Medical Practice Marketing: How to Push Original Content Online

17 Jan Medical Practice Marketing: How to Push Original Content Online

Picture the following: You’ve decided to follow our medical practice marketing advice and become more active online. You’ve set up a blog, started several social media accounts (even a Pinterest!), and now you’re ready to start publishing quality, original content to bring new patients through your doors. You sit down to write — and nothing happens.

This is a very common occurrence, even with practices that have been maintaining social media accounts and blogs for ages. Sometimes, the ideas get stuck somewhere behind your brain, and try as you might, nothing happens — even though you know you should be writing stellar content for people to favorite, reblog, share, and retweet. Here, we’ve compiled a list of ways to push original content online consistently — an approach that will revitalize your medical practice marketing, and bring your website the views you want to see.

Keep a list of ideas.

Successful medical practice marketing relies on organic results, creative thinking, and a little bit of spontaneity. This means that you should pay attention to the ideas that hit you in the middle of the day, on the way to work, or while you’re making dinner — odds are, these ideas are going to be far more effective than sitting in front of a blank computer screen.

Here’s what we mean: Let’s say you’re trying to come up with an idea for your tweets this week, and can’t decide what to post that will still be original. You decide to let the thought simmer, and as you go about your day, you half-hear a patient commenting to a colleague that they had some trouble finding their way to your office. Later, as you’re driving home, you realize that it would be great to make sure your contact information is easily accessible on all of your social media accounts, and maybe you can tweet something about your office’s location, which reminds you of a community scavenger hunt idea you tossed around for the holidays — so on, and so forth.

Write these things down. Keep a notebook for ideas by your desk, and keep one in the office, too, for coworkers to list things they think would be good to post, pin, and write about. That way, you will have a steady stream of medical practice marketing content ideas to pull from, and can use them when you’re scrambling to figure out what to say next.

Figure out what other people are saying.

Here’s where your medical practice marketing research comes into play. Odds are, other practices in your industry are likely blogging, tweeting, and posting about topics your practice might cover or have already covered; while you should never steal content or reuse topics from other sources, it’s a good idea to see what your competition is doing, and consider how they might be getting their info. If your competitors are blogging about homeopathic remedies, for instance, and you’ve heard a few of your patients asking questions about something similar, maybe it’s time you compile a post answering some specific questions so your clients can get their answers from your office.

Additionally, use resources like Google Trends, Twitter’s search engine, and the data from popular posts to guide your writing. Google Trends allows you to view what people are searching for, while Twitter’s search engine allows you to see what people are talking about right now (and how to target and tag your tweets). Data from popular posts will allow you to see what topics really hit the zeitgeist among your audience; use this content as an opportunity to lead into new, fresh ideas for your medical practice marketing.

For more information about original content for medical practice marketing, get in touch with the Healthcare Marketing Group today!