Transcript
[INTRODUCTION]
Well, hello, my friend. Welcome back to The Clinical Entrepreneur Podcast. I am your host, Ronda Nelson and I’m so glad you are taking time to hang out with me today. The topic that we’re going to dive into is a good one! It’s probably the most common question I get from clinicians, as it has to do with their marketing strategy. Here’s why… We’ve all been in front of our phone, on our Facebook or Instagram and you know you need to post and you think, “Ah, what am I going to post about?” I don’t even know where to start. Should I talk about what I ate for dinner? Should I talk about something I learned?” And we end up getting paralysis by analysis. We can’t move because we’re not clear about how to create a content strategy that’s going to speak to the needs of our ideal patient. I get it because we’ve all been there. However, I’m going to teach you how to create four week’s worth of social media content in three simple steps. If you’ll do what I’m going to show you today, you’ll have social media posts and content lined out for the next three to four months.
Before we start, here’s what I want you to do. Grab a pen and a couple of pieces of paper. I want your brain to integrate the information and we know that happens much more efficiently when you’re pen-in-hand writing it down, rather than typing it on a computer. This is a back-to-school exercise and it is going to help solidify this in your brain and give you the confidence that you can do this. The nice thing about this is, when it’s all written out, you can then pass it off to someone else to create the posts for you, and the great news is you can pre-schedule them. This is something you don’t even have to do every day unless you want to. I’ll give you some options for that in the end, but let’s get started.
[EPISODE]
Four weeks of content in three simple steps. Step number one, I want you to write down your top 10 frequently asked questions by your patients. Not what you think they need to know but the questions that they are actually asking you. For instance, they may be asking you, “Are gluten-free foods okay?” Because you’ve probably told them to avoid gluten-containing foods like processed refined bread and pasta. Most of us are going to include that type of dietary recommendation pretty early on, especially if there’s gut inflammation or other things going on that may warrant that type of dietary change. A common question the patient has asked me, “I can’t have gluten. Can I have gluten-free foods?” Another I was frequently asked, and it seemed a little random, but, “Are sweet potatoes okay?” I told them no russet potatoes because of the way that they have been modified and grown and they’re just a sugar glucose bomb. So, I say, no russet potatoes, but they almost always came back and asked, “Well, are sweet potatoes okay?” or they might ask, “Are red potatoes okay?”
Another question I was asked often was, “How long is this going to take? How long is it going to take for me to feel better?” or, “How long is it going to take for me to start noticing results? How long do I have to take these supplements? How long do I have to keep seeing you?” It was always a how long question. Another example, “Why do I need digestive support when I don’t have any digestive symptoms?” This topic alone will give you months of social media content. Why? Because we could talk for days about the role of digestion, stress, the importance of breaking down protein, the importance of bile, the importance of pancreatic enzymes and chewing and saliva, and we could get some mileage out of that. “Why do I need digestive supplements like hydrochloric acid or bitters, digest forte? Why do I need them if I don’t have any digestive symptoms?”
The last question in my top five was, “Why do I need a cleanse? And if I do go on the cleanse, am I going to be stuck in the bathroom the whole time?” They always had questions about the cleanse.
So, number one, if you need to hit the pause button right now, please do that. Write down your top ten questions. This is very important. When you have those top 10 written down, circle five of them. We’re going to cut the list in half, only for now, but I want you to look at the top five. Now of the ten top frequently asked questions, which five of those would you say are the ones that you can either talk more easily about or which are the most specific and relevant to your ideal customer avatar? Which ones are going to resonate with the ideal patient that you want to attract? That’s your homework. Do that right now.
Now step number two. We are now going to take each of those questions and break them into bits and pieces. I want you to think of these as mini topics. I’m going to use an example that I gave you from my top five. “Am I going to be glued to the bathroom and/or am I going to feel bad during the cleanse?” We are now going to break that concept and question down into mini topics. When you make your social media posts, we don’t want to make them a whole novel. We’re not looking for a twenty-minute medical physiological discourse with all of this biochemistry when you’re talking about hepatocytes. No, no, no, we’re not doing any of that. What we’re going to do is deliver these mini topics as either a Facebook Live or we’re going to do them as a written post.
The written posts are going to be shorter. If you’re not an awesome writer and don’t communicate well with written words, then go with the live. Trust me on this. As I was preparing for this episode, I literally came up with eleven ideas within five minutes and I have them all written down here on my piece of paper. Number one, I thought I could talk about the role or the job of the liver. So I wrote that down on my notes. I put the job/role of the liver. And then I thought, “Okay. What would I talk about if I was going to talk about the role of the liver?” Well, then right underneath that, I started writing out a few more things. What is the role of the liver? Well, it’s a filter. Okay. I can talk about that for three, four minutes. The next thing I wrote down is that the liver produces bile, and bile is needed for efficient detoxification.
