Include “Inside Branding” in Your Marketing Mix: Make Your Facility an Effective Storyteller, Too

Human beings visit healthcare facilities. They come as patients, family members of patients, or friends. They come seeking advice, relief from disease, even hope. They may have come to the healthcare facility through some external branding effort. They may visit because of a physician’s referral.

Unfortunately, sometimes brand communications stop when visitors come through the building entrance.

Too frequently, there is no internal branding to back up the marketing communications activities that are going on outside the hospital, the emergency care facility, the nursing home, or the practice’s building. Stacking materials up beside a reception desk or check-in kiosk doesn’t count.

Think about some of the most distinctive healthcare facilities you have visited recently – have they left a positive brand impression (as well as a service impression) on you?
 
Experience shows that marketing within a healthcare facility is just as critical as marketing outside the facility.  In fact, internal brand presentations may have more lasting impact. There’s an immense qualitative difference between passing a hospital billboard message on the freeway and spending hours in the hospital’s hallways.

First, the increasingly popular concept of concierge services is part of upgrading visitors’ relationship with your brand. The facts are quite clear. Older generations of Americans did not expect a hospital to look like a hotel. Younger people (and we’ll leave it to you to determine who’s younger) consider such upgraded services to be an appropriate part of your story.  Today, these service elements are as much marketing decisions as operations factors.

Second, your staff members are themselves brand ambassadors.  They play a huge role in your brand marketing plan because they are in direct contact with your visitors.  They should be attuned to the services and specialties of the facility or practice.  Current patients are often not aware of what is offered – patients and family may not have been in your facility before, or aren’t aware of service additions and upgrades.

Staffers should be experts in the services you offer and how the facility can better serve its patients.  If your team is well-informed about new services, especially within the context of the brand, you’ll get better facility-visitor relationships and more return patients.  They are visitor touch points; their unique capabilities (and frequent patient/family interactions) should not be wasted.

Let Your Facility Do Some Heavy Lifting

Third – but perhaps first in do-ability: Make best use of the actual facility itself. Both public and private spaces provide a wide range of marketing opportunities. Too many organizations don’t take advantage of them.

What we’re really talking about is the building itself. Do you use “inside branding” to support, even enhance your brand story?

Once patients and their families are in the facility, it is not just natural but proven effective to showcase the facility’s offerings and services – under the aegis of the corporate brand.  It is more than just interior decorating.  The facility should convey your brand story using wall spaces and public areas with appropriate logo placements as well as customized messaging decorations (i.e., posters).

Take advantage of varying specialties within the facility (cardiology or maternal/child health, for example) to create and offer specialty-appropriate, brand-focused collateral pieces in these areas of the facility.  And further support the branding campaign with multimedia content on internal TV networks.

(Many patients are “captive” and have time to absorb messages. There may be excellent reasons, from revealing additional services through offering emotional support, for making certain you brand these messages.)

The Power of the “Integrated” Facility

Whether your operating focus is a single specialty or multi-disciplined, the facility itself ought to be an integral component of your brand and an active conveyor of brand messages.  

As a physical form of brand champion, it can confirm, even reinforce your brand story by allowing external message elements inside. In many ways, it offers a far stronger mechanism for brand communications, because of its very physical presence. than your organization’s website.

As the brand decision-maker, you ought to use the facility itself to speak to your publics. Use its physical spaces and characteristics to present additional branded services. Help the bricks and mortar reflect your brand’s aspirations and achievements.

Everything you’ve done to brand and market your organization or your practice should reach a pinnacle at your facilities.  This is the continuation of telling your story by other means.

Adam Nisenson is co-founder of Active Imagination, a Houston-based marketing firm specializing in healthcare and sports branding and marketing. For more information on sports sponsorships and how they might benefit your organization, contact adam@aimagination.com.