Healthcare Brand Engagement
To engage customers, health brands should focus on emotional needs and wants..
By: Alex Valderrama, CEO and Brand Strategist at Cranium Agency
If your health brand is struggling to keep customers, there may be a simple reason. Your customers may not have a strong emotional connection to your brand. It is not uncommon to forget the human aspect of brand building and the importance of connecting with your customers.
“People buy based on an emotional feeling.”
A health brand that creates a strong emotional feeling will encourage the buyer to act. This premise applies to every brand, including the not-so-sexy brands in the health industries such as dentistry, nursing homes, medical device manufacturing, etc. Every health brand has an opportunity to engage with their customers, and the most effective strategy is to engage them through an emotional need or want. Brand engagements are not defined by what the customer gets for their money, but how they feel before, during, and after a purchase. Imagine the excitement right before a great concert, visiting a favorite restaurant, buying the most current smartwatch, or driving a new car off the lot. All of these are examples of how someone might feel when they make a purchase based on emotional interaction with their favorite brand.
Strategically, building a health brand that is in tune, connects with its customers, and creates an emotional engagement is often very difficult to achieve. It involves time, patience, a lot of introspecting, and a clear definition of the brand. There are several strategic branding exercises that can be used to discover how to effectively engage the customer on an emotional level. One of which we spoke about earlier in a recent article called “Increase Sales With a Stronger Brand Promise.” It is also important to uncover the brand purpose, brand differentiators, a strong positioning statement, and the reason the brand is in existence. These are a few of the elements needed to clearly define a robust brand engagement strategy. Ultimately, you will build an emotional connection between your health brand and your prospective buyers.
Let’s face it. Every brand has an opportunity to make an impact on our lives—an impact that creates an emotional response of happiness, excitement, confidence, empowerment, a happy experience, joyfulness, and so much more. These emotional feelings are what drive customers to purchase a product or service, by creating a lasting memory and exciting the senses. A love-fest the brand is sure to benefit from with recurring sales and happy customers.
