As a healthcare marketing expert, you understand the importance of developing powerful, purposeful content intended to drive traffic and convert readers into clients. As a physician, the philosophy of ‘getting published’ in major journals has been an aspiring goal since medical school. These two concepts are not that far removed from one another. One serves to increase web conversions by presenting your expertise on any number of healthcare related subjects. The latter's objective is to establish your medical experience as unique and exceptional, thus ascertaining you as an authority in your field.
Medical Journals and Marketing
Peer-reviewed, medical journals are published with the resolution to provide doctors, students and the public with up to date information on medical technology and medical practices. Many times, physician content published in medical journals will be picked up by healthcare journalists in local level newspapers, national newspapers, online medical resources such as WebMD, and global magazine publications.
Impact power is a factor used in the medical journal community to determine the importance of that particular piece of content. The higher the impact power rating, the more impactful that journal article is deemed for the medical and healthcare community, as well as the general public.
Physician Blogs and Marketing
Just as medical journals can help to establish physicians as experts in their given field of practice, blogs and online articles can ascertain a physician’s level of proficiency in their industry. From baby boomers to Generation X and Y, all the way to Millenials, online content directly related to healthcare marketing can have a far great impact than medical journals, especially of utilized to it’s fullest potential.
Engaging Physicians with the Power of Blogging
Ultimately, as a healthcare marketing agency, it’s your responsibility to illustrate the importance, the paramount significance, of maintaining a physician blog. Yes, medical journals still hold a great deal of power within the medical communities, but when it comes to attracting new patients they do not hold as much water.
Here are a few ideas for getting your physician on board with blogging:
- Make it Easy – The best thing that you can do to land a physician blog in healthcare marketing it to make it easy. Physicians are not accomplished writers, even if they have been published in medical journals, so take the heat off of them and do the blogs yourself. What else are they paying you for?
- Exemplify the Value – Exemplify the philosophy of curating your own voice. Physicians get lost and buried under mounds of garbage that make up their reputation online. From HealthGrades to Vitals to Yelp and Facebook, there is no one, clear voice personifying that physician, there are thousands. The value in blogging is directing your own voice, as the physician, and taking the power back. Accumulating your own voice in healthcare marketing, as the physician, increases the ability to govern your own voice.
- Illustrate with Case Studies – Lastly, have a plethora of case studies in your healthcare marketing portfolio to illustrate the enormous success other physicians have achieved with blogging. With the ability to visually demonstrate success with blogging in healthcare marketing, physicians can easily jump on board.
Making the path clear and concise by comparing the value of blogging to the value of medical journals, as a healthcare marketing company you can convey the message in a way a physician will understand. At Quaintise, we’ve found that pointing out the marketing problem and offering a multitude of solutions, particularly blogging, can open up a whole new world of marketing opportunities for physicians.
Educating is part of the process when looking to engage a new physician in healthcare marketing campaigns. Turn to Quaintise for more information.