Your brand is YOU. It’s your reputation, your personality, how people see you – the core of your business. Taking the time to put an effective and thorough strategy in place is key to setting yourself up for success. One of the best ways to start is a brand analysis. It will enable you to attract the right people, and ultimately grow your therapy practice.
Studies suggest that people are 60 percent more likely to make a purchase when they connect emotionally to a brand. How people feel when they interact with your therapy content, visuals, and message is what dictates a lot of your results. And as a therapist, you know that emotions and mindset are even more relevant – both to your work and to your brand.
If you are a new therapist, brand analysis can help you as you start thinking about what kind of practice you want to have.
If you have been a therapist for awhile, brand analysis is the key to increasing the size of your practice, differentiating your practice from your peers, and standing out as the best choice for clients with specialized needs.
Below you’ll find the complete breakdown of brand analysis for therapists, but really it’s the same process for brands that want to stand out online.
Please let us know if we can support you in this process. Sometimes it can feel like a lot to analyze and you don’t have to do this on your own.
What Is A Brand Analysis?
A brand analysis is a marketing process in which you review the current state of your business in detail. It’s a snapshot or audit of where you are with your brand, and how that is yielding results – or not. The analysis usually includes:
- Background
- Goals
- Milestones or results
- Client avatars / personas
- Target markets
- Voice and tone or editorial guidelines
- Competitor research
How Is A Brand Analysis Helpful?
The point of a brand analysis is to grow your business. That’s the bottom line. In doing the analysis, you glean invaluable insights about your practice, ideal clients and prospects, and how to best position yourself for success.
The main way brand analyses bring results are through improved efficacy of marketing efforts. By deeply understanding all of the above aspects of your therapy practice, and where you want to go from here, you can much more effectively target marketing messages. You will be speaking specifically to your ideal client persona and their needs, in the right channels. Thus, your chances of conversion (signups and booked sessions) skyrocket.
With a brand analysis, you can also create measurable, actionable, doable goals – and map your way toward achieving them.
What Is Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning is an important aspect to overall brand analysis. It refers to your unique personality and offerings, that are different from everyone else’s. Why exactly should anyone hire you or purchase from you? What gap do you fill in the market, and why is that gap special or needed? How do you want your customers and prospects to perceive your brand, versus the competition?
Consumer choice is at an all time high in today’s world. How can you position yourself to be the ideal therapist for people seeking what you offer?
The standard parts of brand positioning include identifying your ideal client, analyzing your competition, and solidifying how your niche offering is different from competitors. Developing a brand positioning statement pulls it all together. The classic structure is as follows:
“For [your audience] that need [your category or segment], our brand provides [your unique benefits] because [evidence backing up your unique benefits], unlike [your competition].”
Brand Positioning Examples
Here are 4 examples of therapy brands that have established themselves uniquely in the market. The first three we sourced from Google simply looking for websites that do a good job with their brand position. The last two are therapy sites we worked on.
Millennial Life Counseling
https://www.millenniallifecounseling.com/
This therapist group has done a great job niching down to millennials. From the start, their name conveys who their target audience is. Your URL is the beginning of your brand so choosing one that has keyword value and can be tagged to your specific brand/audience is a very smart idea.
Looking at the site, you cannot miss who the target customer is. This is a wise move so you can reduce the number of inbound requests for therapy from clients you can’t really serve or who are outside of your expertise. Your brand analysis will help you identify who you want as clients and you can use this information as you make choices like buying your domain name.
TherapHe
What a clever name! The branding strategy on this website clearly conveys that this therapist (Kyle Talbert) only works with men – and on issues related to being a better husband, father, and man. His style, design, and words all support this goal.
His choice to have a small font also speaks to his style. Every element on this website communicates a message to men who want to, as he says, “become the man you want to be.” This message is powerful and will resonate with some men and not with others.
The value of doing this is that as a therapist you know there are some clients who resonate with your style, personality and values. Having a strong brand statement or “value proposition” is a good way to reduce inbound referrals from clients who are not your ideal client. This website does a very good job of differentiating this brand from others who do the same kind of work.
Here are Two Websites We Worked on for Branding, Content and SEO:
Lisa Rabinowitz, MA
When Lisa came to Crownsville Media, she was interested in expanding her practice on many fronts: she wanted an international practice and she wanted to convey her expertise in couples counseling (Lisa is both Gottman and PACT certified).
After evaluating her brand, it was clear that couples communication challenges and ADHD were to core areas to focus on. Her branding voice also needed to include healing relationships and helping couples escape divorce.
This is conveyed to readers from the very first image on her website. Her target audience is identified through the copy on the homepage and across the menu at the top. There is no question about her focus.
She also leads readers on a quick journey right at the beginning on making the decision between couples counseling and individual therapy. This quick narrative communicates one of the bigger questions client have which is: where should I begin.
From images to copy, Lisa’s marketing strategy helps readers determine quickly if her practice fits their need and their location so clients outside of her license area can not waste time if she can’t support them.
Alicia Dorn, MA
Alicia came to us with the goal of really adjusting her general practice to a specialized niche. As a chronic illness therapist Alicia wanted to focus on the needs of people newly diagnosed, living with or caring for someone with a chronic condition.