Next, I wrote down cholesterol because we know that cholesterol, bile, and the liver all go together. I thought of how the liver produces proteins, and protein transport molecules, like LDL, HDL, albumin, and complement proteins. I can talk a little bit about proteins, as it has to do with things moving around, molecules, vitamins, and nutrients in the body. So, that was important.
Now the last mini topic I thought of is our emotional organ, specifically, as it has to do with anger or bile, right? That sour bile, mean, angry type person often has congestion in the liver. Now, timeout for just a second. I started with one thought which was, “How will I feel during the detox? Will I be glued to the toilet? And why do I even need this detox or cleanse in the first place?” So, with that one broad concept, I broke it down into four or five things.
So for my first mini topic, “What’s the job or role of the liver?” Then underneath that, I thought, “I could do a post on the fact that the liver is a filter, like the oil filter in your car, and it just needs to be cleaned out once in a while, and here’s how it gets gunked up. Food can do it. Stress can do it. A high sugar diet can do it.” Right there, five posts. Done. Done for you. You’re welcome. No problem. Now let’s keep going.
Mini topic number two is the relationship between the liver and the kidneys. We know that when the liver gets bogged down, it puts pressure on the kidneys. If you have a patient that has a kidney issue, we might want to consider the liver as being the upstream problem, or at least part of the problem. You could talk about the liver and the kidney, the relationship between the two.
Mini topic number three is liver skin. The liver as a primary detoxification organ is by surface area or volume, the skin trumps it because the skin is the largest detoxification organ in the body. So when the liver gets backed up, we know that the skin can sometimes show up.
For people with rosacea, acne, or some kind of inflammatory process on the skin, supporting the liver is going to have a direct and indirect effect on the way the skin looks.
Now mini topic number four is that the liver is like the gate. There’s a gatekeeper at the liver. It decides what stays and what goes. The liver filters hormones. If there’s not enough filtration capacity in the liver, and all hepatocytes are full, your liver is going to say, “Uh-uh, I don’t have any more room anywhere else in the body, you’re going to have to stay and keep in circulation because I have to put all the bad guys in quarantine that are going to be harmful and toxic. Hormones, not so much, so you guys can keep on filtering around.” Then we end up with an excess amount of hormones circulating because we can’t get them cleared through the liver through phase one and phase two. So you could talk about how the liver makes decisions about what stays and what goes.
Mini topic number five is our need for bile. I kind of covered that in my first mini topic but we do need bile. You can talk about how the liver produces bile, why it produces bile, bile and the gallbladder, the common bile duct, all of that. You could even talk about pancreatitis, which could lead to many more topics.
Number six is the liver needs to have an open way to eliminate through the bowels. When the liver detoxifies, it goes through the bowels. If there’s constipation, a cleanse might not be a good idea because the patient could become more constipated as the liver is trying to dump its waste out through the bowel. You could talk about the liver and the importance of not being constipated when you do a cleanse. The next one is foods that you would want to start with. How can you warm-up this whole liver conversation? How could the patient start using just normal dietary foods to help improve detoxification? You could talk about garlic, onions, cruciferous, beets, and all the things we know that drive that detoxification of the liver.
You could add a seventh topic and talk about phase one and phase two. What is phase one, phase two? I always use the example of Jiffy Lube. I say phase one is like pulling into Jiffy Lube. The intermediate is like the guys who are changing the oil and working on the car. And then phase two is when you pull out of Jiffy Lube and go on your merry way. Out you go. That’s what phase one phase two is like.
Topic number eight could be the importance of water and rest, before and during the cleanse. It’s really important to stay hydrated so that your body has the fluid to be able to keep things moving. We want to have good water intake and maintain a good amount of rest or sleep during the cleanse.
Mini topic number nine is why hardcore detoxes aren’t a good idea, i.e., something that you would do that would make you feel horrible, achy, and headachy. Those are the signs that your body is waving the white flag saying, “You’re asking me to do something here that I can’t do easily and efficiently. I need you to back the truck up a bit. Slow the bus down because I can’t handle the elimination.” Talk about why you do it gently and why you’re looking at it from a different perspective. Nothing hardcore or difficult, just very gentle.
Number ten is three ways to prepare for a cleanse. What can they do to start preparing for the cleanse? Well, make sure they’re not constipated, right? Make sure you’re pooping every day. Make sure that you’re drinking enough water and start to incorporate those foods into your diet. Start to maybe pull out and start to wean off or reduce coffee, sugar, and alcohol.
