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In this episode, Dr. Hales and Myles discuss:

  1. The importance of online branding for doctors
  2. Strategies for establishing a strong brand identity
  3. Leveraging social media platforms to reach patients

Takeaways:

“People are getting younger and younger on social media, meaning that it is so important to have that online brand to stay on top of mind.” – Myles Youngblood.

Connect with Myles Youngblood:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/myles-youngblood-916469123/
X: https://x.com/m_youngbloodtv
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mylesyoungbloodtv/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mylesayoungblood

Connect with Barbara Hales:

Twitter:   @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook:   facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Show website:   www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com
Email:   Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com
Books:
Content Copy Made Easy
14 Tactics to Triple Sales
Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist
YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales

TRANSCRIPTION (167)

Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another show of Marketing Tips for Doctors.

I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we have with us Myles Youngblood. Myles is a very interesting guy. He is, well, you know what, I’m going to tell you a little bit about his story. He owns his own digital marketing agency that helps YouTubers and content creators grow their following and communities online. He primarily does this with a short-form content strategy. He also hosts his own podcast. The show is called Beyond Ordinary. This show highlights the different facets of entrepreneurship. The aim of the show is to connect with great people doing great things to inspire others to do the same. Welcome to the show, Myles.

Myles Youngblood: Thank you so much, Barbara, for that intro. I greatly appreciate you having me on.

Importance of Online Branding

Dr. Barbara Hales: Why is having an online brand important?

Myles Youngblood: Oh, man, an online brand… Why is that important? I could talk for days about this. So, right now, we are in a digital era, right, where a lot of people are on their phones a lot. That’s how a lot of people get their news, right? I remember when I was growing up, and I got my first iPhone when I was, I think, in high school. But my sister, when she was growing up, got her first—her first phone was an iPhone. Mine was not, right?

And so that just goes to show you that people are just always on their phones. They’re always using social media. People are getting younger and younger on social media, meaning that it is so important to have that online brand to stay top of mind. When people think about, “Oh, what do I want to go eat?” people are like, “Scroll through TikTok and figure it out.” I’ve literally had this happen to me—you know, scroll through TikTok and figure it out. So, that being said, having an online brand and constantly being in people’s faces is just so important, especially if you are an entrepreneur.

Establishing a Brand

Dr. Barbara Hales: How does one decide on what their brand is or how they could establish their brand?

Myles Youngblood: Good question. How to establish what they want their brand to be… Honestly, I would say just do a brain dump. Like, where do you see yourself in five years? What do you want to be known for? And kind of reverse engineer. What does that ideal avatar look like? And kind of cultivate your brand and your style around that. That’s what I would say.

Understanding the Avatar Concept

Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, and so for our listeners that are not into marketing, could you tell them what an avatar is?

Myles Youngblood: An avatar? An avatar is really just… How do I describe it—an avatar?

Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, it’s a symbol of your target market.

Myles Youngblood: Right, exactly. So, do you mean like a personal avatar, or like your target market—like, what?

Dr. Barbara Hales: So, if I had an avatar, it would be somebody that I made up to look like the people that I was trying to market to.

Myles Youngblood: Right, right. So, can you repeat the question one more time? You said, what?

Dr. Barbara Hales: I don’t have these questions written down.

Myles Youngblood: No, no, it’s okay. I remember your question. You said, “What is an avatar?” Honestly, if you… This is a show about doctors, right? And I’ve been thinking about, before I came on here, I was like, “Man, if I was a doctor, what would I do, right? How would I market myself to reach my ideal avatar?” And honestly, I would really just make short-form content. And I know I feel biased saying that because that’s what I do for my clients, but I have just seen so much growth from not only doing it for me personally but doing it for my clients.

My clients are on YouTube, and they’re a little older, and I’ve just been able to take their long-form content, batch it up into shorts, and post it every day. Now, granted, I know everybody doesn’t have an online brand to just cut up their long-form content. But if I was a doctor, I would just do either day-in-the-life videos, vlog videos—people like just having that authentic person. Because you have to think about, if you did an email campaign and you sent out just a bunch of emails trying to be like, “Hey, are you looking for a free consultation?” compared to somebody who is, you know, just being a regular person doing everyday stuff on Instagram—who are they going to more likely step into the office with? So that’s what I like to think about.

