How Review Management Can Increase Your Patient Reach
Reviews hold more value than 5 gold stars on your Google My Business. They actually enable practices to get in front of more prospective patients. Healthcare marketing can be challenging, as virtually every business is running ads across multiple platforms. However, studies show that consumers prefer user-generated content, such as reviews, over traditional promotions. That is why most modern healthcare organizations recognize the value that online reviews have when trying to expand their client reach.
Here are four ways review management can increase your patient reach:
If you think that your first encounter with a patient is at their first appointment, you’re wrong. People take their time to research multiple healthcare providers and organizations before settling on one.
Seeing what patrons think about a business is just a search away. This accessibility makes it easy for prospective patients to either click on your profile or pass you up for a competitor. Practices and providers that invest in generating patient reviews are able to establish credibility and trust at the user’s first encounter.
If your practice isn’t on the first page of the Google results page, chances are prospective clients will never even see your listing. But how do you make sure you appear at the top of the list? Reviews!
Online directories, including search engines like Google, push online profiles that have more positive reviews to the top of the list. And with that, reviews must be relatively recent. That means, if your practice has a 5-star rating but the reviews are from over a year ago, Google will promote another practice with more recent reviews over you. Why? Well because people want to interact with a business that engages with their patrons and keeps their online profiles up to date.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is critical because more likely than not, future clients will discover your business online. So, you want to be the first practice that shows up on Google when they search “doctor near me.”
So, by consistently generating patient reviews, you can ensure your practice remains competitive and at the top of the results page.
Studies have shown time and time again that consumers respond to user-generated content more than traditional promotions. In this case, it means patient reviews are more impactful than running traditional advertisements. This is because prospective clients are more likely to believe the honest opinions of current clients over the company boasting about their own service.
On the same token, prospective clients like to see an array of patient feedback, meaning mixed reviews. Yes, negative reviews are fine and can actually be helpful for leveraging your reputation.
When a user sees nothing but 5-star reviews, they get suspicious. Were the reviews purchased? Are they fake? Even if your reviews are legit, it may cause some concern.
Consumers will not only read reviews to ensure they will get good service, but also to estimate the worst case scenario. So, if your worst review was about a long wait time, interested patients are probably more likely to still consider your practice than if it was regarding a wrong prescription.
Nothing beats word-of-mouth marketing, right? Of course! But there are definitely ways to improve it.
While word-of-mouth marketing still exists, it looks a bit different than it used to. Instead of just using the verbal medium, word-of-mouth also includes recommendations via social media, reviews, etc. And these digital recommendations help solidify verbal referrals by broadcasting reviews on popular sites.
As digital marketing platforms are being oversaturated with advertisements, practices are leaning more and more on patient reviews as a way to promote their practice. Not only are they free, but they are specially crafted summaries from your current patients to your prospective patients.
