In a world gone digital, where once people turned to family and friends for recommendations, it is now the word of strangers online that helps them make decisions. Hence, healthcare review management is more relevant than ever. It can make or break your practice. A negative review is like a fly in your soup; it can ruin your stellar reputation or work on Google Business Profile. On the flip side, consistent positive feedback paves the road to your long-term goals.
Boosting Your Reputation
A successful healthcare review management strategy can:
- Establish trust and credibility with potential patients
- Enhance your reputation
- Outshine local competition
- Ensure accuracy and transparency
- Lead more patients to your doors
- And increase profitability
Sharing is caring. At White Coat Web, we are determined to do our bit for practices to shine online by letting them in on key pointers to manage their reviews. These expert insights will be your dose of digital care, helping you turn patient feedback into a powerful tool for growth.
A Check-up on Your Reviews
From crafting the perfect response to negative reviews to highlighting your practice’s strengths, our top tips are designed to keep your online reputation in peak condition.
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- Incentivize patients to leave reviews
- Analyze your reputation to date
- Keep your GBP (Google Business Profile) up to date
- Create useful content
- Monitor and respond to your reviews
- Harness the power of social media
- Get listed!
➡ Check out our webisode on this topic: Review Management on Google Business Profile
1. Incentivize Patients to Leave Reviews
Encouraging feedback is essential. By fostering an environment where patients’ voices are heard, you are promoting a healthy community. To do so, you can
- Implement different channels, such as surveys, comment cards, mail communications, or QR codes.
- Seize the moment: train staff to ask patients for feedback after their consultation and implement follow-up emails to provide links to your review platform.
- Explain that their review is valuable and not only does it help others make sound decisions regarding their health, but it helps you serve them better.
2. Analyze Your Reputation to Date
How can you make a diagnosis without performing a check-up? With 94% of patients going online to find their doctor, it is essential to keep your brand consistent across the Internet. So, the first step into healthcare reputation management is to analyze where your practice stands.
Go through all the possible tools to gather all the information necessary: search engines like Google and Bing, your social media profiles (and the comment section!), and doctor review sites like Yelp!, Healthgrades, etc.). What should you be looking for? Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is the information on my listings correct? (office hours, services, category, description, etc.)
- What am I reading about myself?
- What pictures come up? Are they professional photos? (Because they should be).
- Does it represent what I do and who I am as a professional?
- What positives are there to highlight?
- What negatives are there to fix?
You may do this yourself, have a member of staff do it, or call in the experts, AKA a marketing agency that specializes in healthcare reputation management, to give you a hand.
3. Keep Your GBP (Google Business Profile) up to Date
Your Google Business Profile is your patients-to-be’s online pathway to your brick-and-mortar office. It allows them to find you on Google Maps, which in turn increases foot traffic and lead generation.
When setting it up (or revising it) make sure you:
- Choose the right category (“gynecologist,” for example)
- List the correct address and phone number (which should be the same across your numerous online pages—socials, website, listings, etc.)
- Write an optimized description. It should include clear and medically relevant words so that you are easy to find.
- Make it picture-perfect. Add professional photos of yourself, the team, and the facilities.
GBP is a dynamic tool that allows you to interact with patients in real time, as you can reply to reviews and also update your information when necessary. Are your hours reduced on holidays? Make sure to tell Google! Are you getting asked the same question more frequently? Update the FAQ feature. Is a new service at a special price? Make sure to let Google users know!
4. Create Useful Content
Connecting with patients by sharing your knowledge not only increases your reputation, but also encourages patient self-management. Not to repeat ourselves, but sharing really is caring. By creating valuable content like tips and advice on health issues that you treat, you can attract new patients and also promote the loyalty of your current ones.
Admittedly, this takes time that you might need to dedicate to your patients and your office. A good idea is to partner with healthcare-specialized content writers that can help you spread the good word. What’s more, you can share this content in the form of a blog, newsletter, or videos. The possibilities are endless, so if it feels overwhelming, remember: specialists can come to your aid.
5. Monitor and Respond to Your Reviews
Healthcare review management is dynamic in essence; it allows you to keep track of what is said about you in real time. Proactively responding to comments helps providers identify where there is room for improvement in their practices and build a reputation for being responsive.
Further, you can make any review a constructive moment—if you have received a less than favorable opinion, you can respond by thanking the reviewer for their time and trying to resolve the issue. On the other hand, you should also thank positive reviewers for taking the time to leave a positive comment about you!
When writing up your replies, it is important that your tone aligns with your style and personal branding apart from being professional, courteous, and respectful.
Understandably, not all practices can take the time to monitor reviews at once. Therefore, it is advisable to partner with trusted healthcare review management experts who can handle the hustle while doctors attend to their patients.
6. Harness the power of social media
Social media is your friend in this endeavor—and to be honest, it is everybody’s friend, that is precisely why you should enlist its help.
If you have taken up our advice in point 4, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are ideal to share the content that you are creating! Make the most of them to multiply your reach. At the same time, it gives people multiple ways of finding and connecting with you, providing you with the opportunity to interact and garner more reviews.
7. Get listed!
Being on popular healthcare review sites like Doctor.com, Healthgrades, and ZocDoc can give your reputation a real boost. When encouraging patients to leave comments on these sites, make sure you include them when monitoring reviews and respond to them accordingly.
Just like with your GBP, make sure your information on these sites is up-to-date and consistent with your other listings and pages.
Healthcare Review Management Done Right
Happy patients are your best spokespeople. When your clients are happy and talking about it, it creates a great snowball effect that ultimately impacts the financial health of your practice. However, we understand that it does take a dose of effort to put review management techniques in place.
Enter: White Coat Web, your prescription for a stellar online presence. As a digital marketing agency specializing in the healthcare industry, we diagnose and treat your practice’s online reputation, ensuring patient concerns are promptly addressed and positive experiences are in the spotlight.
- Real-time tracking of patient reviews across multiple platforms.
- Professional and empathetic responses to both positive and negative reviews.
- Guidelines and templates for consistent and effective communication.
- Strategies to encourage satisfied patients to leave positive reviews.
- Detailed reports on review trends and patient sentiment.
- Insights into areas for improvement based on review data.
- Crisis management.
- Tools and tips to increase patient interaction and satisfaction.
- Campaigns to gather more patient reviews and testimonials.
- Utilizing positive reviews to boost your search engine rankings.
- Integration of reviews into your website for better visibility and credibility.
White Coat Web’s healthcare reputation management services can help your reputation—and practice—soar. Get in touch to see how we can take your status from critical to thriving!