Then, the number eleven mini topic that I came up with is, the absolute importance of cruciferous vegetables and garlic, as it has to do with liver detoxification. All of those things, you as a clinician should be able to easily speak to every single one of those eleven things, and actually, we could probably take these eleven. The first one, I broke down into five things so, really, we’ve got sixteen. There are probably twenty different little mini topics just in that one question, and none of them are hard. It’s not like you can’t talk about constipation or healthy elimination and what kinds of things you can do to make sure that you’re eliminating correctly.
If you’re going to write it in a post, a Facebook Live, or Instagram, I would hands down without a shadow of a doubt say that your live videos are going to be much better for attracting the right patient, than something written. When you connect with someone, do you feel like you make a better connection with them when you can hear their voice and see their face? You get their energy. You can tell whether you like that person. How does that get conveyed with something written? You can’t communicate the same way in writing as you can with video. Go listen to the prior podcast. I’ll link to it in the show notes about how to look good on camera. My friend, Chrissy, is amazing. She’s just amazing. Chrissy Weathersby Ball, she’s just incredible. Hollywood actress, been behind the camera. She talks to us about how to feel comfortable on camera and how to really connect with your audience authentically.
So take a breath and let’s back up. Number one, create a list of your top 10 FAQs. Pick your five favorites. Number two, take each of those five topics and break them down into little mini topics or lessons. Your videos should be no more than three to five minutes. Short, sweet, and to the point because our attention span is about zero these days. You need to be concise. You need to connect. Get to the point, get in and get out. The third thing you’re going to do is create a title. Every post needs a title. What I’ve learned from my friend, Bart Precourt, (I did an interview with him about Facebook Lives and I’ll link them in the show notes,) but he talks about how he always labels his posts as a question, always. I love that tip from him and here’s why.
When the brain hears a question, what does the brain want to do? It wants to answer the question. It doesn’t want the question dangling out there with no response, no answer, no solution, no resolution. It wants to answer the question. So, when you label your post with a question, the person that sees it is like, “Oh, is my liver really angry? What does that mean?” Your posts might be, “Is your liver angry at you?” I don’t know. Is it? And then they listen to your Facebook Live, watch your Insta story, your Reel, or your Instagram Live, whatever it is. Pose the questions. It could be, “Is your liver causing your acne?” Just think of a question that your post, your little mini topic will answer. That’s it. You might have a little description in there about what you’re going to talk about, but very, very minimal. If you’re going to do an Insta story, you can use some of the cool little features on Instagram that allow you to dolly up your post, but if Instagram is not your thing, just stick with Facebook.
Most of us older practitioners are going to be more comfortable with Facebook, however, Instagram is the fastest growing platform. So if you’re not on Instagram, you may want to be. However, my advice is to find somebody younger than you and let them do it. These younger kids know how to do it super-fast. It would take me forever to learn it, matter of fact, it has taken me a long time to learn it.
That’s how you’re going to get, as I said, four weeks of content in three simple steps. This is really like three months or four months’ worth of content. Questions change as your practice changes, what you do changes or you start serving a different type of person. COVID, for example. It’s a great example. You might have different questions that patients are asking like, “How do I boost my immune system?” They could break that down into aspects of the immune system and the microbiome and T cells, killer cells, lymphocytes, and white blood cells, and why you need to look at your blood tests regularly. Also what markers you want to keep an eye on to give you an idea of how your immune system is working and why calcium is so important for immune function and the role of vitamin C with immune function. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.
[CLOSING]
I hope this has been super helpful for you, I know it’s a little bit of information overload, but you can go back and read it again. And spoiler alert, I’ve got it all written down for you. A freebie, my friend. You can click on to see my top five most frequently asked questions in the show notes and then I’m going to give you all the little things that we just talked about. If you want, you can steal every single one of them and go use them as topics for your Facebook Lives to get out there on social media. But, still create that content calendar so that you don’t ever have to think about what you’re going to talk about ever again. I would rather you have one idea and you hit that go button and just go start talking, rather than sit there and have an analysis paralysis because you don’t know what to talk about. We all have had that happen. I have too. Anyway, there you go, my friend. Another big information download. I hope this is very valuable, relevant, and helpful to you. So again, look for the show notes. Find that resource. I’ve got a few other things in there for you to look at that might help you. Otherwise, take care and I will see you next week on The Clinical Entrepreneur Podcast. Take care and I’ll see you then. Bye!
[END]
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