Launching your brand is a huge milestone, but branding for private practice doesn’t stop once your website or brand goes “live”. As your practice grows, it’s easy to fall into common mistakes that weaken your brand and confuse potential clients. From slipping consistency to outdated messaging, these pitfalls can quietly hold back your growth. In this post, we’ll walk through the most common branding mistakes private practice owners face after launch—and share simple ways to keep your brand aligned as you expand.
Branding for Private Practice Doesn’t Stop at Launch
It’s important to recognize this one premise: branding does not stop at launch. We launch client branding into the world and notice clients struggling to utilize their brand correctly. We try to mitigate this issue by providing branding guidelines, but sometimes it’s inevitable.
Just know: it’s okay to fall through the cracks. But, for the betterment of your practice, we want you to get the best return on investment with us. To do that, you have to avoid these mistakes that we’ll be outlining throughout the rest of this post.
Mistake #1: Letting Brand Consistency Slip
We get it. Using your new branding can feel overwhelming. You’ve just worked with a professional designer who made something beautiful and now you’re thrown out into the “real world” to actually put it to use. We’ve seen clients remain consistent with their branding for a few weeks to months and then after around a year, their consistency drops off.
We encourage you to stick with it, even when it’s hard! Branding (and website design or SEO for that matter) is a long-term game. You simply cannot establish brand awareness after 6 months of consistent branding usage. Things like this take years to establish. It’s shown that individuals have to see something at least 7 times just to take action on it. With bigger things like establishing a brand, it’s even longer for people to trust you as a professional.
Tip: Reach out to your designer if you feel uninspired or stuck using your branding! They would be happy to provide you with tips or content items to help refresh things.
Mistake #2: Neglecting Your Website Updates
It’s easy to let your website sit and “do it’s job”. That’s what it’s for, right?
While this is partially correct, on the other spectrum of website design is consistent updates. For an example, if you have a WordPress website, your designer should’ve communicated to you that updating your plugins and theme is part of a weekly maintenance process.
Or, if it’s been a year or two since you’ve had your website design but you’ve added on team members and haven’t updated photography.
Things like this may seem small and overlooked by potential clients, but they actually help users get a sense of relation to you. Imagine browsing your social media to find a group practice with several practitioners, only to go on their website to find one practitioner only. Confusing, right?
Tip: audit your website quarterly. Make sure your content and photography is still aligned.
Mistake #3: Forgetting to Update Messaging as You Grow
Last week on the blog we spoke about evolving your branding as you grow. On that post, one of the things we discussed was updating your copywriting.
To the point above, if you are active on social media, marketing yourself as a group practice, but someone navigates to your website to find only one person and messaging with “I” usages, it can feel confusing. Believe it or not, some individuals prefer a group practice to have a multitude of practitioners with specific specialties to help their needs.
This mistake is very common in branding for private practice because growth can happen very quickly for our clients. However, we recommend reviewing your website every quarter to ensure it’s still aligned with the current stance of your practice.
Mistake #4: Overcomplicating the Brand as You Add Services
Let’s say you’ve recently decided to add a course in your offer suite. Sometimes, clients come to us with a “help me” moment because they feel that their entire brand should be changed or altered because of this one service offering.
For example, say you’re a therapist that focuses in anxiety for women ages 18-45. Recently, you’ve launched a course for college students to assist in day to day anxieties and how to combat them. This client may feel at a stopping point with their branding, questioning if their niche now should be college students instead of the previous age range.
Just know if you’ve had a professional designer to design your branding, they’ve made it applicable for many stages of growth. There are times that warrant a refresh in your branding like niche changes, substantial growth or personal changes. Our recommendation is to stay consistent with your branding.
Tip: Reach out to your designer and have them create a brand asset specific to your new service. This can help you feel more aligned with your branding without feeling the need to overhaul the entire brand.
Mistake #5: Ignoring Client Experience as Part of Branding
It’s easy to get caught up in the visuals of branding. However, it’s important to note that branding isn’t just visuals. It’s also the experience you have with a company.
For example, when I think of the Build A Bear brand, I don’t think of their logo. I think of the experience of walking into a store, picking out a heart (and kissing it) before making my stuffed animal. I even think about the boxes that they give you to hold your animal in!
That’s the magic of branding – it has the power to create experiences rather than just looking pretty to the eye.
As a private practice owner, you should still focus on your client experience. Questions we like to ask ourselves are:
- How can I incorporate my visuals into the client onboarding process?
- What are ways after working with our clients that we can show them appreciation?
- Does our process cater to how our ideal clients want to be treated?
Mistake #6: Failing to Plan for the Next Phase of Growth
Most practitioners are Type A (same here, friend!). Being type A, you know that planning is a large part of who we are.
A big mistake we see made is failure to plan ahead for the growth that you’re having. If you are seeing massive changes happening behind the scenes of your practice (i.e. hiring multiple practitioners, being booked out, growing a waitlist), you need to be planning how this is affecting your branding.
Ask yourself: is my brand name still aligned with who we as a practice want to be under? Does our brand visuals still align with the mood we are trying to achieve?
It is okay to have to stop, pause and reflect on how your branding for private practice should evolve. It’s a great thing to listen to your surroundings and communicate how you’re feeling to your designer. Your designer will likely become a strategic consultant once you share your plans + vision for the future. Our client Nourishing NY recently experienced a lot of growth and decided her brand was no longer serving them. She communicated this to us, and we told her a rebrand was necessary to avoid a branding misalignment. Now, their private practice is setup for a few years of growth they may have!
Conclusion: Strong Branding for Private Practice Is Ongoing
Any design project that you’ve hired out for will be ongoing. Mainly because branding for private practice is ever changing and ever growing. With your branding for private practice, the best thing you can do is stay consistent, reach out to your designer when you feel stuck, review your brand guidelines and audit your business quarterly.
Here’s some strong branding that we’ve loved creating at the studio:
If you have questions or if you’re ready to work with a professional brand designer, apply to be a client at Studio Adagio. We specialize in dietitian branding, therapist branding and private practice branding. Reach out for your project!