Knowing how to properly and effectively build and promote your brand is one of the most important marketing tasks you can ever do for your plastic surgery practice. But what if you don’t know exactly how to go about building and promoting your brand? Not to worry, that’s what we are here to help you with.

So what are the latest and greatest branding tips for plastic surgeons? If this is something you have been thinking about, then this article is for you.

Let’s get started!

What Is Your Brand?

Generally, a brand is a combination of perception, value, and awareness. Therefore, you should start by defining what you want your brand perception to be using those guidelines. Asking yourself and answering the following questions will help you with how to proceed.

Is your plastic surgery practice immediately recognizable when seen online and offline?
Do people know of your plastic surgery practice by name?
Does your practice rank highly in local search engine results pages?
What do people think about your plastic surgery practice?
Does your plastic surgery practice currently have reviews?
Does your plastic surgery practice have a high star rating?
What are people saying online (good and bad) about your plastic surgery practice?
Does your plastic surgery practice deliver, overdeliver, or underdeliver on its promise to help your patients?
What value does your practice provide that other plastic surgeons in your area don’t? What is your unique selling proposition (USP)?

These questions will help get you started on the journey to properly and effectively build your brand and your brand’s reputation.

The Core Assets of Any Brand

Brand perception is obviously a mental association; however, it plays an important role when it comes to creating an emotional connection with your current and potential patients.

There is a set of core assets that should be included when building your brand. All your core assets, and everything else related to your brand for that matter, should be cohesive. That means when people look at any of your marketing campaigns and anything else related to your business, they should be able to immediately recognize it as being a part of your practice.

Here are some of the main core assets to consider:

Business name
Logo
Color palette (90% of an initial impression is based on color alone)
Typography
Slogan and tagline
Voice and tone (what personality do you want your business to portray)
Design style and elements

Take a look at each one of your brand assets (print and digital) and ask yourself if people will be able to recognize your brand instantly when seeing that asset.

Your brand encompasses every asset you have. So everything should be cohesive by matching the style, design, colors, messaging, and overall personality of your business. Everything about your brand should always deliver a consistent, unified experience when a current or potential patient encounters one of your messages.

Be Careful to Never Mimic a Competitor

On that same note, it’s also important to make sure nothing about your branding could even remotely be mistaken for any of your competitors’ brands—ever—not even a little bit!

What Will Compel a Potential Patient to Contact You

The most important aspect of your brand is knowing what will compel a potential patient to contact you rather than continue searching. You need a hook of some sort…something that will make you stand out from the crowd.

What’s Your Hook?

Think about how the most popular brands make themselves stick out. For example, Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, or Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef” campaign. These are good examples because chances are you have heard them and will immediately recognize them when you hear one of those catchphrases. However, your hook doesn’t have to be a catchphrase. Anything you come up with to make your business stand out will do.

Now that you have a general idea about how you want your brand to be perceived, you can proceed with building your brand.

Where to Start Building Your Brand

Knowing where to start is perhaps one of the hardest parts of branding. Here are some ideas that will help get you started.

Ask your current patients for their opinion of your practice. What do they like, what stands out the most when they think about your practice, etc.?
Monitor your social media and other online business name mentions. What’s being said, good and bad. Do you see any positive trends and mentions? If so, consider using that information.
Analyze your star rating and reviews to see what information people are including in their feedback.

After you have done that, you can review your current brand messaging.

Reviewing Your Brand Messaging

You now want to look at your current brand messaging and ask yourself the following questions.

Does your current messaging convey your values?
Is your website copy clean and concise?
Look at your overall digital footprint. Can people find you quickly and easily? You want a broad digital footprint if you want to become an instantly recognizable brand and one whose information can be easily found.
Have you claimed your online directory listings such as your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and social media profiles, etc.?
Does your current messaging portray the personality you want to be known for?
Do all your core assets match in color, typography, style, etc.?
Is your current brand messaging cohesive across all avenues?

Now you can begin to think about what activities you need to perform to build your brand’s marketing campaign framework.

Activities That Help You Build and Maintain Your Brand

Here are some activities you can use to help build your marketing campaigns and maintain your brand.

Run a brand sentiment analysis. This will help you compare what people are saying online about your plastic surgery practice. It will also tell you how they feel about your brand and your business as a whole.
Work to get more online reviews (more about this in a moment). Then you want to reply in a timely manner to every one of them, good and bad.
Measure your total average star rating across all review platforms. This will show you where you excel and where your weaknesses are, so you can improve.
Run email marketing campaigns that send questions and surveys to your current patients.
Organize your brand’s content and visual assets in a centralized location (more about how to do this in a moment).
Be easy to reach through text message, email, social media direct messaging, and website chat.

These are just a few of the activities you can do to help build your brand awareness and reputation. And, yes, it does take work. But what if we told you we could take nine of your daily marketing tasks and make them quicker and easier to perform, then consolidate them on one marketing platform?

Keep reading…

Surefire Local—The Best All-In-One Marketing Platform on the Market

Surefire Local’s business marketing intelligence software is the leading platform available for local businesses looking to take control of their online presence. It takes nine of your most important online marketing activities and consolidates them on a single easy-to-use dashboard. That means you only have to pay for one tool versus having to pay for a wide variety of tools you have to manage from multiple platforms and systems.

Using different tools for all your marketing tasks is not only difficult for you and your team, but it’s also extremely time-consuming. This results in you having to pay people for more hours, costing you more money on a day over day, month over month, and year over year basis. Ouch!

What Is the Surefire Local Marketing Platform?

The Surefire Local Marketing platform helps small businesses get higher Google rankings, increase web traffic, get more online reviews, alerts you when negative reviews are posted, and provides placements in 70+ local directories including Yelp, Google, BBB, Bing, Foursquare, Yahoo, Angi, and more. Additionally, Surefire Local has partnered with some of the world’s leading businesses, such as Inc. 5000, Yelp, Salesforce, Quickbooks, Facebook, and many more.

What Can You Do with Surefire Local?

Here is what you can do with Surefire Local.

Ratings and Reviews – Generate and manage more patient ratings and reviews.
Business Listings – List and manage your business across 70+ directories.
Content Marketing – Generate, schedule, and distribute content online across multiple channels all from one account.
Lead Generation – Manage your leads all from one place.
Local Paid Ads – Advertise and track ads on search engines and social media platforms using pre-built, location-based ad campaigns.
Analytics and Reporting – Track, monitor, and measure the effectiveness of all online marketing activities.
Competitor Analysis – Gain insight into what keywords and local search terms your competitors are using, including what’s working and what’s not.
Geo-Location Check-Ins – Create location check-ins to help potential patients find your local business on Google and what you have to offer.
Text Message Marketing – Answer questions, increase engagement, and convert more leads by using real-time text and chat features.

Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo

If you would like more branding tips for plastic surgeons, consider attending a demo of our marketing software. This will provide you with all the information you need to make an informed decision about Surefire Local based on the needs of your specific practice.