Online reviews are worth their weight in gold, and a mix of positive and negative reviews helps improve your patients’ trust in your staff and service. Indeed, recent stats indicate that the presence of negative reviews can improve conversion rates by 67 percent. This is because if the reviews are entirely positive, most people think they are fake. In addition to increasing a patient’s trust in your practice, negative reviews can give him or her a real picture about the success and credibility of your service. In addition, patients who read negative reviews convert better because the fact that they are paying close attention means they are likely to visit your practice.

To begin with, negative reviews do not mean your brand is not good enough. A lot of healthcare marketers deal with negative reviews at some point. Most of the time, negative reviews are a result of mismatched expectations and communication gaps. Therefore, if you happen to get a scathing review of your service, it does not mean your staff or service are bad. In fact, when a medical practice decides to publicly display their negative reviews, it proves it has nothing to hide. Displaying the not-so-good reviews shows that though some patients were not very happy with your service, the majority of patients are satisfied with the way your staff treated them.

While no healthcare marketer wants to get negative online reviews, they are bound to happen. The trick is to mitigate the damage caused by negative reviews by interacting with your patients and reassuring them that you are addressing the pain areas. One of the most effective ways to reverse the damage caused by a bad review is to respond to the reviewer positively. A professional and timely response can mitigate the potential impact of a negative comment and create growth opportunities for your brand.

There are two ways of mitigating the harmful impacts of negative reviews: deleting negative reviews and burying them.

Removing Negative Comments Permanently

Removing a negative review permanently disassociates it from your brand name and ensures searchers never see it again. While this technique is effective, it is difficult to implement.

In some cases, your practice website or social media pages may return a negative result. You can try to handle the situation by responding to the negative comment professionally and politely. If the condition is severe, you can consider removing your social media profile altogether and create a new one.

Often, a negative comment will happen on a web page not owned by your practice. For instance, an individual blogger might share a post about a bad experience with your brand, or a patient may share his or her dissatisfaction with your service or staff. If you do not own or control the web page, removing negative posts from SERPs is much more difficult and may require professional help.

Burying Negative Comments

The next-best option for minimizing the damage caused by harmful online reviews is with search engine suppression, also known as reverse SEO. Burying a negative comment deep in the search engine results will reduce its visibility. With this strategy, instead of trying to remove the negative comment, you simply create more positive reviews in order to bury the negative comment in the search engine results. In most cases, suppression via reverse SEO also works to strengthen your online brand image and promotes your brand in a positive light.

If the sole aim is to push negative reviews down on SERPs, you must keep an active online presence. Posting great content online will help influence search engine rankings. Fresh and relevant content is a fantastic way to attract good-quality backlinks, which will help improve your website’s authority. You can also start contributing to online forums, blogs and communities within your industry or market. Identify the most influential online communities, create your profile and start contributing to relevant discussions. The positive content frequently posted online will mitigate the harmful effects of negative reviews.

Most Internet searchers only click the first few items in search results. By creating SEO-driven content, your website rises to the top of the search ranks, while other web pages move down. If you are able to push a negative comment to the third or fourth page of search results, it is highly likely that browsers will not even see it.

How To Respond To Negative Reviews?

You are passionate about your practice and care about your patients, so negative reviews are going to hurt. However, overthinking will make the situation worse. So, take a step back and remind yourself that negative reviews do not make you a bad doctor. Instead, negative reviews are an inevitable part of running a practice. Keep these tips in mind when handling negative reviews:

Do Not Delete Negative Reviews: Maybe you are afraid of bringing the issue any undeserved attention. Or maybe you feel the grievance is not worth addressing. The truth is, negative reviews are opportunities in disguise. They are your chance to engage with patients in meaningful ways, get valuable feedback to help your practice grow and show your patients that you are willing to accept and fix your mistakes.

Be Professional In Your Response: Do not be defensive when responding to a patient grievance. Even an attempt to justify the situation may make your practice look unreliable. A proper response should include an apology for the patient’s experience. Regardless of your version of the actual situation, the patient had an unfortunate experience, and an apology may soothe upset feelings. You can also add a positive statement about your practice in order to mitigate the negative comments made by the reviewer. Finally, thank the patient for his or her feedback and ask to connect with them offline.

