The sooner you put your thinking cap on, the sooner you can get those many hands to help make your marketing job easier and your content more interesting.
Image: © Shutterstock
“Many hands make light work.” This proverb was first recorded in English in the early 1300s in a knightly romance known as Sir Bevis of Hampton. It is pretty self-explanatory. A big task becomes a lot smaller when you have a lot of people helping out.
Take this magazine for example. There are many people who contribute content every month – everything from writing and editing the columns and feature stories to compiling the Meetings & Courses to selling the ads. If one person had to create all that content on their own, from scratch, it would come out once a year instead of once a month. It is the same thing in a patient care facility. Someone answers the phone, somebody else provides technical services, someone provides the clinical services and there is probably a completely different person who handles the billing.
Opportunities are everywhere
What about marketing? As we all know, and are told repeatedly, it is a brand new era for marketing. We have access to social media platforms, content creation “gadgets,” online translation services and more. The other day I saw a video that was basically created by a dog. Somebody strapped a GoPro camera to the dog’s head and a “what it is like to be a dog” video was created. (View the video at www.fastcocreate.com/3035295/someone-strapped-a-gopro-to-the-happiest-dog-ever-and-the-result-is-very-happy.)
I am always looking for marketing inspiration that I can share. Take a 700- year-old proverb and a dog with a camera strapped to its head and what do you have? An idea for a highly effective marketing plan. Whom do you know that can help you create content for your different social media marketing platforms?
Use what you have
Elizabeth Mansfield
I just returned from the Virginia Orthotic & Prosthetic Association meeting. One attendee brought a dog who wears a prosthesis. Everybody was gaga for the dog. It was a super cute dog and, of course, to most people outside O&P and even some inside, very unique. I had people coming up to the registration table asking if I knew where the dog was because they wanted to take a picture with it. Not of it. With it!
It does not have to be a dog. It does not have to be a cute little kid. It does not have to be an amputee prima ballerina. It can be a 72-year-old dysvascular patient who has time to write a weekly update or record a short video recap of their activities that you can post to your Facebook page or YouTube channel. It can be your front office person whose job it is to take a “before” and “after” photo of all the patients you have seen this week. It can be your lab supervisor who is responsible for uploading pictures of all the molds that were poured. The sooner you put your thinking cap on, the sooner you can get those many hands to help make your marketing job easier and your content more interesting.
