Determining What Kinds of Videos Best Market Your Medical Practice

Any physician can create a list of video topics by looking in the table of contents of a medical textbook or even the latest subspecialty journal. This would give you a big to-do list, but wouldn’t benefit your patients much.

In this article, I’ll show you how to create a high-value, relevant set of video topic ideas that will make promoting your practice easier and more effective.

Whether you’re writing, brainstorming, or speaking into a microphone, the worst place to be is staring at a blank page; starting from scratch. The key to success is to spend time and energy on the front end to create a large list of topics so you’ll be able to draw from them any time.

If you don’t get this figured out, you’ll not only be eternally frustrated when you sit down to promote your business with video, but you’ll tire of the process easily. You’ll quickly give up on the process and declare to everyone around you that, "marketing and promotion don’t work."

Here are three ways of creating long lists of video topics that will supply you with ideas far into the next decade.

Method 1: Create a list of common clinical topics you deal with

Here you want to analyze a typical week in the office. What types of patients come in? Statistically, what pathology do you treat most commonly? What disease is most prevalent in your patient population?

Don’t get this list from some textbook or online article about what "average" physicians see in their practices.

These videos will be consumed by your patients and potential patients in your local geographic area. Therefore the topics should reflect the problems your local population is facing. This won’t always be a perfect match with what walks into your clinic, but it’ll be close.

Write down or type out the top 20 diagnoses you deal with. It may help to just get a print out of the top 20 ICD-9 codes generated by your office. Once you have the list, come up with 10 frequently asked questions you get from patients on each topic.

Each one of those can be a single one-minute to two-minute video.

Method 2: Create a practice wishlist

What types of patients do you wish you could see more of?

Is there a procedure you’d rather do more of than you currently do?

Do you want a practice filled with tennis players or executives?

Target those patients with your video topics.

For each of your target procedures or patient types, create a list of topics you know would appeal to patients who need the procedure or patients who fit into the categories you’ve selected.

Create informative videos that either educate patients on the procedure in question or attract and inform a specific category of patient.

To take this to the next level of practice promotion, you can begin coming up with ways of getting publicity for that particular procedure or treatment. Plan an advertising campaign specifically designed to attract that type of patient you want in your office.

Method 3: Address generic patient questions

Make a list of questions patients ask repeatedly in the office, regardless of their specific diagnosis.

How do I find your office?

Can I get a second opinion?

When will I get my test results?

What are the risks of the procedure?

It won’t take you long to realize you or your staff answer these same questions dozens -if not hundreds - of times per week.

This list is harder to create; you have to picture a typical day of answering questions you don’t think about too much.

But the answers are valuable to patients and will save you hours of cumulative time each month if they’re easily found on your website or YouTube channel.

Putting it all together

Once you get lists of topics for videos, you’ll see some patterns and crossover between them. This may help you avoid duplicate videos.

I recommend starting with topics you can: first, talk about easily and that will, second, benefit the most patients as fast as possible. This makes the videos easier to create and more valuable for more of your patients.

These types of brainstorming exercises will help you create an almost never-ending smorgasbord of ideas from which to choose in creating your next practice video.