As a Direct Primary Care Physician, Why Do You Need a Marketing Strategy?

A physician who follows the direct primary care model operates differently than a traditional family doctor, and educating patients about those differences becomes paramount to building a successful DPC practice. Help patients understand “what is direct primary care?” with a solid content marketing strategy.

We asked Ian Brown, director of marketing at Freedom Healthworks, why it’s essential for DPC physicians to develop an original content marketing strategy, how to do it, and what type of content they should create. Here’s his advice after helping to launch, grow and sustain several independent, physician-owned direct primary care practices.

Why is content marketing essential for a DPC practice?

To build a DPC practice, a physician needs to attract new patients but most people don’t know what direct primary care entails or understand the difference between DPC and a traditional healthcare provider. So, education is really important when trying to sell patients on a new way of receiving health care.

Content marketing, which includes developing a content marketing strategy, is the new way to market your business and build awareness for your brand. Educating patients before they walk in the door is one way content marketing works well for direct primary care physicians. If you want a DPC practice to grow, it’s important to develop a content marketing strategy.

How can content marketing even the playing field for local DPC doctors?

There’s no way a local direct primary care practice can compete with the big hospital networks when it comes to large marketing budgets. The traditional advertising model allowed big hospitals to build their brand by running ads on TV, radio and in newspapers. Now, smaller DPC practices can reach the same audience online by gaining brand awareness through content marketing.

In today’s digital age, people research online to find solutions to their healthcare problems. They may narrow their search to a specific product or problem, but they’re actually expanding the number of brands they consider as possible solutions. Your DPC practice needs to be one of those brands that’s part of the conversation, offering a solution to that problem through educational videos, blogs and social media. The information goes out to educate patients, solve their pain points, and create trust in your brand. That’s the idea behind a good content marketing strategy.

What type of content should a DPC practice focus on?

I love working with physicians, because they work directly with patients. They are trained to speak to patients about what matters most to them, so the content they produce should focus on what they talk to patients about in the exam room.

What do patients want to know when they visit their family physician? What are the issues and problems they are looking to solve? Why is a relationship with your physician important? A content marketing strategy for a DPC practice should answer those questions.

All of the doctors we work with are incredibly passionate about their patients, about direct primary care, and about spending time with their patients. Sharing that passion through storytelling and informing patients about the DPC model of healthcare are the type of things we
want to talk about in their content.

How can Freedom Healthworks help DPC practices create original content and video?

None of our doctors decide to launch their own direct primary care practice with the idea they want to become experts in marketing or business. They want to have more time to spend with their patients and our strategies are developed with that in mind. They don’t have to do it alone. I think marketing can seem overwhelming for many of our physicians, and our goal at Freedom Healthworks is to make it as simple as possible and to have the highest impact as possible.

Freedom Healthworks helps launch, maintain and grow DPC practices. As a piece of that, we offer a video marketing strategy combined with informative blogs to create content showcasing the physician’s expertise and the personal style of their practice for prospective patients to see. If you’re a DPC physician looking to grow your practice, we can offer this as a way for you to simply and completely create a content marketing strategy.

Most physicians are trained in healthcare, not content marketing. They don’t have the time or expertise to focus on marketing their business well. With a content marketing strategy developed by Freedom Healthworks, physicians can easily create high quality, consumable content for prospective patients.

If you have any questions about content marketing, feel free to reach out to Melissa Turpin at mturpin@freedomhealthworks.com.

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Why DPC Doctors Need a Content Marketing Strategy