#6 Marketing Tip for Urgent Care: BUILD YOUR BRAND

Urgent Care Marketing presents Urgent Care Marketing Tip #6: Build Your Brand.

A “brand” is the unique set of benefits a business delivers to a customer while “brand elements”—functional and emotional—are what differentiate a business in the minds of consumers.

Ultimately, branding answers the question “why would someone use my center versus other options?”

For urgent care, “functional elements” are what a center does—such as suturing cuts and setting fractures—and the quality, price, and consistency by which it does them. All too often urgent care centers focus their branding on the functional elements. When educating consumers who are unfamiliar with urgent care—competing with the emergency room—functional elements such as short wait times and low co‐pays effectively define the urgent care brand. But when marketing to “enlightened” consumers and competing with other urgent care centers, walk‐in service and on‐site x‐ray are not brand differentiators—the focus must shift to the emotional elements.

Emotional elements” go to consumer perceptions and differentiate an urgent care according to the patient experience. When consumers do not have sufficient medical training to differentiate the quality of physician services, they make quality judgments
based on what they can see and feel. A shoddy facility, long wait times, and an abrupt medical assistant will result in an evaluation that the doctor is of “poor quality,” regardless of the true quality of clinical services provided. But if the staff is friendly and warm,
the waiting room comfortable and well attired, and wait times regularly communicated—the patient will be more likely to return and recommend the facility to others.

If you’ve been reading our blog and working on the Urgent Care Marketing Tips 1-5, you should have a jump start on building your Urgent Care Brand.
If you’ve missed the 1st 5 steps, you can visit: Urgent Care Marketing Tips

Once a brand is established it’s time to work on brand recognition and brand awareness.

A brand which is widely known in the marketplace acquires brand recognition. One goal in brand recognition is the identification of a brand without the name of the company present. Logos, fonts, and images are excellent examples of brand recognition. One does not have to see the Company’s name  but can merely identify the company right away because a the logo, font or images used.

Urgent Care brand awareness refers to patient’s ability to recall and recognize the Urgent Care brand under different conditions and link to the brand name, logo, jingles and so on to certain associations in memory. It helps the consumers to understand to which product or service category the particular brand belongs to and what products and services are offered under the brand name.

Branding and creating a brand recognition and brand awareness is important to each and every business. And as Urgent Care Facilities are popping up everywhere
all over the United States, the competition becomes greater and greater with each day.
These days, branding and brand marketing not only becomes crucial for Urgent Care Walk-In Clinics but simply put, it’s a necessity.