When most people think about branding, especially if they don’t work in marketing, they tend to think about company logos and taglines, clever slogans and colors. All of those have their place in branding your business, but they’re only a part of the whole, and you need a strong brand to attract your ideal clients and continually grow your audience and your med spa.
In this article, we’re going to look at what branding is, and we’re going to share our top brand development tips for med spas.
What is branding?
If branding isn’t choosing colors and creating a great logo, then what is it? Well, you need both your brand message and your brand identity.
A brand message is the core of branding. There’s no mention of logos in this area of branding. Instead, it’s all about who you are as a business, how you come across to other people, your values, and what others think about you.
While you can’t control everything that people think about you and your business, you can keep consistently presenting your brand to people and building brand awareness until you reach the point, like so many big businesses now, where people only need to see your logo or your tagline and they know exactly who you are, what you do, and what you stand for.
Where your logo and other creative aspects come in is with your brand identity. This is where you need to work on creating a package of logos, graphics, color palettes, slogans, and more to represent your business and attract your ideal clients. However, you can’t do that until you know what your brand message is.
Work on that first, and your logo, colors, and slogans will flow naturally from your brand message. You’ll have a coherent whole, a strong brand that genuinely does represent your business and who you are.
Why developing a brand matters:
- Ultimately, if you don’t develop a brand, people will look at your business and decide for themselves who and what they think you are. You then risk people getting quite the wrong impression, and you could find that you lose clients to competitors who have developed a strong brand. Creating your own brand helps you to control, as much as you can, how others see you.
- When you set out and say “This is who we are,” you are deliberately stating who you want to work with and the type of people you want to attract. This is a good thing. You can’t market to “everybody.” That isn’t a strongly defined target market. It’s too big and shapeless, and you’ll spend far more than you want to on trying to get clients through the door. With strong branding you are also deliberately putting off those people who aren’t for you – again, that’s a good thing, because you don’t want to waste your marketing dollars and your time on people that you don’t want to work with.
- The stronger your brand and the more you build brand awareness, the more people will already know who you are. You won’t need an introduction, your branding will have done that for you, and that’s half the marketing conversation that you just don’t need to have anymore. When you get to this point, people are familiar with your med spa and they’re more likely to choose you than a competitor they aren’t sure of. You’ve developed trust and a reputation, simply by developing your brand.
- It’s easier for your team to be consistent when marketing your med spa if you have clear branding and messaging to refer to. That helps you write strongly and consistently in your brand voice across all of your marketing, which again builds your brand and builds trust.
Brand development tips
Work your way through our top ten brand development tips for med spas and you’ll come out at the other end with the beginnings of a strong brand that reflects who you are as a business:
1. Define what makes your med spa unique
If you’ve ever written a business plan, you’ll know you’re supposed to come up with your unique selling point (USP). If you already have that down, then you’ve got a great start with your branding.
But it’s time to dig even deeper. It’s not just about your unique selling point. How do you want to come across to your clients? What do you want people to think of when they think of your med spa? Who do you serve? What are your values? What impression do you want to create?
Brainstorm your ideas and see how close you can get to describing the essence of your med spa.
2. Evaluate your competitors
It’s always a good idea to keep your eye on the competition, but when you’re looking at branding your own med spa, evaluating your competitors can really help.
Think about how they come across to you. What does their branding say to their audience? Is their branding strong and clear? If not, why not? What could they do better? Can you see what their values are? Do you know instantly who they want to attract?
Do your research and see what you can learn from your competitors to make your own branding stronger.
3. Identify your ideal client
If you have buyer personas, start there. You might need to revamp your personas and take another look if things have changed since you started your business. Either way, you need a deep dive into who you really want to walk through your doors.
You have to know this well, because you can’t build a brand that strongly attracts your ideal clients and clearly repels the people you don’t want if you don’t know who they are and what they want.
4. Use compelling messaging
With what you’ve learned in the first three steps, it should now be easier to look at the kind of messaging you’re currently putting out and whether it’s fit for purpose. Does it appeal to your target audience? Is it clear and compelling? Do you think it will attract the clients you want? How does it compare with your competitors?
Whatever marketing messaging you already have, now is the time to go through it and revamp it to ensure it hits the mark every time when addressing your ideal clients.
Create your messaging, slogan, tag line, brand voice manual, and everything else you and your marketing team need to aim beautifully targeted messaging at your ideal clients.
You could consider bringing in the professionals for this. Check out some excellent graphic designers in your area and look for someone experienced who you think will get what you’re aiming for with your brand. Look at their style and the quality to make sure they will create something that suits your brand.
Take your time with this search because your logo is important. Yes, you can change it later if you need to, and at some point, you may want to rebrand, but it’s far better to get it as close as you can right now. Consistency matters and people need to see you with a strong logo, that’s reflective of your business.
5. Be consistent
Wherever you post online, and whatever you do offline, you must be consistent. It matters as much that you use your same brand voice when answering the phone as it does when you’re writing marketing copy or blog posts.
Your brand must be consistent in every way, everywhere people encounter it. You need the same logo, in the same colors, with the same look and feel. You need to sound like you whenever you post. Every time you do that, you are reinforcing and building your brand.
It’s also helpful if you can use the same name consistently on every social media platform for brand recognition.
6. Be authentic
It’s really hard to pretend to be someone other than who you are. And if you’re trying to build a consistent brand, it’ll be even harder if what you’ve created really doesn’t suit who you are deep down and how you want your business to be seen.