Additionally, as you see on her about page, she shares openly that she’s not only a trained mental health therapist, but also someone living with a chronic illness herself. This makes her uniquely qualified to help others with the practical experience of living with a chronic condition.
Not everyone wants to share this openly about their lives and that is OK. But we do live in a world where openly sharing your lived experience is championed. Alicia communicates her brand in both her words but also her images and the colors on her website. Colors and images share the vibe or energy of your website and the light pink and warm brown convey a soothing message which is helpful for people who feel stressed and overwhelmed.
What Does Brand Analysis Have To Do With Therapy Websites?
In order to grow your therapy practice, people have to be able to find you. And in today’s digital world, websites are a prime way to be found. In addition to referrals, therapists are often discovered online.
Brand analysis allows you to clarify all of the aspects of your therapy practice, which is the first step in building or improving a website. You then need to present these details on your website, to distinguish yourself from other therapists – your competitors. Doing so will lead to more website traffic and ultimately, more business. A more effective, clear, targeted website leads to conversions. For you, that may be booked therapy sessions or packages.
Once you’ve clarified your brand positioning, search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial business boosting strategy you can use with your website as well. SEO helps your website appear higher or more often when people put search terms into engines like Google.
Who Are You Really In Competition With?
You might think that you are competing with any other therapist or mental health professional/service. And while on some level you are, there’s a lot more to it.
Differentiating your practice from other therapists in your area is important. This is true even if you want a virtual or online therapy practice. Customers need to understand why they should hire you over another therapist.
Without clearly stating what makes you unique or special on your website, you run the risk of clients not understanding your value. When that happens, customers will leave your website in favor of a website that appears to better meet their needs.
You can stand out from your “competition” in a few ways:
- Location (you’re the best person on a clients drive/location)
- Specialty (you have credentials or expertise in a specific modality or training)
- Vibe/values (how you show up on your pages – images, language, colors etc)
Start by writing out all of these details
- What types of therapy or healing modalities are you an expert in?
- What is your radius of treatment location?
- What therapy practices are within a 10 or 20 mile radius of your office?
- What do those therapists specialize in?
- What do you offer that’s different?
- How do you want your values to stand out on your website?
How To Do A Brand Competition Analysis
As mentioned above, your competition usually includes other therapists who practice in your same service area, and/or offer similar modalities or methods. Researching what they are doing in order to better communicate how you are different or special is part of brand analysis. You can do this easily by doing a Google search.
The three main assets you want to look at for each competitor:
- Their website
- Any social media you can find
- Any advertising you can find
Make notes about what you see.
- What kinds of content do they have?
- Do they blog/write on a regular basis?
- Where do they share their blogs?
- What is their core message – is it positive or fearful? Is it informational or trying to sell/convince someone to do something?
- Check out the color palettes, logos, vibe and personality.
Then ask yourself:
- What angle could you focus on that makes you stand out?
- What emotion or experience do you want to evoke that is unique to your practice?
When we do competitor analysis we add to this what’s happening for the website’s SEO. Knowing your competitors SEO will give you a data-driven look into how well your competitors brand is doing and places where they are growing in their influence or dropping. All of which can be leveraged for your own brand to help you stand out and get more traffic to your website.
What Is Your Customer Journey?
The term “customer journey” refers to the process by which people find and hire you. It also includes the stages of being a client, and often the post-interaction stages as well. In layman’s terms this really is the stages clients go through as they consider therapy, decide to get therapy, start looking for a therapist and eventually hire a therapist.
You want to understand the customer journey stages for client acquisition and retention. By understanding your prospects and website visitors, you are much more able to speak to their needs, concerns, and barriers to action.
When you know this information, you’re better equip to deliver the right content at the right time. This is how you maximize your chances of converting them into a client.
When people know you can fix their problem or address a concern, they will act.
What are the customer journey stages?
The standard stages are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Retention
- Loyalty
A tool called journey mapping is helpful in researching and writing out all of these details for your brand. The recommended sections of a customer journey map are:
- The buying process
- User actions
- Emotions
- Pain points
- Solutions
For more detailed guidance on the customer journey, read our article here.
Analyze Your Brand
Hopefully you feel ready now to go through the brand analysis process for your therapy practice! You may first want to map out a timeline for this exercise, and the associated tasks.
Here is a step-by-step list you can adapt:
- Clarify the foundational pieces of your practice: mission, vision, and values.
- Brainstorm key words and feelings you want your clients and visitors to experience. Identify what inspires you and your “why.”
- Define your ideal client, and all of their demographics/psychographics.
- Choose or upgrade your brand colors, logos, fonts, and visual identity.
- Assess your brand’s positioning strategy.
- Write out a new/current brand positioning statement.
- Research and analyze your top 5-10 competitors.
- Do a customer journey map.
- Tweak copy on your website, social media, or ads to reflect changes and speak to your ideal client.
- Invest in SEO to attract more targeted prospects.
- Note and track your goals for the next 6 months or 1 year.
How We Can Help Your Therapy Practice
Brand analysis is an essential endeavor for therapists looking to grow their practice. As you can see, there are a lot of components to the process. Investing time and effort will be worth your while. You’ll have more clarity, and you will also start to see results in the form of better aligned clients seeking you out.
Would you like support with your brand analysis or marketing? Let our expert team take some of the weight off your shoulders. Contact us today.
