6 STEPS TO BUILD A BETTER BRANDThe Ultimate Guide to Branding a PT Practice

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Overview

LOGOS

COLOR

IMAGERY

VOICE

POSITIONING

GUIDELINES

A brand is defined as a particular identity or image regarded as an asset of your company. The way your company looks and its messaging should be the same across all communications and platforms—from your web-site to your newsletter to your letterhead and envelopes. Your practice’s brand image defines the impression that potential patients and referring doctors will have of your practice. Thus, it needs to be professional, con-sistent, and memorable.

Whether it is your physical therapy website, newsletter or company ma-terials, you need to have a beautiful, branded practice. Everything should seamlessly carry through and really bring all of your promotions together. This makes it easy for a new patient, physician or the general public to identify your brand.

OVERVIEWWHAT IS BRANDING?

Your physical therapy practice’s logo should be an iconic visual representation of your practice. If any of your patients see the logo, whether it’s on a billboard, newspaper ad, or building sign, they should be able to instantly identify it and connect to your practice.

LOGOSYOUR IDENTITY

Logos and graphic design are more than just creating images that look nice—branding, conceptual insight, and quality should inform and influence the imagery.

Your practice’s branded identity includes your logos (icon and wordmark) and their treatment across your clinic, print, and digital marketing. Having a distinct branded identity helps new patients identify your clinic and reminds past patients about your care and results.

PRO TIP:

It is more crucial that your logo resonates with your audience than you, the business owner.

But, there is often a case to refresh your logo and do a “rebrand” to update your logos. You can probably see plenty examples of old graphic design and physical therapy logos from other businesses and clinics. Having an outdated logo can create the public perception of being behind the times and not being cutting edge or relevant. You want to ensure that your physical therapy logos and marketing is on par with industry leaders. And, you want to have the best looking website and print materials.

Logos should visually epitomize your practice and give the foundation of your company colors. Your logos and colors will combine to influence the look of your website and print marketing. Thus, choosing the right image, font and colors is crucial. Your logos should be simple so that they stand out—nothing is worse than a complex or abstract logo that is confusing and not grounded in your practice’s mission.

We suggest:

• Hire a professional graphic designer. Repeat: Hire a professional graphic designer. Professional designers have infinite experience creating logos and can generate endless options, color schemes, and arrangements.

• Be open to ideas. It is great to come to the table with examples of other practice logos or colors that you like. This can give the designer guidance and inspiration. Do not expect them to copy another clinic’s design and change the colors to match yours. You wouldn’t want to see your logo being “borrowed” by another practice right?

• Think about where you want to use the logo. Print marketing, website, social media, t-shirts, bumper stickers, building signage, billboards etc. You want the designer to give you a suite of variations on your logo.

BEFORE AFTER BEFORE

AFTER

COLORYOUR IDENTITY

Color is one of the most powerful tools that a practice can use to create and enfornce it’s brand. When selecting the color palette for your brand, it’s more than what looks pretty or about creating warm and fuzzy feelings. It’s about conveying a specific message. Your message.

PRO TIP:

Make sure your colors are eye-catching and complimentary. Choose your inspirations from your

natural environment and have a palate of 2-3 logo colors.

When it comes to picking the “right” color, research has found that a consumer’s thoughts about color appropriateness for a product (does the color “fit” what is being sold?) is more important than the individual color itself. So, if Harley owners buy the product in order to feel rugged, you could assume that the pink + glitter edition wouldn’t sell all that well.

It’s the feeling, mood, and image that your brand creates that play a role in persuasion. Be sure to recognize that colors only come into play when they can be used to match a brand’s desired personality (i.e., the use of white to communicate Apple’s love of clean, simple design).

IMAGERYTHE RIGHT LOOK FOR YOUR PRACTICE

Image is everything—from first impressions to conversion to loyal customer. Both consciously and unconsciously, people demand a certain look and professionalism from a business or service. So what is the right look for your practice?

First, it depends on your patient population, types of services and treatments, and location/demographics. For example, a pediatric clinic is going to have a different image as compared to sports physical therapy as compared to a physical therapy practice for Medicare patients. When promoting your PT practice, the images that you use to depict your clinic are often the first time a potential patient is “seeing” your business. What type of first impressions are online viewers developing?

HOW TO TAKE YOUR OWN HIGH-QUALITY PHOTOS:

1. Book your photographerGet a photographer who has a working knowledge of how to set and shoot portraits and who owns a high-resolution camera.

2. Plan for the shoot• Set a date for staff photos (and a rain date for outside shots).

Schedule a time in the morning before PTs start seeing patients.• Style your “models”. Have the staff wear your PT clinic’s polo or

other branded shirt. We don’t recommend t-shirts because they look wrinkled in photos. If you don’t have branded shirts, ask the team to wear solid colored tops with either collared shirts or modest necklines. Block the office calendars to allow everyone time for their photos and some extra time to do hair/make-up that morning.

3. Set the stage• A few days before the shoot, try out different test locations and

lighting. Check out the test images on a computer to see the coloring and styling. Some recommendations:

• On overcast days, outside settings can work well. Find a bench near your office that has a nice tree or plantings in the background.