Respond Quickly: Do not let damaging thoughts linger. A quick initial response is the first step to addressing customer grievances. Your prompt reply will show the complainant that you are paying attention and that patient issues are a priority. You must regularly check review sites you are listed on and monitor your social media feeds. You can set up online alerts at mentions of your practice.

Apologize, Even If You Are Not Wrong: While being right feels great, being forgiving is better for the reputation of your medical practice. Irrespective of what went wrong and why, always apologize to your dissatisfied patient. Your first message when responding to negative reviews should be that you feel sorry your patient had an unpleasant experience, and you would like to address the issue and compensate for the inconvenience. Be generous. Offering a discounted service can not only turn an upset patient into a satisfied one but can also attract more patients who will be impressed by your generosity and compassion.

Encourage Positive Reviews: The more online reviews you have, the less impact a negative review will have on your overall satisfaction score. For instance, if you have only five Yelp reviews, then one negative review can drop your satisfaction score by 20 percent. However, if you have 20 positive reviews, then a negative review will only bring your average score down by 5 percent. Also, most of your happy patients will not bother leaving online reviews unless you ask or remind them to do so. On the other hand, unhappy patients will be posting their unpleasant experience online as soon as they walk out the door. So, do not leave any stone unturned to convert your happy patients into brand ambassadors.

Do Not Take Negative Comments Personally: Physicians tend to take all criticism personally, which makes discouraging feedback all the harder to hear. It may be tough to regard criticism as an inevitable part of the job, but it is what it is. For sure, patients do not expect you to be 100 percent perfect, and the same patients will find an 89 percent positive rating more authentic than a 100 percent rating. While it is critical to manage your patients’ expectations, you must also manage your expectations for yourself. You have to understand that you may not be the right fit for every patient and that sometimes it is an intelligent decision to let a patient go.

Learn From The Experience: Despite the sting, every negative review offers a learning opportunity. If a patient is struggling to find kind words for how he or she was treated, your staff may not be following the right protocol. Through negative feedback, patients can point out things that you may have overlooked, such as parking problems, vague billing practices, long wait times and many more. Even if the patient’s problems seem silly to you, try to fix the issue. It may help change the patient’s perception of your practice.

Follow HIPAA Guidelines: One of the biggest reasons to move the conversation offline with the reviewer is to avoid disclosing a patient’s personal information publicly. Never disclose any of the patient’s personal information, even if the patient initiates specific details in their review. It may become challenging to discuss a complaint while remaining vague. Explain your limitations in your response and ask the reviewer to discuss the problem one-on-one, where you do not run the risk of revealing their personal information.

Final Thoughts

Negative reviews are difficult to handle. An unhappy patient leaving scathing reviews for your practice is like a swift kick to your online reputation. Online reviews tend to keep displaying in search results for years to come and can make patients turn their back to you. However, negative reviews can be used to your advantage, as long as they are surrounded by a handful of positive reviews. The trick is to interact with your patients and assure them you are addressing the problem. One of the most effective ways to reverse the ill effects of a negative review is to respond to the reviewer in a positive manner. A positive response to a negative review can reduce its impact and create growth opportunities.

In addition, be sure to inform your employees of the reviews you have received, both positive and negative. Negative reviews are an indicator that there are systems and processes within your practice that you need to improve. Formulate a plan to respond to reviewers quickly and professionally, and make sure their concerns have been adequately addressed. There is a possibility that some of your reviews are fake. If the negative review is fake or you doubt its authenticity, contact the third-party review site and ask them to review it and/or remove it.

Knowing how to respond to negative reviews is the key to patient-practice relationships and continued growth. Negative reviews are not the worst thing in the world and, when handled correctly, they can be turned into opportunities to satisfy your patients better and grow your practice.

Your practice’s online reputation is crucial, and negative reviews could affect it adversely. The best way to manage negative reviews is to hire reputation management consultants. An online reputation management company will monitor your online presence while implementing strategies to help you look your best. myPracticeReputation’s management tools allow you to monitor online reviews so you can address negative reviews quickly in order to prevent escalations and regain your patients’ confidence.

Market research aims to understand the reasons patients will visit your practice and avail themselves of your services. It also covers aspects like target market behavior and how financial, societal, cultural and personal factors can influence that behavior.

