The most successful brands in healthcare are the established ones.
It isn’t rocket science. Healthcare consumers spend big money on products and services and have much to lose if they fail. Naturally, they prefer investing in products from legacy brands with many reviews backing them up. Or brands that have a reputation for making quality products.
Besides, trust is fickle in healthcare, and building it – infinitely hard. Even a single negative experience could cause your buyers to lose faith in a product and your brand. Worse yet, thanks to easily accessible online reviews, you could even lose your prospective buyers to it.
Therefore, brands that want to survive in healthcare must invest in brand and reputation management from the get-go.
Still over the fence about it? Here are a few more reasons to convince you.
Four Reasons to Invest in Healthcare Branding and Reputation Management
1. Improve Customer Acquisition
Gone are the days when healthcare brands could advertise their products over billboards, newspapers or advertisements to ensure they stick with the customer. Today, customers, regardless of age, come across new healthcare brands online.
The first thing they do next is visit the brand’s website. And that is followed by checking customer reviews. They look at five key parameters for assessing a brand:
- The consumer sentiment conveyed by the review
- The star rating
- The number of reviews
- The responses by the providers
- Recency of reviews
Fail on either of these parameters, and you risk losing a potential customer. Fortunately, reputation management can fix this.
You can reach out to your happy customers and solicit reviews from time to time. And once they leave a review, you can have your team acknowledge and reply to them. These efforts show your potential customer that your brand is active and reliable and helps you convert them.
2. Increase Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty gets customers returning to your brand over choosing your competitors’. For perspective, customer retention rates in the healthcare sector stand at a whopping 77%.
But to achieve such customer loyalty, you need to do a lot more than create a spectacular product. You must provide an impeccable customer experience to your buyers as well. One way to do this is to rely on healthcare reputation management. And here is how it works.
Your prospective customers will conduct their due research before investing in your product. But they will also have questions regarding it. While many will use forums to get answers to their questions, others may visit your website for help.
You can respond to customer queries on either of these platforms and help your buyers make better purchases. In addition, if they encounter any problems during delivery, you can use your reputation management system to identify and address them. Lastly, you can pay heed to their concerns and suggestions and respond to them empathetically.
Such conversations routinely show your existing customers that you care about their predicaments. This creates an enjoyable customer experience, builds trust and fosters customer loyalty.
3. Stand Out From Your Competitors
Capturing the attention of your target customers in a market saturated with legacy players and new entrants is a behemoth task. After all, everyone is competing for the same 8 seconds. But you can ensure your brand leaves a lasting impression with impeccable branding. Here is how that works.
When you invest in healthcare branding you focus all your efforts to make your customers feel a particular way by tapping into their emotions. For instance, Humana, a medical insurance company, wanted to differentiate itself as a human-first brand.
So, it used an easy to read logo and made sure the copy on its webpage was simple and easy to understand. The brand website even greeted their customers with “Good afternoon” or “Good morning”, as per the time of the day.
All of these efforts make prospective customers see Humana more in a more positive light compared to typical medical insurance companies. Humana instantly feels more approachable too.
4. Cater to Specific Consumer Needs
When you begin investing in branding, you strive to cater to the needs and desires of a specific set of customers. You engage in market research to understand them better. And this tells you about your target market’s concerns, aspirations, and perspectives on products in your niche.
You can now develop effective campaigns targeting these customers and position your products better. You can even use customer data to identify new niches to expand into with new products.
This alone puts you miles ahead of your competitors.
Over to You
Brand building and reputation management in healthcare are crucial to ensuring a market presence in the saturated healthcare space. These efforts can also help you capture a larger market share, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and even help you stand apart from your competitors.