The world is fast-paced and increasingly consumers are looking for more opportunities to connect with others. While your brand itself isn’t a human, the people behind it are, as are your patients. And those patients or potential patients want to feel a trusting relationship with your healthcare brand.
As marketers, you’ve likely heard the advice to humanize your brand, but it can be difficult to know exactly what that means and where to start. At its most basic, humanizing your brand means adopting a more relatable communication style over industry jargon and creating a personality for your brand that connects with your audience in a meaningful way.
Humanizing your brand is especially crucial for healthcare brands, as healthcare is much more personal than other industries. Having a brand that feels like the real people behind it helps to build trust and foster lasting relationships with patients. Patients are looking for companies and organizations who care about people and the community beyond just their medical needs. Your brand needs to show that you care about who patients are, as individuals.
To help give you more tangible examples of what it means to humanize your healthcare brand, we surveyed B&Yers in various roles around our agency to tap into their unique perspectives.
Humanizing Healthcare Brands Advice from the B&Y Team
Strategy
“In order to craft a strategy that humanizes your healthcare brand, you have to know the audience profile of who your brand is trying to resonate with. Once your target audience(s) are identified (and prioritized), creating persona profiles that go into as much detail as possible will make the subsequent branding activities, like brand voice development, key messaging pillars and media channel analysis progress more smoothly.
Ideally, you’ll find several synergistic areas between what your target audience values and what your brand delivers on that can serve as the entry point for your target audience to build a natural affinity toward your brand.”
-Kourtney, Managing Partner – Strategic Planning & Account Service
Brand Voice
“When creating an identity for hospitals or healthcare brands, we like to think about the company itself as if it were a person. If the company were an actual living, breathing being, who would they be? What personality traits would they have? How would they communicate? Those are some of the first questions we ask our clients and ourselves when creating a brand identity. Although it seems like a strange exercise, it really helps create a persona that is real, genuine and reflective of who you want to be and how you want your audience to see you.
Once you’ve created an identity for the company, it’s easier to make your brand more approachable through various storytelling techniques, such as creating patient-centered narratives that highlight the human impact of healthcare services, providing an inside look at real healthcare professionals and who they are as people, using warm and accessible language that feels more like a conversation and less like clinical documentation, and sharing the brand’s passion for improving the lives of the people it serves. It’s all about balancing emotional resonance with credibility to help healthcare brands build trust and make meaningful connections with patients and families.”
-Shardi, Managing Partner – Content
Creative Concepting
“I love to create content with real people and real scenarios. Highlighting actual patients with real stories, real connections and relationships with your brand connects with community and is a genuine way to tell your story.
The biggest driver to humanizing healthcare is to keep the focus on the patient and the patient experience – putting the people first – whether that is in person at the healthcare facility or through different media – web, print, TV, video, etc.”
-Ian, Managing Partner & Creative Director
Digital Creative
“When I think of ways to humanize healthcare brands using digital tools, a few ideas spring to mind. Using animated explainer and infographics videos to communicate your message in creative, fun ways—plus these types of videos are proven to hold viewers’ attention longer. Using original photos and videos—healthcare facilities can be sterile, but your marketing doesn’t have to be. Or, finally, creating engaging digital questionnaires. Turn your standard paperwork into a way to impress patients from their first interactions.”
-Kris, Director of Interactive Design & Digital
Digital Advertising
“In healthcare digital advertising, personalization comes with unique challenges due to HIPAA regulations. While we can’t access certain patient data, we can still create meaningful connections by leveraging compliant targeting methods such as age, geography, and other approved demographics.
By focusing on compelling storytelling—through patient testimonials or showcasing advancements in care—we can humanize healthcare brands and build trust with the right audience. Meeting people where they are, whether on social media, search pages, CTV, or YouTube, ensures that our messaging is both relevant and impactful.
Advertising isn’t just about promotion—it’s a powerful tool to remind and encourage people to prioritize their health. With the right strategy, we can use digital advertising as a helpful nudge or prevention tool to guide patients toward the care they need at the right time.”
-Isaac, Digital Media Buyer
Inspired to add more humanity into your healthcare brand’s communications and marketing? B&Y can help you put these ideas into practice. Let’s talk!