Myles’ Journey into Podcasting

Dr. Barbara Hales: So, Myles, how did you get into this? What brought you to that point where you said, “Hey, this is me. This is what I want to do, and this is what I want to represent?”

Myles Youngblood: That’s actually a good question. So, I started my podcast relatively recently, right? I started about three months ago.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Congratulations, by the way.

Myles Youngblood: Thank you so much. And so, before I was doing the podcast, I was doing some… I was trying to pivot my business into some consulting—some consulting. I bought a consulting program and everything, and I was going to utilize… I wasn’t going to do… I was targeting, like, accountants. I was pivoting completely out of the way, right? And I remember I was watching Alex Hormozi one day, and he said, “Hey, if the best thing happens, happens, then what?” Right? So, I sat back, and I was like, “Okay.” I closed my eyes and was like, “Okay, I’ll be making, let’s say, six figures a month, but I’d be doing this accounting stuff. I’d be talking about accountants.” And then I was like, “I’d be making content for accountants. Is that something that I want to do?” And my answer was no. And so…

Transition to Short-Form Content

Dr. Barbara Hales: Why did you even choose accountants? Do you have any relationship to them other than tax time?

Myles Youngblood: Yeah, exactly. I really don’t know how I came to accountants. I think I was just like, “I think accountants struggle to get clients outside of tax season, so let me try and help them.” So that’s pretty much how I landed on it. There was really no methodology, if I’m being honest. But actually, shout out to that program that I bought, because how I came into podcasting is what they told me to do. They wanted me to, like, make content and run ads to the content, and I told them about my clients for the short form, and they said, “Hey, use podcast interviews with your clients and utilize that content for social proof.” So I did that, and I did my first episode, and I was like, “You know what? I actually like this, and I could actually see myself doing this long term.” And so, I kept doing it ever since.

So, to bring it back to answer your question, really just ask yourself that question, like, “Is what you’re doing really what you want to do? Is it something that you can see yourself doing 5, 10 years from now? If the best-case scenario happens, would you be happy doing that?” And that’s what I did. In terms of short form, how I came into doing that—because I have a business and a podcast—how I did that is I just saw that a lot of long-form creators were not utilizing short form, right? Short form was relatively new, and I know TikTok, I believe, has been around since 2016, and it really blew up over the pandemic. When you see that there are these billion-dollar companies like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube—all of them literally scrambled to make their own version of that in 2021.

So, if these billion-dollar companies are literally changing the way they are doing things to compete with TikTok, then obviously it’s something to look into. /So I did, and I just started reaching out to different creators and letting them know that, “Hey, I can cut up your short form, post it on all platforms for you, and then you can skyrocket your growth.” And it’s been up ever since. I’ve been doing this for several years. I’m actually going to meet up with some of my clients next week at a conference for content creators. So, it’s been really great being in the content creation space, for sure.

Future of TikTok and Content Strategy

Dr. Barbara Hales: From the business side, what do you think is the future for TikTok? Because, you know, you can’t really go on the news without hearing that Congress wants to ban TikTok unless an American firm buys it out, which we haven’t heard anybody coming forward to do. And for people saying, “Well, if TikTok’s future is in doubt, why would I spend all this time and effort to do content on it?” What are your feelings about that?

Myles Youngblood: Yeah, that’s a great point. So what I would say to that is, part of what I do for my business is we post on all platforms. The reason why we do that is exactly what you just said. I don’t want my clients to be pigeonholed onto one platform. A lot of my clients were only on YouTube, and that’s not really good because, especially in cancel culture nowadays, it only takes a click of a button—YouTube takes you down, and you’re done, right? So that’s why it’s good to be on TikTok, it’s good to be on YouTube, it’s good to be on Facebook—all these different places. And I would say, not just on social media but just in general, I don’t think it’s good to rely on one source. So, say you don’t have an online presence, but you just rely on email marketing or something like that, or you rely on your email list—that’s not really good. You want to always have some sort of backup, some place where you can always tap into, like, “Okay, if this goes down, at least I have this as a back end to kind of funnel people to.” So that’s what I would say.

Optimizing Social Media Profiles

Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah, what I tell people is, even if they are not going to be on a particular platform, or they’re not going to be active on it, it pays to go on every single platform, just to be able to put your profile on. There is no limitation for that. And this way, every platform profile will be directing any traffic that you get from your keywords back to your website.

