Everyone talks a good game about brand building. But not many understand the nuances of building a successful healthcare brand or how branding can strengthen their market positioning, connect with the right audience, and amplify their brand value.
Yet, a strong healthcare branding strategy is essential for effective communications, impacting everything from content and email marketing to website design and online advertising. We asked Kendra Rainey, Brand Strategy Consultant at Spot On, to share her from-the-trenches insights about crafting an effective branding strategy. Here are the five steps she recommends.
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Understand What a Healthcare SaaS Branding Strategy Entails
A brand strategy is a holistic approach to how your company represents itself in every activity. It's not your visual identity like logo, color palette, font choice, or illustration style — these are the execution of a brand strategy.
“A SaaS branding strategy takes a broader perspective. It provides well-researched, well-designed guardrails to determine how your company behaves in the world,” says Rainey.
Your healthcare branding strategy should help you connect with your prospects and customers. It’s a living, breathing entity that evolves with your ideal audience, your solution, and the market landscape. It guides an ongoing conversation with your audience, making them want to embody your value by using your solution.
To create a brand that inspires this kind of loyalty and affinity, you must dig deep and articulate what your company stands for. “Companies must take a step back from what they sell to first understand why they sell it and what it means to their customers,” says Rainey.
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Codify Your Branding Strategy Into Language
After clarifying your brand’s identity, you need to turn concepts about your brand’s value, personality, and differentiators into something tangible, sharable, memorable, repeatable, and executable.
Codifying your healthcare branding strategy into language will help guide your healthcare marketing tactics — such as your website design and content creation — to create a consistent brand experience across all customer touchpoints.
First, define your brand mission statement, vision statement, and values. Develop a voice and tone that align with your brand’s personality. Do you want customers to view your brand as authoritative? Friendly? Approachable? Determining how you’ll speak to customers can help showcase what your brand’s all about. To aid in this process, craft a value proposition to articulate why your solution matters to your target audience.
Additionally, create a messaging framework to ensure consistency across sales, marketing, and customer success teams. The framework should include a tagline, an elevator pitch, and a more extensive narrative for your website and marketing collateral.
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Gain Audience Insights From Different Perspectives
A successful healthcare branding strategy requires you to understand what drives your target audience to act. Knowing what motivates them can help you align your brand messaging with their priorities. So, how do you gain such deep audience insight?
Take the time to talk to different people in your company — including executives, marketers, and customer service reps — to learn what your audience cares about. Getting insights from customer-facing team members is particularly crucial because they interact with prospects and customers more than most.
“While the CEO may have the vision, the sales rep or customer service employee knows the day-to-day details, so it's important to get input from both sources,” says Rainey. “Interviews and workshops with stakeholders can help you learn about your audience from various perspectives."
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Set the Foundation for Your SaaS Branding Strategy
According to Rainey, your branding strategy should address three primary elements:
• Your strategic positioning differentiates your brand and articulates why your customers should buy from you instead of your competitors. It signals to your audience that you have what they want and can solve their challenges with a unique approach.
• Your story shapes how your audience and the world perceive your brand. It should go beyond your products and services to create an emotional connection with your prospects and customers — the secret sauce behind brand recognition and loyalty.
• Your vibe is the alchemy of your brand personality, ethos, and voice. It's the swagger you add to your position and story to make your brand come to life, and it's reflected in every detail, down to your word choice and tone of your communications.
Use your established mission, vision, and values to determine these foundational elements for your branding strategy. Take time to workshop and refine them before infusing them in public-facing marketing materials.
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Support Your Value Proposition With Strong Brand Messages
Your value proposition communicates what makes your solution and company attractive to your buyers. It’s audience-specific, going beyond solving an external problem to understand your prospects’ mindsets. A strong value proposition can help you pinpoint which triggers motivate your customers, such as the need to avoid a stressor or align with a compelling philosophy.
“Your value proposition connects your vision and mission to your prospects’ challenges,” says Rainey. “When done right, it bridges your brand's big-picture vision with the execution of your healthcare marketing tactics.”
Compelling brand messaging supports and communicates your value proposition to your customers. A company might have multiple brand messages that each articulate the brand’s position, story, and vibe in ways that appeal to various audiences at different stages of the buyer journey.
Consistency and appropriateness are key to creating brand messaging that generates positive awareness and makes an impression on your audience. “Take a step back to consider your brand holistically and strategically. Shift your mindset and put yourself in your audience's shoes to craft messaging that resonates,” Rainey advises.
Build a Solid Foundation With a Robust Branding Strategy
An effective healthcare branding strategy taps into emotional triggers, connecting your company with your audience’s priorities. It helps you deliver a consistent brand message throughout the buyer journey to build trust and accelerate your pipeline.
Crafting a robust branding strategy is an essential step, but many companies unfortunately skip it because they’re intimidated by the process. Others go through motions but fail to translate their brand strategy into effective marketing tactics.
If you fall into one of these categories, the good news is that you don’t have to go it alone.
Working with an experienced healthcare SaaS marketing agency is the key to building a solid foundation to support creative execution. At Spot On, we help healthcare software companies develop SaaS branding strategies that set them up for success and maximize their marketing ROI.
We can help you turn your vision, mission, and passion into a unique story that appeals to your target market and speaks to their mindset and worldview. Schedule a meeting to see how we can help your company build a brand that stands out from the rest.
