20 Jun Are You Branding Your Practice?
Why it’s important:
With repetition comes familiarity.
When people go through their day to day, they don’t usually stop to absorb the information floating around them. We are very hyper-focused on our daily activities, using our blinders to filter out what’s important from what’s not. Our streets and screens have become so flooded with information that a critical skill of any consumer is to filter out the information that isn’t immediately related to their goals. If someone walks by a bakery, they might see a decorated cake in the window and think it looks nice, but not take a glance at the rest of the treats before walking away. If someone then walks past that bakery every single day, and if nothing changes to catch their eye again, that storefront (including the nice cake) will eventually fade into the white noise of the street around them. Noting something in passing might not even lead the person to think of ordering from there, instead only vaguely remembering the cake they once saw before forgetting it entirely. In this way, the bakery lost the interest of the consumer because of its inability to properly grab and hold onto their attention for longer than a moment. Same shopfront, no marketing or promotions, and less attention garnered.
Humans aren’t meant to process ALL of the information that we see, so we have to filter out what our brains think is important or relevant. However, the mind is also extremely susceptible to both repetition, reputation, and content. When you see an ad everywhere, like for movies and soft drinks, your brain will eventually take a sort of dull notice to it, which eventually manifests itself within the subconscious as a more solid thought. Seeing something once doesn’t do much, seeing something in varied ways often nails it in. Ask someone on the street where to get a smoothie, and they’ll most likely say somewhere like Jamba Juice. That’s because this big company has the funds and power to plaster themselves on every surface, with new ads all over TV, social media, and in person. This leads everyone to consume their adverts and their products, growing larger as the social sphere of ‘most popular’ grows. The same concept applies to the big name gyms, medical practices, and shops. Big names come up first. To get someone to actively consider you as their number one choice, you have a lot of work to do in establishing yourself as a real competitor.
Many may think that their “small” or “close” community believes in their practice and would choose them over bigger name competitors, but that is statistically false.
Instead, most people will just adhere to the set of situations listed above, going for the most prominent option without active consideration.
In reality, small practices cannot afford to remain complacent for long in the medical business world of kill or be killed.
What you can do:
If you want to put yourself on the top of the charts, be it in healthcare or otherwise, you need to make a cohesive effort to build your brand. Marketing is a key component of building your practice and shouldn’t be ignored. With the rise of digital marketing, and thus an immense influx of information that a typical consumer experiences daily, making your presence known is a balancing act of good quality content and a schedule that brings your posts to the forefront.
A direct response marketing campaign (posts that triggers a call to action in the consumer) should be paired with a strong frequent social media presence. By getting your audience’s attention and making your practice interesting enough to consider, you’ve effectively hooked them into learning more about you. These posts can include specialized notations to grab a specific type of patient as well as a careful grasp on overall branding (cohesive tone, strong graphics, and good content. This branding strategy can bring your content to the top of the feeds, and it only gets better as time goes on.
The right healthcare marketing agency can help you to figure out where to take your brand and get you on track. Prescription PR is ready to help create a customized and efficient marketing strategy to boost your practice to success. If you would like to make the move into more effective branding, contact our team today.