4 Steps to Create a Strong Osteopathy Brand
- Alan Zaia M.Ost
- November 27, 2021
- Branding
How to craft a stunning osteopathy brand
Own a strong brand so you can stand out amongst your competition
Creating an osteopathy brand is an essential part of any clinic growth strategy. As the general population becomes more sophisticated, they demand that their healthcare providers deliver a consistent and compelling experience. Therefore, having a strong brand is an integral part of any business strategy. It can also help you stand out in a crowded market and communicate who you are, what you do and why you do what you do.
Let’s cover four simple steps to developing an osteopathy brand that will stand out even in the most fiercely competitive places.
What is a brand identity?
Developing a brand identity is an integral part of any business strategy. A brand identity is a set of key elements that help define and reinforce your personal or clinic brand. Key elements include a unique name, professionally-made logo, fonts, a collection of colours, tag lines, meaningful values, a defined voice and tone and a recognisable style. These elements are used across various physical and digital platforms and often strengthen your existing brand reputation.
Brand strategy guide
Establishing a brand style guide will help you implement consistent visual language across all of your activities.
When you have created an incredible brand identity, you must have a rule book that tells you how to use your brand for maximum consistency and impact. That’s where your brand strategy guide comes in. Your brand strategy guide is your brand in a box, a physical booklet that thoroughly explains everything about your brand.
Your brand strategy guide can be used as an instruction manual to create a consistent look, sound and feel for anything attached to your practice. That covers all marketing materials, including your website, social media, business cards, posters, emails, etc., even when decorating your room or entire osteopathic practice.
The importance of a strong osteopathy brand
For us at Osteohustle, building a brand is essential for all osteopaths because a strong brand:
- Creates a professional and consistent experience no matter where patients find you, thus boosting brand loyalty.
- Separates you and what you do from your competition.
- Installs trust immediately and over time, even beyond yourself, so new patients trust the brand rather than just the principal.
- Showcases mutual values shared between your brand and their personal values.
- Attracts incredible staff and builds reliable businesses that also share your values.
- Establishes an emotional connection with potential and current patients who relate to what you stand for.
- Positions you the obvious go-to osteopath for what potential patients look for in a brand.
4 steps to create a strong osteopathy brand
Creating a stunning brand identity for your practice comes down to a lot more than just choosing a logo. Firstly, you must understand that all the visual elements of a brand are meaningless if they don’t stand for anything. Therefore, the first step is to understand who your patients are and what their needs are.
1. Values and finding your why
The first step in this process is conducting research to identify your core values. Create a list of values by speaking with patients, team members, and significant others to get an idea of what they think your values are as a person and an osteopath. Inside The Osteopathy Brand Academy, we develop a brand from scratch so you can build alongside, including how several gold-standard exercises to easily discover your personal and professional brand values.
Once you have a definitive list of around ten values, you can create your mission statement. Now, here at Osteohustle, we prefer the idea of finding your why, a concept developed by Simon Sinek. The Brand Academy takes Simon’s why statement creation exercises and translates them into osteopathic terms so you can find your why and express it throughout your branding.
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2. Choosing a name
Deciding on a name for your practice or your personal name is very important for unique branding. Having a consistent and memorable name will help establish your brand and help you stand out in the crowd.
Approach choosing your business name like you would picking the name for your newborn child. When you think of a name like Rose, Lilly, or Violet, your brain thinks of beautiful flowers and fragrances. While other words like rubbish, swamp, and rotten will remind you of a bad stinking smell.
Before creating our Osteopathy Brand Academy online course, I read a fantastic book by Alexandra Watkins called Hello, My Name is Awesome!
Find a name that sticks with SCRATCH
This method is directly from the book. It’s a great way to find a name that sticks in the minds of future and current patients.
S- Spelling. If the name sounds correct but spells wrong or shows as a misspelt word, then it is time to scratch it off.
C- Copycat. Avoid names that sound similar to another brand.
R- Restrictive. Don’t use a name that limits your future. Always consider the possibility of bringing other professions into your clinic or building a second clinic outside your suburb. Maybe having ‘osteopathy’ or ‘Fulham’ in your brand name isn’t the best choice, or it may be a great idea!
A- Annoying. Always avoid names that are two words forced together or spelt backwards. People won’t like the name and tend to forget it.
T- Tame. You don’t want your name to look or sound dull.
C- Course of Knowledge. Stay away from words few people know.
H- Hard to pronounce. Stay away from names that are hard to pronounce. People won’t use them because they’re afraid to look silly or embarrassed.
Choose your name wisely. Of course, you can change it, but it’s not an easy thing to do once you’ve decided.
3. Identifiable experience
Find Your Red Thread by Tasmen Webster is a fantastic example of creating an identifiable patient experience, something that over-delivers and goes above and beyond their expectations. Tasmen talks about how having a red thread woven throughout your business is essential for success.
What is it? Red thread, also known as the “rogue’s yarn”, finds its roots in sailing. Think tall ships and pirates, and you’ll start to picture the kind of rogue we’re talking about: those that would steal precious rope for their own ships.
To prevent that kind of theft or to identify the owner of the rope after it was recovered, fleets started to insert a coloured thread to mark it as their own. Most famously, the British Royal Navy chose red for their rogue’s yarns, and the red thread metaphor was born.
How does it relate to osteopathy? Quite simply, I love the idea of being able to make your way of practising osteopathy so remarkable and aligned with your identity that even the smallest piece of your business is recognised as your branding. So create your red thread by combining your vision, your deepest values and your unique way of wanting to help people.
4. Practice
You must practice your branding. Keep it consistent. Ask yourself: “how does my branding affect what I’m about to do?” Before you order those business cards, pay someone to build your website or bulk post some social media posts; ask yourself that question. Is it on brand? The more you practice, the more effortless it will become.
Written by Alan Zaia M.Ost
Founder & CEO of Osteohustle. You’ll find Alan coaching osteopaths, travelling in a van or writing our weekly newsletter, The Hustle.
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