The only way your branding will really work and attract people is if it’s authentic and real to you. You have to feel it and have the same values. You have to believe in your branding and know deep down that it really does represent you. If not, people will be able to tell, and your branding will feel in authentic.
In the same way, when you’re posting online, greeting customers on the telephone or in person, or writing anything for your marketing, you have to be authentic, real, and genuine. People know if you’re not and no matter how beautiful your design and how good your copy, you will lose out to med spas with a more authentic brand.
7. Engage your community
You’re not just building a brand; you’re building a community of people who are attracted to how you come across and what you say. You will build an audience on social media if you continue to be authentic, genuinely helpful, and completely you.
Engage with your audience. Ask them questions, reply to their comments, answer their questions, laugh with them, build genuine relationships.
You will build and attract an audience of your ideal clients if you give them what they want and if you also respond to them and engage them.
8. Create valuable content
Content marketing is extremely important when building your brand. You need to always keep your brand voice in mind and be consistent when you post. But you also need to provide excellent content that your target audience wants to see.
From learning about your audience and building your buyer personas, you should have a good idea of what content your people want to see, what questions they want answered, and in what formats they prefer to consume your content.
That’s not just an intellectual exercise, it’s what you need to provide to your audience.
You can then refine and tweak as you go, learning from your analytics to see what people respond to and what they don’t.
9. Build a reputation
Take a look at the nine steps above. Everything you’ve done on those nine steps was designed to help you build your reputation, not just your brand. What you need to do now is keep doing what works.
Get to know your audience even better. Ask them what they’d like to see and give it to them. The more genuine, valuable, and helpful you are, the more you’ll build your reputation and your brand.
Build your brand with Surefire Local
With Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software, you’ll find it’s far easier to build your brand. We can help you automate a lot of the marketing tasks that go into brand building, such as posting to social media, email marketing, and content marketing.
Instead of having to do things manually, it will be far easier to keep track of your marketing and branding efforts with our single login, easy-to-use platform.
Here’s how we can help:
Send review requests via text message and email and post responses
Reviews are extremely important when it comes to building your brand and your reputation. Using our platform, you can manage your review requests and replies quickly and easily.
Send review requests via text message and email, follow up with reminders where needed, and post your replies from right within our dashboard.
Create and publish content to your blog, social media, and Google Business Profile
Our platform will let you jot down content ideas, create and publish posts, and schedule your content ahead of time.
We can post to your blog, social media platforms, and to your Google Business Profile.
It’s then much easier to provide and keep track of the valuable content that your audience is expecting and that you need to provide to build your brand.
Share photos and videos across your online presence
It’s quick and easy to share high-quality images and videos across every part of your online presence. As we said above, we can post to your blog, social media, and your GBP, and we can also update over 80 business directories with new posts, videos, and images to keep every part of your online presence up to date and looking the part.
Maintain consistency when it comes to the information found about your business online
One thing that can impact your reputation online and your appearance in the search results is having inconsistent information online.
Your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) must be consistent everywhere you post it. If it isn’t, it can cause potential clients to become confused and wonder if there is more than one med spa and which one they should choose. Google may also penalize you and show your information further down the search results if they can’t tell which information is correct.
Luckily, you don’t need to stress about this, and nor do you need to spend time individually logging into and out of directories and social platforms. Simply log into our dashboard, and you can update everything, including over 80 business directories with your contact details, posts, news, images, offers, and more.
Increase local search rankings with an optimized website
Ensure you’ve fully optimized your website and all your social platforms and directories, by including the right keywords and phrases, including local keywords and related keywords, in your headings, meta title and meta description, in your first paragraph and throughout your copy, and in the alt text in your images.
Make sure people can find you and your great content by making sure your site and other places in your online presence are optimized fully.
Measure engagement to determine what your audience is most interested in
With our marketing platform, you get exceptionally detailed data and analytics, and you can run reports and see results on every part of your marketing.
You can then look at your engagement on each social media platform, in your newsletter, and on your website to see what people are searching for, what they are spending the most time on, what questions they are asking, which are your most popular posts, what formats people tend to engage with the most, and more.
You can then ensure you’re providing more of what your audience wants.
Send targeted email campaigns to foster customer relationships
With email marketing, you can reach your clients and potential clients right in their own inbox. You can market to them, engage them, send surveys, ask questions, and get to know them even better so you can improve your marketing.
But this is also a great way to build client relationships and to provide tailored content specific to only certain segments of your list who will be interested in receiving it.
You really can make people feel as if you’re writing personally to them and anticipating what they need with good customer research and the right software to deliver your emails.
You can write your emails in your dashboard and choose from templates, and you can schedule your emails to go out when you want them to, without having to be sitting at your keyboard.
Determine brand sentiment with a word-cloud graph revealing frequently used words in your reviews
On Surefire Local’s marketing platform, you can see a word-cloud graph that will show you the most common words people are using when they write a review for you. This gives you an at-a-glance overview of what people think about your business and your brand.
Use this to keep an eye on what people are saying and make sure your marketing and your branding are on the right track.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
Building your brand takes a lot of time and effort, but Surefire Local can take some of the load off you with our powerful business intelligence marketing software.
We can help you with all aspects of marketing your med spa and building your brand, and you’ll be able to do it all without even leaving our dashboard.
Add in comprehensive reports and detailed analytics and you’ll always be sure you’re on the right track with Surefire. Book a demo today and see how we can help build your brand and your reputation.