For many if not most plastic and cosmetic surgeons, your name is your brand. Your work signifies who you are as a surgeon, your training and experience, your commitment to patient satisfaction, and so much more. But there are many good reasons to brand or rebrand your medical practice with a different name, including bringing on a partner, setting up a future sale, or marketing a catchy name that will resonate with prospective patients.
If a rebrand is in the cards, we strongly encourage you to get your web team involved early in the process. Speaking from experience, the earlier your web marketer is in the loop, the fewer headaches you’ll encounter when it’s time to revamp your web presence. Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the considerations for your web marketing when changing your brand.
1. Your Website Address
Your website is your “homebase” in the wild wild west that is today’s Internet. Picking up your roots and moving to a new website address involves a lot more than just buying a new URL. Our main concern for clients who are switching web addresses is the effect on Google rankings and organic search traffic. A decade ago, it could take Google 6 months or more to fully grasp that you’ve moved to a new website address, and start to give your new domain credit for the “link juice,” domain age, and other factors that may influence rankings. While the delay is usually nowhere near as long now, it is still reasonable to see a sizeable drop in traffic for at least a month, and continue to trend lower year over year for many months longer. In an environment where every visit counts, and when you’re trying to build momentum with a new brand and all that entails, this can make for a rocky start.
Whenever possible, we encourage clients to keep their existing URL even after a rebrand. But many times this is just not possible. For instance, if you’ve brought on a new surgeon, having the URL for your site remain www.drjanesmith.com just won’t work. In those cases, you’ll need to rip the bandaid and go with a URL that’s relevant to your new brand. Choosing a good new URL can be even trickier than choosing a new name for your practice. First off, many URLs including terms like “beauty,” “aesthetic,” “cosmetic” etc. are already taken or expensive to purchase on the resale market. Next, you really want to be thinking on a very long time horizon. Perhaps you are bringing on a new surgeon now, but what if you bring on a third down the road? Do you really want to go with www.jonesandsmithplasticsurgery.com? Another potential pitfall is putting your location in your URL. If your practice website is www.longislandnycosmeticsurgeon.com does that mean you’ll never move somewhere else? In short, there are many things to consider when choosing a URL that will work for you long term, and you don’t want to change URLs frequently.
2. To Redesign or Not Redesign
Depending on the extent of your rebrand, you may be redesigning your logo, changing your color scheme, or revamping your office. If the rebrand is smaller scale, it might make the most sense to keep your current website pretty much as is, except for some updated images, info and maybe new videos. For a bigger rebrand, you are likely better off starting from scratch with a fresh website design that can make the most of your updated assets. And speaking of those assets, it pays to take the time to have professional photo and video shot at your office. Higher quality assets gives a web designer many more options to create a modern and appealing site.
3. Name, Address, and Phone Updates
Once you’ve done the hard work of choosing a new name, updating your assets, (possibly) updating your URL, and launching an updated website, you then need to get the word out about your new brand across the web. This can be done through what are called NAP (name, address and phone) updates. There are several services available that essentially syndicate your correct NAP info across the web, so that for instance people using different directories or map services will see your correct information.
If your office hasn’t moved as part of your rebrand, then your main concern will be getting your new practice name spread far and wide across the web. Just pay one of these syndication services a few bucks and move on, right? Not so fast. First off, they are all ongoing subscriptions to ensure your correct information stays correct on a multitude of sites. Further complicating things, a few big players (such as Google, Apple Maps, and Bing) don’t reliably pick up this syndicated information, which means you need to manually claim and/or edit your info on these platforms.
If your office has moved as part of your rebrand, you will follow the same process, but there’s a bit more urgency so that you avoid having patients show up at the wrong office address. Adding “We’ve Moved!” type alerts on your contact us page, pinning posts about your new address on your social channels, and sending out an email announcing your move are some additional ways you can call attention to your new address and avoid calls from grumpy patients who’ve driven to the wrong office.
4. Social Media Channel Changes
Any medical practice rebrand is going to necessitate updates on your social media channels too. For starters, you may need to change your handle/URL on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Also spend some time in your social media admins updating profile photos, banner images, and bio/description text. And if you use templates or a brand guide for creating new post content, make sure that is up to date with your latest brand assets, including color palette, fonts, etc. We don’t recommend taking time to re-do any of your old posts, but especially if your rebrand is a biggie, plan to pin a post or two about it for the first few months after the switch.
If your rebrand is prompted by the addition of a new doctor at your practice, it makes sense to review the social media presence of that new partner and develop a plan for how to maximize your exposure on the channels that matter. For instance, if the incoming doctor has a strong social media brand already, it makes more sense to retain that, with increased posting that mentions the new practice brand. For a newer doctor or one who isn’t on social media, a rebrand of your main practice channels should be sufficient.
5. Video Re-dos
If you have a lot of videos on YouTube, Vimeo, or even hard-coded on your website, you should take the time to review them as part of your rebrand to see if they need updates. It might be that your videos need a fresh logo, and updated title and description information. Some of your video content may no longer be relevant (for instance if you’ve changed your service offerings as part of the rebrand). And if you’ve added another surgeon, get a plan together for how he or she can contribute some video content in the near term to help balance out the content mix.
6. Newsletter Redesign
We really, really hope you are sending regular email newsletters. We recommend freshening your newsletter layout every few years regardless of any changes to your brand, but a brand re-do is the perfect point to take a serious look at your newsletter template. You may need to swap out your logo, change around your colors, and/or update your address info. As mentioned above, it’s also a great idea to send out a newsletter announcing your rebrand, particularly if you have moved locations.
7. Don’t Forget Your Paid Ads
If you are running any paid ads on Google, Facebook/Instagram, or other platforms, make sure to take a fresh look at the creative. Depending on your brand changes, you may need to change out URLs, names, images, and more. It’s a pretty simple update compared to most of the others on this list, but can get easily overlooked.