Building Your Personal Brand as a Direct Primary Care Doctor

As a direct primary care (DPC) doctor, your personal brand is an important part of your professional identity. It helps to set you apart from other family medicine doctors, urgent care centers, and hospital systems in your area, and can attract new patients to your practice. Here are some tips for building and promoting your personal brand:

1. Define your unique value proposition: What makes you different from other DPC doctors? What are your areas of expertise, and how do you approach patient care differently? By identifying your unique value proposition, you can better communicate the benefits of your practice to potential patients.

2. Develop a strong online presence: In today's digital age, it's essential to have an online presence that showcases your expertise and personality. This can include a website, blog, and social media profiles. Be sure to regularly update your online profiles with relevant and engaging content, and consider using SEO techniques to increase your visibility.

3. Engage with your community: Building relationships with your patients and other healthcare professionals in your community can help to establish your personal brand and reputation. Consider speaking at local events, joining professional organizations, or volunteering your time and expertise to organizations in need.

4. Utilize patient testimonials: Patient testimonials can be a powerful way to showcase the value of your DPC practice. Encourage satisfied patients to share their experiences online, and consider featuring these testimonials on your website or social media profiles.

By following these tips, you can effectively build and promote your personal brand as a DPC doctor. This can help to attract new patients and establish your reputation as a trusted and competent physician.

Leveraging Your Personal Brand to Grow Your Direct Primary Care Practice

This week was amazing in that I had a post go viral on LinkedIn. I’ve been posting weekly on my social media accounts for the last 3 to 4 years about my work with Direct Primary Care and our practice Plum Health DPC and this is the first time that I’ve had a post go viral.

Here’s the post in full from LinkedIn. If we’re not connected on LinkedIn, please feel free to reach out:

This focus on virality may seem like vanity, but it has important implications for our business at Plum Health and for the broader direct primary care movement. Here’s why going viral is important:

• builds awareness for my personal and professional brands

• gives me credibility as an authority on direct primary care, house calls, and health care in Detroit and beyond

• increases traffic to our website, Plum Health DPC, as that link is at the bottom of the post

• I can now use this post as a peg to engage with journalists, generating more news, more engagement, and getting more attention for my business

• this post has increased new membership/sales for our direct primary care practice, Plum Health DPC

Our viral post about making house calls in Detroit has now reached 1.5 million people via LinkedIn

With that being said, I’m so excited to launch our newest course, Leveraging Your Personal Brand to Grow Your Direct Primary Care Practice. I want to teach you everything I know about starting and growing a Direct Primary Care practice, and one of the most important lessons that I can teach you is how to use your personal brand to grow your practice. You can take the course, here.

HOW CAN I LEARN MORE ABOUT STARTING A DIRECT PRIMARY CARE PRACTICE?

If you enjoyed reading this blog post and if you want to learn more about starting and growing your direct primary care practice, look no further than our book and our courses on how to start and grow your direct primary care practice. We at Startup DPC have begun compiling some of the best content available on this blog, in our book, and in our courses.

The best place to start is to take our Direct Primary Care Business Plan course, available here. From there, you can learn how to attract new patients to your direct primary care practice and how to find the perfect location or build out the practice of your dreams.

Thanks for reading and watching, and best of luck in your direct primary care journey!

-Dr. Paul Thomas with Startup DPC

The StartUpDPC Show Episode 1: How this Direct Primary Care Doctor Successfully Leveraged His Personal Brand

Building a Personal Brand can help you build your Direct Primary Care practice. By having a trusted personal brand, more people will be willing to sign up with your Direct Primary Care service.

Paul Thomas, MD and Kendrick Johnson, DO talk about personal branding for Direct Primary Care doctors on the first episode of the StartUpDPC Show.

But, many of you reading this are unfamiliar with how to build a personal brand. So, I wanted to show an excellent example of how to get this done.

Dr. Kendrick Johnson is a Direct Primary Care doctor with Ark Family Health and he recently made an excellent post on LinkedIn, which helps build his personal brand. The post is titled “Why this Doctor Had to Escape the Healthcare System.” During the video, he tells a personal story, shows real emotion, and even vulnerability. He becomes a relatable person and builds trust with his audience.

Because of this, we thought he'd be a perfect first guest on our StartUpDPC Show, where we will be interviewing thought leaders in the Direct Primary Care field and asking them some tough questions.