When conducting market research, here are some of the fundamental questions you must attempt to answer:

• Who are your target audience? Describe them in terms of gender, age, income, occupation, lifestyle, education, profession, etc.
• Which medical practices do they visit these days? Describe their preferences and needs relating to your products or services, including how much they rely on healthcare practices, their preferred physician or practice, the best available products and acceptable price points.
• What will make them come to your practice?

Although some of these questions may seem complicated, you would be surprised at the detailed information that is available about the target audience, revenue figures and target audience motivations. It is important to tap the various information sources to seek answers to as many questions as you can. This will help make your plan more convincing and improve your chances of success.

Market research does not come cheap. It requires a significant amount of expertise, effort and resources to achieve the desired results. However, for practices of all sizes, the best market research is the research they do on their own. In-house research might take the form of telephone interviews with patients, crunching numbers from published sources or competitive intelligence that you might have gathered on your competitors through social networks.

Whether you agree or not, as a medical practice owner you conduct market research all the time. When you talk to your existing or potential patients about your practice or check out your competitors’ prices, you are conducting market research. When done right, this process can produce a wealth of information about your services, your target audience and the market you operate in.

Far too many entrepreneurs or medical practice owners embark on ventures without proper market research. Often, a medical practice failure is said to be the result of poor market research. Successful entrepreneurs are risk minimizers, rather than risk takers, and market research enables them to reduce risks.

Why conduct market research?

The goal of a market research campaign is to equip you with the information needed to make informed decisions about your start-up medical practice and the 4 P’s:

Products or Services: Improve your offerings based on findings of what your target audience wants and needs. You can focus on factors like unique selling features of your services.

Price: You should decide on price after considering profit margins, competitors’ prices and the price your target audience is willing to pay.

Placement: This is where you get to decide about the placement or display of your products.

Promotion: Think about various ways and channels to reach your target audience. Your preferred marketing channels may include traditional advertising, social networks, website, email marketing, etc.

Market research can help you:

• Understand your target audience and their preferences.
• Create more effective and targeted healthcare marketing campaigns.
• Identify potential business opportunities to grow and increase profits.
• Identify and monitor your competitors.
• Reduce or manage risk in your business decisions.

Right Time to Conduct Market Research

Market research is viewed as a component of the planning stage before launching a new medical practice. Indeed, market research is critical for start-ups and should be a key element of healthcare marketing plans. This data feeds into a number of areas and helps to:

• Determine the revenue potential of your services so that the correct prices can be set.
• Attract patients to your practice and establish your brand image.
• Set the right prices for your offerings.
• Retain patients and earn repeat business.

Needless to say, one practice’s market research data and marketing plan will be different than another’s objectives and tactics. Even practices within the same area will have different business goals and marketing strategies based on their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. However, there are guidelines for running market research campaigns that every practice must follow.

Healthcare marketing plans and market research are not solely for new practices. Accurate assessment of the market and development of an effective business plan are critical to the success of both new and established practices. Medical practice owners who contemplate significant changes, such as expansion and relocation, also use market research to support their decisions. Some of the situations that might call for market research are:

• Launching new healthcare marketing campaigns.
• Opening a new location or changing the practice location.
• Introducing new lines of services.
• Entering or exiting a market.

The quality of information gathered through marketing research campaigns can be very useful in day-to-day operation. A consistent flow of reliable information can help you maximize the potential of your current activities and help you create a roadmap for future growth.

How to Conduct Market Research?

A practice that understands its target audience and their needs can establish itself successfully, compete with other practices, target new patients and identify new opportunities. Follow these steps for running successful market research campaigns:

Step #1: Assess Target Market Size

While assessing your target market size, your approach should depend on the scale of your new practice. While determining the potential market size, be sure to look at both value and volume. Volume refers to the number of potential patients, while value refers to the value of the target market.

Assessing potential market value can be a challenge. One approach is to see if an approximate figure is publicly available. Other approaches include buying a research report or estimating the figure yourself.

Step #2: Segment the Target Market

If your new medical practice targets specific market segments, then you should segment the target market in order to understand it better. One of the best practices is to examine the market from a demographic perspective. This approach will provide valuable insights that will help you determine your next step.

Step #3: Define Your Target Market

Your target market is comprised of potential patients you will be focusing on. Defining your target market is even more important when your market has too many segments and each segment has different demand drivers.

