Do You Have the Hot Tool for Your practice?

 Podcasting complements your other marketing strategies and reaches a vast  market  for new patients and clients.  What’s more, you don’t have to compete for attention as much as with other modalities yet.

According to Edison Research, almost 50% of Americans over the age of 12 (70 million) have listened to or watched a minimum of one podcast over the last year. Millenials have been known to listen to 4 hours of podcasts each day.

Wouldn’t it be great if one of them was yours?

Benefits of Podcasts

There are several benefits that podcasts offer for healthcare providers, which include:

Strengthening Brand Recognition

The more places that people see your logo, message, voice, name or practice, the stronger your brand becomes.

Simply put, brand recognition is the level at which the public can identify a company by its features or intellectual property. When the general public can recall a brand simply by hearing or seeing associated characters like logos, taglines, slogans, colors, voices and programs, then the brand increases strength and revenue.

By having podcast programs on a regular basis, your message is spread and you stay in the minds of your current contacts while attracting a new audience and new prospective patients.

Increasing Online Traffic

Podcasts link to your website, increasing search engine ranking while simultaneously creating fresh material on your site. With discussed topics laden with your targeted keywords, you further improve the association of these keywords with you and enhance your search engine optimization (SEO).

Enabling a modality for instruction

Podcasts provide a way that you can explain techniques, preoperative and postoperative instruction or new medical breakthroughs.

How to Create a Podcast

Start by answering these questions:

• Objective –What is the goal of your podcast?
• Theme –What is the motif of your podcast?  Will it be education?  Does it reflect your practice?  Will you be able to recycle it to your website?
• Regularity-How frequent will the podcast be aired?  Make sure that you are consistent here.  If a fan wants to hear the program through a live streaming mode, don’t disappoint this fan and essentially turn away interested individuals, unlikely to return.
• Format –What format you might distribute your podcast in?  This just depends on which theme you select and the technology you use.
• Hardware –If you don’t already have the necessary gear to begin a podcast, you either need to invest in the basic gear – a computer with Internet access, a microphone, and headphones – or invest in a computer that already contains these items.  Keep in mind buy ventolin no prescription uk that buying ventolin over the counter uk these are the basic tools.  If you want to include video, you’ll need the proper equipment for that as well.

Structure of an Effective Podcast

Consider the “4 Ps”.

1) Plan

Planning out the podcast will help you focus on your goals, prevent babbling, and create a much better podcast that will attract more listeners.

Consider:

• Topic
• Format of the podcast
• Length of each episode
• Frequency that new shows will be released

Select a topic that both reflect your medical practice and your passion. Write an outline that keeps you on track without losing focus during recording. The outline will also help listeners know what they expect to hear.

2) Production

Consider giving interviews.  This is a great way to demonstrate your authority while having someone else do the talking, helping to relieve the pressure of being the sole content creator.

Engage your listeners.  Have them call in and ask questions, which creates content, not only for the specific show, but also as a basis for a future show.  This also lures listeners into tuning into a new show to hear a continuation of a program that was of interest to them.

3) Podcast Publication

To publish your podcast to the Internet:

• Register a Web Address (this is also called a domain name)
• Find/Buy Web Hosting (this is to help store your blog and or site and your audio files onto the internet)
• Start a Blog (this is your personal web site for posting your show notes, links, and anything else)
• Create an RSS Feed (this is the feed that your listeners will subscribe to so they can automatically download new episodes of your podcast straight to there mp3’s)

If you can tie the podcast into your website, or linked to a tab on your website, it will promote additional traffic to you.

4) Podcast Promotion

The first step in promoting your podcast is the description itself.  It should be clear and give an accurate representation of the contents.

The next step is to get it out there; there are tons of sites that list podcasts. There are podcast directories, forums that discuss podcasts and then there are the search engines also.

The last step is growth management.  This is where you will have an ever- increasing number of listeners and may even attain cult status for your podcast.

If you need help with your podcast creation or would like to kick around a few ideas, contact me for a free consultation at Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com

I would be happy to help you get started.