twice is fine, but when everybody says the same thing, that re-statement loses all value. Find what makes you unique – and let that define your brand’s images and your word-choice.
If you follow these three simple, strategic steps, you will be marketing your brand, and that brand will be bringing you the kinds of patients you want.
These on-target branding tips – and hundreds of other pieces of practical marketing and operations advice, can be found in the new Fourth Edition of Cheryl Whitman’s ground-breaking book, Beautifully Profitable / Forever Profitable, available at Amazon.com, or directly from Cheryl on this website.