Step #4: Define Your Target Audience Needs

This step demands a qualitative assessment of your target market by defining the market needs. While defining the needs of your target market, you should go into the details of demand drivers for your services. Why will potential patients buy your services? What health problem are your products addressing? How are your offerings different from what is already available in the market?

The market needs can also be derived from looking at the efforts of your competitors and emphasizing more on markets where your competitors are not focusing.

Step #5: Identify Entry Barriers

In this section, you should answer the two most important questions:

1. What factors may prevent someone from opening a competing practice next to yours and end up snatching 50 percent of your business?
2. What factors will make you successful in your target market?

Simply put, barriers to entry will help protect your start-up medical practice from new competition.

Conclusion

By following the steps mentioned above, you will be able to put together a comprehensive healthcare market analysis for your new medical practice. Conducting healthcare market research can be an eye-opening experience. Even if you think you know your target audience or market well, conducting a market research campaign will uncover new channels and tips to help improve your healthcare marketing plan.

When it comes to dental practice marketing and increasing patient volume, nothing beats referral marketing.

While you can use popular and effective marketing strategies, a significant part of attracting new patients includes getting them through referrals from existing patients. Getting referrals from existing patients is one of the most successful marketing activities that you can put in place. This is primarily because new patients referred by existing patients are more likely to be happy and satisfied than patients who find your practice on their own. Patient referrals are a much easier and cost-effective way to gain new patients than finding them through traditional marketing tactics.

Importance of Patient Referrals

The success and profitability of your dental practice depend on ensuring a continued stream of patient referrals. Gone are the days when you would succeed in increasing the number of patient referrals just by offering a free consultation during the holiday season. For your dental practice to grow, you should see 25 to 50 new patients every month. Moreover, a majority of your new patients should come from patient referrals. At times your staff may seem reluctant to ask for referrals from existing patients, but you should not shy away from this practice if you wish to gain new patients. It is important to make conscious efforts to keep your name at the top of your patients’ minds and encourage them to refer your services to their family and friends.

While the main benefit of referrals is the number of new patients that it can deliver to your dental practice, there is a secondary benefit you might have overlooked: the quality of patients who are delivered.

Some marketing channels tend to attract discount hunters who are not the ideal patients in your target demographic and are likely to visit only once. In contrast, referred patients are the friends of your existing patients, so they are a great match for your target audience and tend to become loyal, longstanding patients. They are also predisposed to liking your offerings before they even try your products or services because their friends have been spreading the good word about you to them.

Are Referrals Right for Your Practice?

While there are no hard-and-fast rules as to what type of dental practices can benefit from patient referrals, there are some key factors to consider:

Underlying patient satisfaction

The happier your patients are with your services, the more likely they are to recommend your practice to their family and friends. A high Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a good indication that referral might work well.

Demographic

Referrals can work for any demographic, but some tend to be more effective. Women are said to recommend more than men. In addition, while the older demographic tends to recommend less, their recommendations tend to convert better.

Impulse or thought-after decisions

Since dental procedures require consideration, it may take longer to get a referral program off the ground as potential patients who receive a recommendation may not yet be ready for your services. However, the seeds of consideration are sown.

Heavy discounts

Does your practice discount heavily? Lack of discounts and freebies might make it difficult for the referral offer to stand out. If your discounts are less generous than other offers in your local area, then referrers are unlikely to share them within their circles.

Economics

It is important to have sufficient gross margin for the referrers’ and the referees’ incentives to fit within your Cost Per Acquisition. If you cannot offer a compelling incentive, then incentivized referral may not work.

Knowing that your dental practice has the right attributes for happy patients to share with their friends is a great first step. However, the right combination of messaging, discounts and psychological triggers can take your referral campaigns to a whole new level.

Strategies for Generating New Referrals

The most challenging part about generating referrals is gathering the courage to ask. Some dental marketers think they will offend their patients by asking for more business in the form of referrals and recommendations. In reality, your patients will be more than happy to send people your way if they are satisfied with your services. It is important to have a good relationship with your existing patients and develop a plan to seek referrals from each one of them.

If you are not yet convinced about asking for referrals, here are a few facts that will convince you:

• Referrals do not cost anything.
• Most of your existing patients know someone who can benefit from your services.
• Your patients are better at marketing your services than you are.
• Referrals often lead to more referrals.

