With the global health and wellness market projected to continue growing, branding your functional medicine practice is more important than ever. Because the healthcare sector is expected to see significant growth over the next few years, the health and there are plenty of services to offer.
Functional medicine practitioners must focus on branding their practice sooner rather than later to stand out from their peers.
We’ll explore the elements of successful health and wellness branding and discuss several tips to help you get started.
Related: Building a Great Wellness Brand
What Is Health and Wellness Branding?
The primary point of health and wellness branding is to personify your practice through storytelling and brand strategy that focuses on communication, design, and patient experience.
Before we get into the branding tips, let’s review the traits that all successful branding practices share. The elements of the best health and wellness branding strategies include:
Staying consistent in your messaging across all touchpoints
Building an emotional connection with your patients
Making a positive difference by interacting with the community
Helping your patients during every step of their health and wellness journey
Maintaining honesty throughout your communications and actions
Overwhelmed with the whole process of branding your practice? We make it easy with our complete marketing systems!
Why Brand Your Practice?
As a functional medicine practitioner, your first priority is promoting optimal patient wellness through your practice. However, building a quality brand is a vital part of making a positive impact on their lives.
Health and wellness branding is what shapes a patient’s first impression of your practice and healthcare services. With the right branding, you can use storytelling and visual elements to show potential and current patients what value you can bring to their day-to-day lives.
When your patients understand your brand, they are more likely to engage with you and become lifelong advocates of your practice.
Branding Tips for Your Functional Medicine Practice
Now, let’s look at six of the best health and wellness branding tips you can use to market your functional medical practice:
Know Your Audience
Before branding your functional medicine practice, you need to understand the patients you want to attract. You should clearly answer these three questions:
Who is your ideal patient? Consider what kind of patients are most likely to need your services — their age, demographic, etc. These attributes can help you shape your branding plan from the start.
What value can you provide them? This answer boils down to the lifestyle your ideal patient lives, their health and wellness goals, and how you can help them reach those goals.
What are your practice’s long-term goals? Health and wellness brands go through constant changes due to continuous research and shifting trends — how will your practice adapt to these?
Create Branding Elements
Your health and wellness branding strategy must be cohesive; your voice, visuals, etc., needs to stay consistent across your messaging and echo your brand as a whole.
To get started, you should:
Create a logo. There’s a reason why brands have unique logos — it makes you more recognizable, giving patients an easy way to remember your practice. Creating a logo builds a visual foundation the rest of your branding can follow.
Develop branding guidelines. After deciding on a logo, it’s time to establish the elements of your brand. Develop a “brand kit” that consists of guidelines defining:
The font you use
The colors you use
Key visual elements that follow your logo
Rules for how to apply your visual branding
Create a User-Friendly Website
Branding your functional medicine practice is about bringing in new patients — and your website is where many of them will make their decision to visit you or not. Your website must be:
Fast
Accessible
Mobile-friendly
Related: Building a Great Web Presence
In addition, your website should include the following:
A homepage that draws attention
An about us page to showcase your story as a health and wellness brand
The services your practice provides
A contact form for patients to message you
A blog to inform patients about new health and wellness trends
Landing pages to bring in potential patients from Google
Tell Your Practitioner Journey
Making a human connection is what can set your functional medicine practice apart from others. Taking your current brand and helping your patients understand your practitioner’s journey can bring many benefits to your practice.
It can help you build a true connection with your patients by showing them how you’ve transformed the lives of others. Potential patients want to see real people that got real results — so show them!
Be honest and transparent, and use case studies to back up your claims of success.
Use Social Media
Social media as a marketing tool is no joke — your patients are likely on multiple platforms daily. One of the most impactful ways for health and wellness brands to connect with their patients is through social media, including:
Instagram ads to post visual stories
Facebook to interact with patients
Twitter for short, meaningful interactions0
YouTube to create helpful content aimed at your patients’ health issues
Reddit to drive more patients to your brand
Always Engage with Your Audience
Building an online relationship with your patients is only the first step. Next, you want to engage with them by encouraging them to opt-in to receive newsletters, follow your social media, leave reviews online, etc.
The most important part is being authentic — patients won’t engage with your brand if they don’t have a good reason. So be real in all that you do — post genuine results, connect with actual people, and talk about true success stories from your functional medicine practice.
Connect and engage with your patients the right way with our wellness branding and marketing specialists at Mindbody Talent!
These Branding Tips Help You Stand Out from the Crowd
The health and wellness field holds many different growth opportunities. Your patients have clear expectations for your brand and how it should contribute to their health and wellness journey.
Follow these branding tips and your practice will be better positioned to play the role of a true healthcare partner to your patients throughout their lives.
Related: Fueling the Healthcare Revolution
