Branding Your Medical Practice
By: Tina Bell Director of Marketing, HealthCARE Express Branding your Medical Practice is a major cornerstone to your marketing campaign’s success. Those are words I strongly stand behind. So you can imagine my curiosity when I recently saw the book Branding Only Works on Cattle: The New Way to Get Known (and drive your competitors crazy) by Jonathan Baskin sitting on a shelf. As a Texan, the book not only had creative appeal, but the title also prompted an immediate contradictory response from my brain. I bought it on the spot. It was a good book. Baskin argued that old marketing tactics like cute taglines and fluffy ads on television and in print no longer work. Instead, marketers must understand how the services they offer affect consumer behavior. The theme I took away from the book is it does not matter how great the marketing campaign you create is if your service is subpar and your messages are contradictory. However, I disagree completely with the title. Branding works on cattle, but it can also work for your Medical Practice – if you do it right. What is Branding? Your Medical Practice’s brand is how people define their experience with your company, both what they expect to receive before they use your Clinic, and what actually happens when they utilize your services. Branding, then, is how you go about defining this experience through generating customers, converting them to patients, and then satisfying their every expectation of your brand. In Medical Practice, understanding and creating a great customer experience is the key to defining a successful brand. Customers who come to you expect quality medical care. They expect you to have digital X-Rays and Labs on site. You cannot compete with expectations. You can compete with an experience. What is one of the strongest brands in the world right now? Apple. Why? They have created a unique customer experience. You are cool if you own an iPhone, an iPod and an iPad. You feel cool for carrying it around. You feel cool for spending a high dollar amount on a tiny object. You have bragging rights that others without the i(Insert Product) don’t have, and you are in the club with those who do. So how can you convert Apple’s strategy to your Medical Practice? Easy, build your brand on creating a unique customer experience. If your Medical Practice is the Disneyland for sick people, you have done something right. Building the Experience There are three blocks you can start with to build your Medical Practice brand: Convenience, Fun, and Pleasant Atmosphere. Block 1: Convenience By default, your Medical Practice should be convenient for patients to access, both when you are slow and when you are busy. How do you accomplish this? For starters, be a true walk-in clinic. If you take appointments, you may make it easy for some people, but you will make it more difficult for others. As a walk-in Medical Practice clinic, you have to be prepared to handle any patient volume situation that may arise while catering to the needs of your customers. When you are busy, consider doing patient call backs. Take down the patient’s name and cell phone number and let them know you will call them to return when there are two to three patients in front of them. This allows your patients to avoid sitting for hours in a crowded waiting room. Instead they can leave to wait at home or run errands. Another thing you can offer is web check-in. Allowing patients to utilize web check-in makes it easy for them to register for their visit without ever having to come into your clinic. Many electronic medical record (EMR) programs come with a web check-in feature at no additional cost. Block 2: Fun While customers to any Medical Practice expect quality medical care, you have the option to give them something more. Figure out ways to make visiting your Medical Practice fun. Let’s face it; no one wants to go to an Medical Practice clinic because no one wants to be sick or injured. When they do come, make the experience as enjoyable as possible. Remember those Apple Fans? They, along with their Droid counterparts, would probably enjoy having free Wi-Fi in both your waiting room and in patient rooms. Since your Medical Practice already has internet, adding free Wi-Fi should come at a minimal expense. Additionally, consider setting up a play area for children, and adults alike. Make sure toys are easy to disinfect, to help prevent the spread of germs. Hand held video games can be attached to the wall to entertain older kids, while puzzle books, like word finds and Sudoku, from the local dollar store can entertain adults waiting in patient rooms. Block 3: Pleasant The final starting block for creating a great customer experience is developing a pleasant atmosphere, where patients enjoy being in your clinic. Consider offering cold bottles of water at check-in and free coffee in the waiting room. You can easily set-up a gourmet beverage bar with a Kuerig Coffee Maker and an assortment of coffees, teas and cocoa. Make sure magazines in your Medical Practice are current, especially sports, news, and gossip related magazines. Consider playing music in the hallways and waiting room area, but be cautious of the type of music you play and the volume level. Remember, you don’t have to live on a ranch in Texas to develop a good brand. You can define your brand as an experience, and then make sure your staff helps you keep the momentum going to maintain that experience for each customer who visits your Medical Practice. [Editor's Note: Tina Bell is the director of marketing for HealthCARE Express and the director of business development for Medical Practice Success. She will be speaking on this and other topics at the upcoming Medical Practice Success Summit. Click here to learn more about the Success Summit.]