It is clear that referrals should be a significant focus for your dental practice. So, how can you get more and better-quality referrals? Here are five dental marketing strategies to increase the number and quality of referrals for your practice:

1. Go the extra mile for your patients

When a patient visits your practice, he or she should have a good experience. When you provide exceptional service, people take notice. And when people take notice, they tend to spread the good word about your services. These conversations cause referrals. So if you are able to fulfill a patient’s needs, that is great. But if you are able to go above and beyond, that is what will eventually be noticed. By going above and beyond, you will position yourself apart from all the noise that surrounds your brand.

2. Improve your patient experience

Patient service plays a significant role in every dental practice. Your patients like to be heard, and they like their pains to be take care of. One of the best ways you can encourage referrals is by providing the best patient experience. Never let your patients’ comments and questions go unanswered for too long. As long as you show a little sympathy and flexibility, your patients will be more understanding when there are errors or slipups.

3. Build relationships

Your patients are referring your services, not your brand. That is why it is essential to build relationships with your patients. You must make sure you are doing a good job of listening to patients and making them feel comfortable. You can consider sending personalized emails that are relevant to a patient’s interests or treatment options, reminding him or her that you care about their oral health.

4. Personalize your interactions with patients

The more you personalize the experience for patients, the happier they will be. Whether you want to personalize your interactions by remembering information about them, or reminding them of their upcoming appointments, or sending them promotions, personalization will show that you care. Personalization will result in a more engaged patient base, one that is likely to refer your practice to friends and family.

5. Do not be afraid to ask

Even though referrals happen naturally, it can be difficult to get patients to think about your practice after they leave. This is the reason you should always ask for a referral while they are still at your office. In general, patients are the happiest post-appointment, so this is a good time to ask for referrals. You can offer incentives to make referring easier.

Conclusion

The world of dental practice marketing is constantly evolving, and it is normal to feel overwhelmed and unsure of what the future looks like. Tried-and-tested marketing methods may not produce the same results, but that does not mean we should ignore them completely. Word-of-mouth referrals are just as effective today as they were a decade ago. However, today word-of-mouth referrals are being used in a way that can spread the good word about your dental practice faster. You can use them to generate new patients for your dental practice and build a thriving practice in this age of healthcare marketing.

For a free dental practice marketing consultation and to make sure your practice is taking the right steps to attract new patient referrals, contact us today.

Case studies are underleveraged, yet very effective. In fact, case studies are more effective than brochures and traditional, expensive marketing collateral. The reason? Because people love to read stories. This is what case studies allow you to do – tell remarkable stories about your practice, staff and products. And the patient stories that you share can evoke emotions, paint pictures and give your practice a sticky power.

Most people connect with stories, and there is no better method of storytelling in healthcare than sharing your patients’ experience in a data-backed case study.

Essentials of a Case Study

While there is no set format for creating an effective case study, most of the successful case studies contain similar elements. In general, there are three parts to a case study.

The Problem: Give a brief of the problem.

The Solution: Outline the different solutions or courses of treatment available.

Results: This is where you showcase your products and services as the best solution to the problem.

When you build a case study on these basics, the end product will be an informative, shareable and engaging piece of content. In order to improve the quality of your case study, do not get too caught up with finding and fixing the format.

An original story cannot be locked into a formula. You do not have to restrict your content into specific modules like business plans. The most engaging and compelling stories take a creative approach and then play with perspective. At any cost, avoid writing your case study from your own perspective. This would be like writing testimonials for your own staff and services. Simply put, a successful case study highlights “What is in it for me?” from the target audience’s perspective.

Importance of Case Studies

We all understand the importance of social proof – telling our website visitors and potential patients that others have tried your products and are satisfied with your services. The different types of social proof include online reviews, social shares, patient testimonials and case studies.

Case studies are a building block of healthcare marketing for improved lead generation and a healthier bottom line. The main purpose of case studies is to attract new patients by demonstrating the satisfaction that existing patients have already experienced. This the reason case studies are also known as patient experiences or patient success stories.
A case study lets you show off how your staff and services are better than your competitors, and all of the other aspects that your existing patients love about your practice. In addition, case study content will improve credibility and provide authoritative content, which will work wonders for both SEO and online reputation perspectives.

