A month after marketing bootcamp

This is a historical personal account, notice or shared post. Past dates, affiliations, events and promotional descriptions are distinct from current operating information. Hospital and republication-rights review remain pending.

Pay a blogging agency and posts appear. Yet after reading them, nothing stays with you: similar, predictable articles with no recognizable author. I relied on that approach for a long time.

Then I joined a month-long marketing bootcamp. A physician studying marketing felt unfamiliar; I thought of myself as someone who simply did the clinical work.

One of the first things I heard at the bootcamp was:

‘If it does not connect to revenue, it is not marketing.’

That made me uncomfortable. I felt physicians should not talk about revenue. But if patients cannot find me, my abilities cannot help them. Becoming a good physician and helping patients find that physician are different skills.

We had to write two posts a week, like a group assignment. Even diligent people miss things when work piles up; the group structure meant something was produced.

This time I wrote differently: not like an agency, but about questions I would have as a patient and what seeing and treating complications had taught me. I tried to give readers useful information and, above all, to write sincerely.

Finding information that actually matters to you in an overwhelming stream is harder than it seems. Just as an engaging first impression can start a relationship, a post needs an engaging opening to be read. A video's first three seconds matter. I finally learned that.

Then the numbers gave me feedback.

I started the bootcamp on March 28. A month later, new visitors to my blog had increased by 38%, something I had not experienced while depending on an agency.

I no longer outsource predictable posts. I learned to identify where patients' needs begin and to build a connection from there. I thought I was only a physician who worked. It turned out I could learn.