Your online brand is the digital face of your business – it should completely align with what clients will experience when they arrive at your clinic.
Know your audience.
To build your brand online, you must first have a clear understanding of your audience. This is especially important if you are actively going to use your website to leverage content strategies and communication plans.
Who are they? What is the gender split, age ranges, marital status, etc. What is their average household income? Where do they live?
If you have more than one strong client group, each will need to be addressed online.
Give your brand a voice.
Based on your understanding of your client, determine what they will want to hear online and what one or voice they will want to hear it in. This will form the foundation for your brand’s voice.
For instance, if your's is a very low-key or rural office, you may want to use a less formal tone. If your's is a big, bustling urban clinic, your voice may be more sophisticated or academic.
When writing content, speak with your audience – not at them – as people respond better to a conversation that relates to them and engages them.
Get professional photography.
For a services based business, photography can make or break a website. If you have the budget, we strongly recommend getting a professional in to take photographs of your clinic and your team.
Make sure all the brand elements line up.
Logo, colours, fonts and imagery are all as important to your online brand as they are to any other collateral you may develop for your business, such as flyers, banners, etc. Make sure that what you do online, works seamlessly with everything you do in your clinic.
Plan your social media integration.
What do you want your brand to say or do online? What types of interactions do you want your consumers to have with your business? Is Facebook right for you? Twitter?
You may not have all of the answers at this point, but a little research should help you understand where your audience is and how to interact with them.
Start by polling existing clients to find out what social media they use, if any. (Not all businesses need to use social media.)
Then use your social media to invite existing and new clients into a conversation. With social media, conversational strategies often work better than promotional strategies.
Use regularly posted new content to build your reputation.
After you launch your website, the single most important thing to getting found by search engines like Google is 'relevant' new content. Most businesses will do this through the Blog functionality on their website.
The more good content you post, the more Google sees that you are active with your business and offering value to your clients. This will increase Google's comfort in 'recommending' your business to people who are searching online.
New content is also the best way to continue to develop your brand personality online. People read blog content differently than regular website pages. With blogs, they are happy to see more storytelling and a more conversational approach to the things they are interested in as clients.