The path to business growth is not necessarily a paved one, but it’s much easier to navigate when you have a well-established brand as your guide.
Branding and marketing are more than fluff, rather they’re a strategic blueprint for growth and the key to overcoming many of those unrelenting administrative headaches. In fact, branding and marketing are a significant ingredient in patient satisfaction, patient retention, employee retention, and, ultimately, business growth (however you define it).
Patient Satisfaction & Retention
As a healthcare provider, you likely understand that a satisfied patient is a profitable patient. On average, they lead to fewer no-shows, stronger relationships, and a higher lifetime value. Plus, it just puts you and your staff at ease when you can tell a patient is satisfied!
Acquiring, satisfying, and retaining patients happens on your website, on social media, through your visual identity, through our values statement—through branding.
Marketing solutions, in action:
Improve patient experience through clear communication. Don’t make patients chase down information, put it at their digital fingertips. As an example, does your website answer these key questions?
• Are we accepting new patients?
• What is our approach and/or philosophy to care?
• How can a client get in touch with us?
• Who will be providing the care to patients? What are their qualifications?
• Why should a patient choose us? And what is the incentive to stay with us?
Help patients get to know you by crafting an authentic brand that tells your story and highlights what’s important to you. They want to know who they are partnering with!
Show (and tell) patients that you care about their well-being through messaging, photos, testimonials, and more.
Employee Retention
As employers, you never want to see your talent go. Hiring new employees is not only expensive, but it’s disruptive to business operations and hinders patients’ ability to form deep, trusting relationships with staff.
Thinking about the cycle, happier patients can lead to happier staff. Staff that want to stay. For example, happy patients show up to appointments as scheduled, which means less appointment shuffling for staff. Generally, it also means your team is met with more pleasantries and fewer conflict.
Now let’s imagine your staff’s nightmare day: Three last-minute cancellations, 2 no-shows, and 12 calls to ask about your hours, and it’s not even 1 pm. Branding and marketing can help fix that.
Marketing Solutions, in action:
Reduce administrative load by publishing clear information. For example, reduce the number of repetitive phone calls by including commonly asked questions on your website. It gets tough answering the same question 12 times a day…
Create a positive reputation for your practice. This translates to an employee being proud of their workplace and helps them buy into the company culture.
Streamline stationery, branding, and more. A consistent brand leaves less room for questioning. You’ve defined the way you walk, talk, and present yourselves to the public. In this way, branding guidelines are actually freeing.
By improving the quality of patient-staff interactions and reducing those daily irritations, you can help employees find more satisfaction at work.
Business Growth
You’ve garnered the trust of patients, you’ve created an environment for staff to thrive… and you’ve inadvertently set yourself up for business growth.
The role of branding and marketing does not stop here. Medical and dental practices that continue to embody their brand will also continue to deliver on a brand promise that helped get your business there in the first place. To that end, it’s important to embody your brand—every aspect of it. Be who you say you are.