In our conversation, we talk about building a Direct Primary Care Practice, leveraging Social Media to get this done, the importance of Google Reviews, sustainable growth rates for Direct Primary Care practices and more.

One of the things that really struck me is that Dr. Johnson used a relatively inexpensive technology, an older-generation iPhone, to shoot his LinkedIn video. Take this as a lesson: you don’t need to hire a camera crew or an agency to produce high-quality content. Instead, you need to look into the camera (on the back of your iPhone or other smartphone) and tell your story with authenticity.

Thanks for watching and have a great day,

- Dr. Paul Thomas with StartUpDPC

How to Build Your Personal Brand for your Direct Primary Care Practice

Building a Personal Brand can help you build your Direct Primary Care practice. By having a trusted personal brand, more people will be willing to sign up with your Direct Primary Care service.

But, many of you reading this are unfamiliar with how to build a personal brand. So, I wanted to show an excellent example of how to get this done.

Dr. Kendrick Johnson is a Direct Primary Care doctor with Ark Family Health and he recently made an excellent post on LinkedIn, which helps build his personal brand. The post is titled “Why this Doctor Had to Escape the Healthcare System.” During the video, he tells a personal story, shows real emotion, and even vulnerability. He becomes a relatable person and builds trust with his audience.

Video of Dr. Kendrick Johnson posted on LinkedIn - this is a great example of how you can build a strong personal brand that will help you attract new patients to your practice.

So, the first part of building a strong personal brand is building brand recognition. Brand recognition is exactly what it sounds like: the ability of a consumer to recognize one brand over other brands. In other words, it's the ability of consumers to identify your product by its attributes and design elements.

But, in this case, it’s you and your face, your body, your beliefs, and the stories you tell. And no, you do not need to have a perfect face, body, belief system, or stories, but you do have to share these elements (aka your personality) with your audience.

So, in the example above, Dr. Kendrick Johnson is introducing himself to his audience by telling a story about himself. He even tells a very touching and relatable story about his father.

Importantly, he Dr. Johnson uses a medium that many people use - LInkedIn, a very popular social media platform. This sort of professional discussion about the role of a physician in society plays really well on this medium. In fact, LinkedIn is probably the perfect medium for this video.

And, because Dr. Johnson delivers a strong message with a great medium, he has great results, and this is based on the engagement that this post has received - over 100 reactions and several comments with thousands of post views.

The third part of this formula is consistency. If Dr. Johnson can create unique, engaging, thoughtful content that demonstrates his trustworthiness and compassion on a regular basis, he’ll build a strong personal brand. If this is a one-off thing, Dr. Johnson’s efforts here won’t be as impactful.

Consistency is key. Consistently generating high-quality content helps you win on social media platforms.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more content and more informational blog posts and courses.

Sincerely

-Dr. Paul Thomas

How Personal Branding can help you grow your Direct Primary Care Practice

Intro

Tonight, I went live with the Direct Primary Care Alliance and talked about how personal branding can grow your Direct Primary Care practice. This is a huge topic, and I tried to tackle as much as possible in under an hour!

Currently, I’m working on my second course on this subject, Personal Branding for Direct Primary Care Doctors. If you haven’t seen our first course on Building a Sales Funnel, check it out here.

Why it’s important to Build a Personal Brand as a Direct Primary Care Physician.

Why is it important to build a personal brand as a Direct Primary Care Physician? Simply, building a personal brand is a great way to attract new patients to your practice. People/your potential customers spend a lot of time on Facebook. Instagram, and LinkedIn and these can be places where you can show your authentic self, where you can demonstrate your caring and compassion, where you can develop genuine relationships with people through social media.

Building a personal brand is all about communicating your character to your community or to your target audience. You can share about your successes and failures, your hopes and dreams, what you believe in, and why you decided to start a Direct Primary Care practice.

When you do these things, when you share about yourself in an honest and transparent way, your story and your character will start to resonate with people in your audience. They will identify with you and start to trust you for the person that you are, the caring, compassionate, and authentic physician in their community.

When you are a primary care doctor, you’re asking people to trust you with their most important resources: their health. By communicating your character, your ethos, and your values through these social media platforms, you can start to build that foundation of trust.