We are in the midst of a series of episodes that I am doing about content creation for the medical professional/doctors/medical practice. This five part series is based on five foundational principles or ideas for content marketing for the medical practice.

Content marketing serves three purposes 1. it shows off your expertise, 2. it builds trust, 3. it helps people. 

Our #1 job as physicians is to share information or solve problems for our patients. That is the first principle on my list.

The trick in our content creation, and one I am far from mastering, is to avoid being boring, tedious, or dull.

Which led me to my concept #2: tell a story. We are all storytellers and we all have stories to tell.  Stories educate,  entertain, inform or inspire. Stories aren’t boring. They draw you in and pull you along. Stories are how we understand the world and how we understand ourselves.

We tell our stories in many different ways.

This brings me to my number three principle: reimagining our content, rethinking one form of educational or informational material into a different form.

When we make content for patient education or information we should immediately turn and ask ourselves what else can this be. I have a handout for say kidney stone prevention. Can I make this an infographic or a short educational video for YouTube or TikTok?

The answer I think is yes, of course. And I think we should always be considering HOW to do this.

 Our printed educational handouts become videos becomes infographics become movies and maybe even an audio or podcast format.

The reason we do this is both to expand our reach and the life of our content but also because the different forms will appeal to different people or patient populations.

My call to action or encouragement to you is to think in various forms for content creation.

For many or most practice our “content” will be simply our website. Other practices will venture beyond to audio and visual content. 

But no matter what we do we have to think about what info we want to share, what problems can we solve, and what stories can we tell. 

We have many tools for online content creation. All we have to do is use our imagination to be creative and resourceful and to figure it out.

Principle #3: Re-imagine your content.