• If you have to be inside, find a room with lots of natural light (even try turning off the fluorescents) and a clean, solid colored wall.

4. Lights, Camera, Action• Start taking the staff photos. Don’t hesitate to have the team

member adjust their clothes or hair to photograph better. Also shoot in a variety of poses to see what looks best.

• Allow 10-15 minutes per staff member. The first few might take longer depending on how well you prepped, but once things are rolling the process should speed up.

A brand message should be your practice’s tagline—a short 3-5 word phrase that epitomizes your mission and promotes your services. Look for positive, inspiring, and motivating words that encourage action. Be sure to include a concrete term or result…movement, motion, health, wellness, active, lifestyle etc. Use this opportunity to promote how you achieve exceptional results with your patients. Convey your expertise in a patient-centric and approachable way!

MESSAGECRAFT YOUR TAGLINE

PRO TIP:

Stand out from the crowd with a brand message that is innovative and inclusive. Your practice’s demographics and services may evolve over time so you want to your brand to be able to flex with your changes and growth.

We recommend:

• A phase that is between 3 and 5 words as longer phrases are often difficult to understand and remember.

• Words that are unique and encapsulating, but not exclusive. You want the tagline to encourage and support your treatments and services, but not in a way that makes them seem unattainable for the average person.

• Avoid qualifiers (best, #1, top-notch etc.). Unless you’re a Guinness record holder for PT, you probably should not claim to be the best. If you win an award for your treatments, such as Best PT in Richmond, hype that as an accompaniment to your tagline.

PRODUCTBE SPECIFIC

A key component of a brand is that it distinguishes your product from other similar products. So, what is your product? It is physical therapy, healthy patients, expert services and treatments? As a practice owner or marketer, you need to establish your product before you can start successfully marketing it. The product should be specific to your clinic and different from those offered by the “average” PT clinic. For example: saying “physical therapy” is your product generalizes your practice in with millions of other providers. Now what if you said your product is “sports therapy”, now that narrows the scope a bit.

Let’s take it a step further and say your product is “performance improving sports therapy”. What does that say about your brand? “Performance improving” implies that you focus on returning the patient to a physical state that meets AND exceeds prior performance metrics. You also measure results as a means to confirm the patient’s improved abilities. “Sports therapy” indicates that you work with athletes and/or patients that enjoy maintaining an active lifestyle. You have a specialty in this area and tailor your physical therapy towards sports/fitness conditions. Now you have a product that both guides your brand and supports its business goals.

GUIDELINESHOW TO WRITE PT PRACTICE BRAND GUIDELINES

The mark of a truly exceptional brand is the uniformity and consistency that aligns all its marketing and assets. Think about brands that you can recognize anywhere like Coca Cola, Ford, Amazon, or even Starbucks. Whether or not you like and support these brands, you can identify them right away. There are even mobile apps and trivia games based solely around recognizing iconic brands’ logos and fonts.

As a practice owner, you want to ensure that all representations of your business are accurate and on point (or “on brand”). This goes beyond just your marketing and includes marketing content from other organizations too. Say your practice pays annual fees to be featured in various local marketing—your Chamber of Commerce directory, church bulletin, YMCA program guide, and local community college registry. Each year you send them your business information and logo to be placed on their marketing, and usually that’s all the input. You don’t necessarily receive a rough draft of their marketing materials before they are printed, so it’s almost impossible to check for mistakes.

Now, if you had brand guidelines, then you could send those to the organization as a check point to ensure their marketing is on brand for your practice. Even if you don’t get to review the rough drafts, the organization has a document that shows exactly how you want your practice to be represented.

Logos: types, sizes, colors, and requirements. Be specific—a good graphic designer will know exactly what hex colors your logo uses, what the minimum size is (if your logo is too small or squished it could be hard to read), and how it looks best.

Name Conventions: most practices have a full, legal business name and several variations of that name. Your brand guidelines should state which names can be used and how. For example, if you have a small or iconic logo, then you would typically want your full business name used so that people can identify your practice. Or, some practices often drop the LLC or other suffix to simplify their name. Lastly, if your practice uses an abbreviated name, then you want to be specific about what that abbreviation is and when to use it.

Digital Media: website URL, social media accounts etc. For digital marketing, this could include links to your account profiles. For print media, this could include the platform’s icon followed by your account. For print campaigns, the icons should always be followed by the account (@PracticePromos for Twitter) or URL (https://www.facebook.com/practicepromotionsptmarketing).

Contact Information: address, phone number, fax number etc. By providing your contact information, you avoid that risk that someone could look it up and inadvertently insert the wrong information. If you address has a suite or unit #, be sure to include that in the correct formatting. For practice’s that have multiple phone numbers such as a dedicated appointment line or referral coordinator, you can include all relevant numbers in your brand guidelines. However, it can be helpful to say “for general marketing communications use: XXX-XXX-XXXX” to avoid any confusion. Keep the area code with the number to streamline calls. For fax numbers, generally these aren’t need for marketing purposes unless you are targeting physicians.

Consider keeping separate internal brand guidelines that include a list of logins (usernames and passwords) for your website’s CMS, social media profiles etc. so that access can be maintained.

BRANDING GUIDELINES CHECKLIST

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