The B2B healthcare space is quickly becoming saturated with many different players all vying for your audience’s attention. One of the best ways your organization can make sure that it stands out from the crowd is by maintaining an authentic, recognizable, and consistent brand voice.
As HubSpot puts it, your brand is what distinguishes your organization from any other. [I] But with all the thought that goes into choosing brand logos, mission statements, imagery, and more, brand voice often gets overlooked. Continue reading on to learn how your healthcare organization can develop its unique brand voice and how doing so will help you better engage with your audience.
What Is Brand Voice
Your brand voice is an essential aspect of your organization’s overall brand identity–an identity that” focuses on your brand’s personality, as well as the values you convey to customers.” [ii] Contrary to what some may think, brand voice is not just about the specific words your organization chooses to use. It is about how you use them, where you use them, the tone of voice you use them with, and more.
Overall, maintaining a brand voice that resonates with your specific target audience is key to establishing trust with them. The more they start to recognize the sound of your organization’s voice, the more confidence they will find in it due to its familiarity.
How To Develop Your Healthcare Brand’s Voice
- Competitor Analysis
When attempting to craft your healthcare organization’s distinct brand voice, you should start by analyzing the brand voices of your competitors. Take note of their tone, their positioning, and any words or phrases that keep coming up repeatedly.
The main focus of your analysis should be to make sure that the brand voice you develop is unique from your competitors. Too often, organizations will just copy what is already out there without thinking deeply about how they can stand out from the crowd—especially in the healthcare space. While your brand voice probably shouldn’t be a complete 180 from that of your competitors (you have the same audience after all), you still want to make an active effort to establish your own distinct voice and personality.
- Company Values
Your brand voice should be an extension of your organization’s values. Spending some time looking over your company’s mission statement should help you begin to identify what your brand voice should sound like.
Routine cybersecurity training can equip For example, if your company’s purpose is to help your audience learn something, a friendly, educational tone might work best. Or maybe your brand voice should be more authoritative, professional, or even conversational. Whatever you choose, you should reflect your organization’s values in the words and tone you use in all your messaging.
- Ideal Audience
Next, consider your ideal audience. If your brand voice were a real person, who would they be speaking to? How would they sound? What key concepts, ideas, or phrases would they be sharing?
Imagining your brand voice as a person having a conversation with your target audience can help you identify what sort of messaging fits best with your brand. When your customers interact with your brand, you want them to feel as if you developed all your marketing materials with them specifically in mind.
- Authenticity
If every time you spoke with a friend they sounded and came across as a completely different person, you would probably have trouble forming a trusting relationship with them. That is because it is easy for people to tell when others aren’t being authentic—and the same goes for your healthcare organization’s brand voice.
Your brand voice should stay true to your company’s overall brand identity. Always trying to cater to the latest fads and trends will leave your customers confused at best and distrustful at worst.
- Consistent, But Evolving
Finally, it’s important that your brand voice is consistent so that your audience can learn to recognize the sound of it. Take stock of your messaging across a few of your marketing channels. Do your emails, tweets, and blog posts sound like they were all written by the same person? If not, your brand voice isn’t consistent enough.
However, just because your brand voice should be consistent doesn’t mean it can’t evolve. As your organization grows and changes, so should your brand voice with it. One of the best ways to make sure that your whole team stays on the same page when it comes to your organization’s brand voice is to develop a brand voice style guide. It could include things like what tones to use, what words to avoid, whether to directly address the audience as “you,” and all the other elements that are crucial for you. Using a style guide can help ensure that your brand voice comes across consistently and can easily adapt to changes year after year.
Finding Your Healthcare Organization’s Brand Voice
If you need help crafting your brand’s unique voice and applying it throughout all your marketing initiatives, we can help.
Our team can provide targeted strategies and develop vision-focused content that aligns with your mission and brand identity.
References AND RESOURCES
- Wheeler, K. (2020). How to Develop a Unique (& Memorable) Brand Identity in 2020. [online] Hubspot.com. Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/develop-brand-identity.