Myles Youngblood: Exactly, exactly. I want to piggyback off of that point. Oh my, it infuriates me so much whenever I see people who have an Instagram bio or something, and they have a Linktree with like five links in it—it’s literally a no. So what I do, and I always tell my clients this, and I do this for myself, is: one link, one funnel. So whatever you’re trying to promote, if you want people to go to your website, just have the website, right? So, like on my Instagram, for example, even though I have a TikTok, I have Facebook, I have YouTube, I have all that—I don’t have a Linktree that has all of them because I know that if someone clicks on that and they see five links, they’re going to click off. I just want to make sure that they go to that one thing. So that’s what I tell people—just promote whatever is most important in your bios and your social profiles.

Dr. Barbara Hales: So you’re referring to calls to action?

Myles Youngblood: Exactly. Call it whatever—call to action. Make sure to optimize your profile so that when people land on your page, they see, “Okay, this person has this expertise, and this link that I’m about to click is going to take me to wherever.”

Call to Action and Lead Magnets

Dr. Barbara Hales: What call to action do you recommend for your clients?

Myles Youngblood: Call to action. So that’s a good one because I’ve been kind of testing to not always, because it’s not… what I’ve seen is you don’t always want to just always show people. It’s like a kind of a ratio that you want to figure out, whether it’s 80/20—sometimes you have a call to action, sometimes you don’t, right? So sometimes I’ll have my clients, for example, a lot of my clients, they are in the finance YouTube space, and they teach people how to trade stocks, and they have Discord. So sometimes they’ll talk about their Discord in a video, and in the actual video, we’ll put like, “Link to Discord in the description,” right? But every video isn’t like that. Some videos are literally just educational—”Hey, this is a stock pick that I’m looking at,” and that’s it. I don’t think that you should always have a call to action because if you always have a call to action, then people are going to be numb to it, and then they’re just not going to even take action to begin with.

Dr. Barbara Hales: So, do you recommend lead magnets for your clients?

Myles Youngblood: Lead magnets? A lot of them don’t really have lead magnets. What I would say about a lead magnet—well, at least for them—is that they already make content that’s pretty much… they’re making free content on YouTube, and it’s like, okay, they get to see all the free game that they’re giving. And if somebody, you know, follows them and they make some money with their thing on, with whatever stock pick on YouTube, then obviously, they’re more than likely going to opt into their Discord. So, they don’t really have lead magnets; they have pretty much a natural lead magnet.

Batching Content and Scheduling Tools

Dr. Barbara Hales: What are two tips that you could give our listeners that they could implement right now to be more successful in their brand establishment?

Myles Youngblood: Two tips… um, I’ll probably say two things. I’d make an Instagram if you don’t have one. And then second, I would… well, be active on Instagram—at least post. I post probably like once, at least once a day. But I know everybody isn’t savvy like that, so maybe do once every other day—story posts, maybe an Instagram reel here and there, something like that. And then two, I’d probably build an email list, if I’m being honest. I know that’s something that I’m looking towards—being able to just have a massive email list so you could literally just have people’s data. I think data is just so important, which is why these phones are always listening to you, and they have all these updates because data is so important. So if you could build an email list, I think that’s probably like, like, top of the top. Because it doesn’t matter what social media tries to cancel you; if you have an email list of 10,000 people, you’ll be able to start over like that. So that’s what I would say.

Dr. Barbara Hales: What is your feeling about a company like Hootsuite, where you just get to a weekend, you sit, and you knock out like four hours’ worth of content, you give it to Hootsuite, and then they drip it out over the next week or two?

Myles Youngblood: Oh yeah, that’s—I would 100% recommend that. Like, batch—what you call batch—recording your content. Like, take a day to record everything, and then take another, you know, day or two to, you know, edit it, and then just distribute it. Then utilize different third-party applications to be able to distribute it on all platforms. I would 100% recommend doing that because trying to wake up every single day, script, record, edit, and then you do that every single day… like, you’re not going to want to do that. So I would definitely recommend trying to, you know, block out certain days or weekends or whatever to get your content out for, you know, the coming weeks or months, for sure.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Is there a particular company that you like to work with?

Myles Youngblood: Oh, I use Metrical. That’s what I use for scheduling content for not only me but my clients.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s great. Well, we’ve really enjoyed having you here today with some very interesting content. This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors, with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and you have been listening with myself and with Myles Youngblood. Well, that’s it for today, and till next time.

Myles Youngblood: Thank you.