The healthcare sector has undergone a number of major changes in recent years: with the need for greater personalisation of care, increasing consumerization of the patient experience and more eyes on the healthcare system than ever before, healthcare companies are having to approach their customer journey differently and find new and truly impactful ways of captivating their audience.
At Journey, we support London healthcare companies to strengthen their brand, define and communicate their key messages and form meaningful connections with their audience. From brand discovery to marketing communications, website design to content, our authentic and inspired brands and marketing campaigns get you closer to the people that matter.
Key Brand & Marketing Trends for Healthcare Companies in London
A Clarity of Brand
A clear sense of identity has always been important in the healthcare market, but as new players have emerged and existing incumbents have elevated their communication strategies, it’s now business-critical that companies seeking to cut through the noise have well-developed strategies for their brand image. This is where Journey can help.
Shifting to Digital
No matter what the product, a strong digital dimension to the customer experience, both pre-sale and post-sale, is now just a standard part of any proposition. Understanding where your audience is active online and building a journey around their existing behaviour, is crucial for any healthcare brand seeking to grow. However, that’s not to say the offline world no longer plays a role; on the contrary, it can be the more traditional mediums that have the greatest impact. At Journey, we help you to understand what this balance of digital and human looks like for your business.
Greater Marketing Integration
With so many touch points across a range of devices and channels, ensuring a clear and consistent journey has become a growing challenge, but also a fantastic opportunity for differentiation and a competitive edge. Those healthcare companies that can communicate a compelling narrative across a series of channels, both online and offline, are giving themselves an enormous advantage.
Building a Great Brand In The Healthcare Market
Our process always begins with a robust audit into your existing identity in terms of marketing collateral and on a more fundamental level. The audit is not simply about your brand, however. We look at all the facets of your business and the healthcare market as a whole:
Your Position
We need to understand how you are perceived in the healthcare market today. What do your staff, customers, suppliers, competitors say about you when you’re not in the room? What are your strengths and weaknesses today? What are your greatest assets and achievements, but also your greatest flaws and threats? It’s only by understanding the full reality of your business today that we can start to build a picture of where it can be tomorrow.
The Competition
Who are the key players operating in your vertical? What customer needs are they servicing? What customer needs are they neglecting? Are there any lessons, be they strategic or tactical, that we can learn from their operations and apply to your future strategy?
The Customer
Perhaps most importantly, though, we need to understand your customer. Who are they? What keeps them up at night? What motivates them to make decisions? What are their greatest hopes, fears and aspirations? Where are they active online? What sort of content do they engage with? Who and what influences their behaviour?
Broader Market Landscape
Finally, we need to look forward to the future and evaluate the broader market factors that are likely to shape the landscape over the next 5-10 years. After all, this is about building something that endures and grows over time, rather than slowly losing relevance.
- How is technology impacting your part of the healthcare market? Will AI and machine learning revolutionise how customers engage with your product in 5 years from now? Are we taking necessary precautions to protect the brand from cyber threats? How will increased digitisation allow us to evolve those products that have historically been served offline?
- How might changes in regulation impact your strategy? This has of course long been a core part of the healthcare industry, but with technology accelerating the speed of change, regulation also needs to move faster. What’s on the regularity horizon in your vertical?
- And what about social and cultural shifts? Customers in all markets are making increased demands of their providers to satisfy what they perceive as important ethical and social criteria. How can you reassure your customers that you’re a brand they can really trust to make the right decisions for the right reasons?
Developing Brand Architecture with Journey
Your brand is not merely what people see on your website. It’s every moment of every interaction they have with your business. Your brand architecture, therefore, is a complex construction that needs constant love and attention. At Journey, we help to define and refine some of the most important components of your brand to form a strong foundation for all future activity:
Strategic Positioning
The healthcare market is packed with hardworking and well intentioned businesses trying to talk to your audience. We can help you to occupy a clear and distinct position in the mind of that customer so that they actually hear your voice.
Mission & Vision Statements
From your shareholders to your customers, everyone engaging with your business needs a collective purpose they can buy into. What is the change in the healthcare market that you’re trying to make and why should people care? We provide you with the tools you need to communicate this clearly.
Organisational Values
Brand is what happens when nobody’s looking. What are the shared cultural values and traits that connect your employees and how are they embedded into the day to day operations of the business? During our brand discovery sessions, we like to include a range of people from across your organisation, from boardroom to customer-facing, to get an accurate picture of who you really are as a London healthcare business.
Tone of Voice
Whether you outsource your communications or manage it all internally, having a clear framework for the voice of your brand is essential if you’re to be able to communicate in a consistent and impactful way. We carry out a series of workshops to really dig into the personality of your brand and develop a set of rules that all those involved in your communications can then easily adhere to.
Product Messaging
From understanding your price point to developing a powerful value proposition that combines the key benefits, both emotional and rational, we need to understand exactly how your brand manifests itself at a product level.
Customer Experience
From the first time a customer hears about your healthcare brand, through every moment of every encounter, we need a clear understanding of what their perfect customer journey looks like and the “magic moments” that will live long in their memories, driving retention and referral – the bedrock of any growing brand.
Visual Identity
This is where it all comes to life. Every dimension of the brand architecture now needs to be represented visually, as we turn words and ideas into something beautiful and memorable. From logo design and typeface to user imagery and colour palette, this is about painting a picture that will make an indelible imprint in the minds of your customers. At Journey, our passionate team of highly skilled designers and brand experts create the visual cues that people will associate with your brand.
Once your brand identity is crystal clear, we turn this rich architecture into a strategy for your content and communications that flows through every channel, both online and offline. Website design and development, video direction, live event management, email campaigns and brochures are only some of the ways that we’re able to support successful strategic marketing campaigns.
So whether it’s engaging with healthcare influencers or building a community for your healthcare app on social media, Journey has a team of digital experts to help you fully leverage the value of your brand throughout the customer journey.
For more information about our branding process or to enquire about any aspect of your marketing, get in touch today.