How Should a Healthcare or Wellness Practice Think About Its Marketing Plan?
Stuck, overwhelmed, not sure where to start — that's usually how this conversation begins for someone running a healthcare or wellness practice, and it's not because the ideas aren't there. It's because a real marketing plan and a pile of tactics are treated as the same thing, even though they do two very different jobs.
A marketing plan covers a lot: which channels carry your name, how often you show up, what you spend to get there. The piece I actually work on with healthcare and wellness practices is narrower, and it's usually the part that gets skipped: deciding what your patients need to understand, in what order, and what you're willing to leave out so the message stays clear instead of scattered. That's the content strategy living inside the marketing plan, and it's usually what decides whether everything else — the posts, the emails, the promotions — actually adds up to something.
Most plans start in the wrong place. They start with tactics: post more on social media, send a monthly email, run a promotion around a new service. Tactics feel productive because they produce something you can point to. But a list of tactics doesn't tell you what to say when a longtime patient asks why the messaging suddenly sounds different, or what to do when the busiest stretch of your year needs a completely different message than the slow months. A plan does.
A real plan starts with what your practice is actually trying to move: awareness of a new service, trust before someone books their first appointment, or a shift in how you talk about your specialty. Everything else — the channels, the content, the calendar — gets built to serve that, not the other way around. And the plan has to hold up once it's actually you publishing it, your name on it, your words; you're the one who has to stand behind them. You're not worried about a formal review board; you're worried about something simpler and more personal: will this sound right? Will a patient or a colleague reading closely catch something off? Will this make your practice sound like it doesn't actually know what it's talking about? That worry isn't a sign that something's off with you or your writing; it's a sign you take the people reading it seriously, and a good plan works with that instinct rather than ignoring it. A plan built without that worry in mind gets abandoned the first time a sentence feels risky. A plan built with it in mind treats getting the wording right as part of the process, not a hurdle in the way of it.
None of this is about producing more. It's about making sure what you do produce is pointed at something. Twenty years of writing inside health insurance, oncology, and rare disease taught me that the words that survive scrutiny aren't the safest ones; they're the ones that were clear about their job from the start.
If you have more ideas than direction right now, that's usually not a content problem; it's a content strategy problem, and it's fixable. So what's the one thing your patients need to understand about your practice right now?