We are in the midst of a five part series talking about content creation for physicians and medical practices as a way to do content marketing for the practice.

This episode is dedicated to my fourth principle for content creation: do one thing well.  

In the previous few episodes we have explored 1. share information and solve problems, 2. telling a story, 3. reimagine one form of content into a different form.

This fourth principle, do one thing well and the next principle, keep a schedule, are the get down to business, get to work principles that require a bit of discipline.

As a bit of review, content marketing is putting stuff online that provides immediate value to a potential patient even if they never pick up the phone to seek your services.  Content marketing shows expertise in a field. Content marketing builds trust. Content marketing helps people. 

Doctors and professionals of all sorts put themselves online in the practice website, video platforms such as youtube or Vimeo, social media services, advertisements, and even encourage our patient to post reviews on online review sites. We are trying to tell the world who we are, what we do, and why people should choose us for their medical care.

All physicians should consider themselves content creators.

As physician content creators we want to share info or solve a problems using our expertise in our chosen field of medicine. We need to think of ourselves as storytellers when we create content to make us not boring. And because we serve many different people with many different needs we think to re-imagine our content for different audiences, a blog post for one or a youtube video for another.

In the previous three episodes I have tried to expand the way that a physician sees him or herself as a content creator. You can do it; You should do it. Your phone in your pocket has everything you need to get started.

But you can’t be every thing to every body everywhere all of the time.

The secret to any content creation, or any creative endeavor is that it is hard work and it takes a lot of time and effort to be any good. 

Which really brings me to my fourth idea, to put a stake in the ground and try to do one thing well.

For most of you and I think for most practices a simple organizational change, and my suggestion, will be to regularly review and update a practice website, the starting place for your content creation. There is always a bit of proverbial bed-making that needs to be done for the practice website. A phone number needs to be changed, a doctor moves out of state and leaves the practice, the current mask policy for the practice during covid needs updating.

But maybe in addition to the regular updating of pictures and phone numbers your practice wants to have a place where you regularly update some information or help to solve problems for patients or people just looking to get some help, for lack of a better term we can call it a practice BLOG, and a few well written paragraphs with each post may be all that is needed to tell the story that can help a few patients. 

The choice will be yours to make for your medical practice. The key is to get the one thing done well, or as well as you can, even if it seems like a small thing. 

Your content creation may never expand beyond that; it may not need to.  But the one thing done well can serve as the foundation for anything else you want to do. 

The call to action for this episode if you are thinking about content creation is to choose this year what is the one thing you are going to focus on to do well and to do the work to get it done. 

In the next episode I am going to talk about the fifth principle for content creation, keeping a schedule.