5 Tips to Improve Your Cosmetic Surgery Brand and Identity

You have a brand, but you may not know what it is. You may confuse it with your logo. Your brand is important, since it’s what defines the emotional benefit you deliver to your patients. Your brand identity is the visual representation of that emotional benefit. Your brand is not your logo, since that’s part of your brand identity.

To use a house analogy, your brand is the blueprint while the identity is the elevation.

Since it takes a mere 0.05 seconds for people to form their first impression when they view your website, your brand identity needs to effectively communicate what your brand is about almost immediately.

As a cosmetic surgery practice, you know the level of competition you’re facing, which is why it’s imperative to build a brand and identity that allows you to differentiate.

What Does a Brand Identity Entail?

Brand identity encapsulates your brand strategy into a visual communication. It conveys your business’s mission, vision, and values, which dictate the types of products you represent and the type of care you provide your patients. It includes your practice’s personality while representing what you want your customers to feel when they interact with your practice.

Brand identity is vital for your cosmetic surgery practice for a number of reasons. It helps build visual consistency and authenticity and trust with your patients. 81% of customers choose a company based on trust, whereas 86% say authenticity is a decisive factor for them.

Establishing the brand identity for your cosmetic surgery practice gives you a foundation for your website messages and tone. It dictates the strategy for your advertising messages and how your coordinators greet patients over the phone. It also reaches into how you design your waiting room and offices.

Every touch point that people encounter when it comes to your practice should be dictated by your brand identity.

Tips to Establish Your Brand and Identity

Following these five crucial tips can help you establish and maintain a solid brand identity. If you have trouble getting started, call a creative marketing company that specializes in brand identity to help you create a strategy and execute on it.

1. Research your audience, competition, and value proposition

Creating a brand starts with understanding why you’re in business. That means research. Knowing your audience is crucial, but it’s also important to understand what your competition is doing, both right and wrong. A value proposition is based on why you’re in business. What do you provide that no one else does? Why do patients choose you over other cosmetic surgeons? Why do they refer their friends and family?

Look for what sets your business apart and how your customers can relate to it. 77% of consumers prefer to buy from brands that share the same values as them. For a cosmetic surgery practice, that value can be the best version of yourself.

Once you have a clear understanding, you need to create a positioning statement and brand personality profile. This helps you form key messages and the tone for those messages. If you’re “fun and approachable,” the tone for your messages will be quite different than if you’re “professional and capable.” Know what you are and communicate accordingly.

2. Put time and effort into brand design

Your logo is significant because it’s the visual centerpiece of your brand identity. You can boost your brand recognition by 80% by using a signature color. It’s not just about the color, though, as form, type, and templates are all crucial design elements.

There are three parts to a logo: the mark or the symbol, the name, and the tagline. The only rules are that you have to have just one of these—eventually. If your practice is just starting out, you need at least a mark and the name. Taglines are fluid because they provide positioning for the moment. They can change over time, but the logo should be fairly timeless. At the same time, things change, and your positioning 10 years ago may not be as relevant now as it was then. Don’t be afraid to refresh.

With your logo in place, your identity should follow. Make sure you have a color palette so that you have colors to work with when executing your identity. Primary colors are typically those used in your logo. Secondary colors are complementary colors that can set off your primary palette.

This palette helps you be consistent in all your communications and advertising efforts. A consistent brand presentation creates efficiency in your communications and can increase your revenue by 33%.

3. Use a voice that integrates with your brand

The language you use is an essential part of your brand identity, and is dictated by the personality. Professional language suits professional brands, and a conversational tone is better for laid-back or friendlier brands.

Connect with your audiences by speaking authentically from the heart of your brand.

4. Avoid inconsistency, mixed messages, and imitation

Establishing your brand identity is as much about doing specific things as it is about avoiding others. For instance, we’ve already discussed the importance of being consistent, but authenticity means being you (your brand) and only you (your brand).

Moreover, researching your competition isn’t about imitating what they are doing. Copying your competition is not authentic—it’s being a copycat. One of the most imitated brands is Apple Computer. There is only one Apple and their investment in their brand goes way beyond the white packaging with sans serif type. It’s their investments in research and development, product design, package design, store design, customer service, and everything else that it takes to create products that shake up the world, and to deliver those products with a customer experience that gives you a visceral reaction from the time you purchase it through the time you open it and throughout the entire ownership cycle, again and again.

Unless you are willing to make those investments in your operations and brand, you will never be the next Apple. Instead, try to understand who you are and your value to your customers, and be that.

5. Get professional help when it’s needed

If you’re running your cosmetic surgery practice, chances are you don’t have the time, energy, or expertise to work on your brand and identity.

At OAK Interactive, we specialize in healthcare marketing, providing comprehensive brand strategy and brand identity services to medical practices just like yours. As a digital marketing agency based in Houston, we can create a solid brand strategy, execute with a memorable logo and identity, and develop engaging messaging that all create lasting impressions.

Doctors turn to us when they need creative marketing services for their cosmetic surgery practices. See how we’ve helped our clients and get in touch with us when you’re ready to engage a creative agency in Houston, TX.