A health system represents a different selling process. While digital targeting has opened many new avenues of finding potential patients where they need your services, building long-term growth and revenue requires health systems—more than any other type of brand—to place a strong focus on building brand equity within their communities. Brand equity is what will keep consumers choosing your providers and services time after time.
This is why health systems must have a clear brand strategy—your north star to eliminate unnecessary distractions. It’s a road map that guides you through your challenges and enables you to solve the challenges your consumers face. Most important, the brand strategy encompasses who you need to be to your audiences as well as your business objectives.
This is one of the things we’ve seen health systems struggle with the most. With an ever-increasing emphasis on patient counts and revenue, it’s become harder to justify to CFOs the necessity of investing in branding and brand awareness campaigns when you can’t tie each ad to direct revenue.
If you want true growth, you need more than short-term activation. To influence behaviors in the long term, you must build a strong brand. Branding is the basis for all other activities. It drives preference for your health system and doctors over the competition, which will influence consumer actions today and tomorrow.
When you become the preferred brand through impactful messaging that resonates with your audience, it makes it much more efficient to activate that preference when patients need your services. It helps guide patients down the funnel for the services they need. In short, brand drives loyalty.
Marketers must build up that preference, then activate it smartly to convert brand equity into revenue. Each type of marketing enhances the other—and finding that balance will depend on your budget and market size.
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Dive deeper with stats: Patient Satisfaction Doesn’t Equal Brand Satisfaction.
25% is the estimated increase in profitability by boosting loyalty 5%.