Another great thing about case studies is that they are targeted and specialty-specific. In other words, if a case study if properly developed, it will never appear vague to readers. There is very little risk that your case studies will miss the relevance mark. You can rest assured your case studies will resonate with the needs of your target audience.

Creating Impactful Case Studies

Before you start writing a case study, make sure you understand your target audience and their pain points. Having detailed and in-depth personas will help you write patient stories that can answer most of your target audience’s questions. You can collect information about pain points of your target audience by:

• Checking with your staff and patient engagement team for common questions.
• Noticing what patients ask you after they have come to your practice or used your products.
• Monitoring social media networks and online forums.

Monitoring and tracking some common online platforms will help you assess what pain points you need to address when creating case studies.

Finding Ideal Candidates for Case Studies

Your next step is to find patients who will be happy to explain how using your products or visiting your practice has addressed their health issues. However, do not choose just anyone. The ideal patients for creating case studies must:

• Match one of your ideal patient personas.
• Be a loyal patient who is satisfied with your services.
• Be happy to be interviewed.

Important tip: Make sure the patients you are interviewing for your case study are able to articulate the value that your products add to their well-being. If you are doing a video case study, then avoid people who get tongue-tied when faced with a camera. However, when doing a video case study, be very careful of HIPAA regulations and seek all permissions before you begin recording.

When looking for patients for case studies, monitor patient interactions on social networks and mentions of your practice to see who are posting positive comments about your practice and services. Patients who are posting positive reviews might make good case study subjects.

In addition, if a popular influencer loves your product or visits your practice, featuring him or her in a case study can give an additional boost to your marketing campaigns.

Asking Relevant Questions Is Critical for an Impactful Case Study

Once you have identified the patients for a case study, it is time to draft questions for the interview. You can interview by email, phone call, video chat or in person. However, it is advisable to talk to patients in person because the human connection is likely to give you a more natural interaction.

Try to ask more open-ended questions. A patient is more likely to express his or her thoughts better if you ask the following questions:

The health issue they experienced that made them want to visit your practice.

• What you offered or suggested that made them choose you.
• How your products or services benefited them, and how they can substantiate their claims.
• What is unique about your staff and services as compared to your competitors.
• What they would tell others about your practice, products or services.

How to Write a Case Study

You can follow a number of approaches for writing a case study from the interview material. However, for most readers, case studies that tell a story, highlight the issues and involve real people seem genuine and trustworthy. You can choose to present your case study:

• In chronological order, narrating events as they happened.
• Using the problem, solution and results format.
• Using the background, goal, strategy, implementation and results achieved format.

Like in all healthcare content marketing pieces, it is important to write an attention-grabbing headline that will draw the target audience into your case study. Many headlines include the treatment used, the key benefit that the patient received and some tangible data.

When creating a case study, it is important to be factual. Do not shy away from including any failures or setbacks as they may increase your credibility. Highlight details that make your practice look trustworthy, without being too salesy. Put your patient in the spotlight and let his or her words show how amazing your services are.

Most important, format your case studies like other online content – make them bite-sized and scannable. As much as possible include subheads and bullet points, and highlight key data. Break the text wall with interesting graphs, screenshots and quotes.

Do not be afraid to experiment with formats. A lot of healthcare marketers present case studies as infographics and slideshows in addition to text format, audio and video. The format of your case study does not matter as long as you are telling a compelling story that your target audience will relate to.

Promoting Your Case Study

Once your case study is ready, the next step is to promote it. Your practice website and blog are obvious places to show off your case study, and you can do this in various ways:

• Write a small note that you have prepared a case study that highlights the benefits one of your patients received from your services. Post this note on your website.
• Write a summary or a synopsis of the case study that highlights the major portions of the case study.
• Publish your case study as a blog post, or gate the content, asking website or blog visitors to subscribe to your email in order to read the full case study.

You can also upload case studies on their separate landing pages and promote them to the patients they are most relevant to.

Case studies are great for offline lead generation because you can print them as handouts to give away at networking events. If done right, patient case studies can be a compelling healthcare marketing tool. Are you using them to promote your medical practice?

Want to learn more about online reputation management for doctors? Visit us at mypracticereputation.com or call us at Toll-Free: (844)544-4196.

Do you know what your potential and existing patients post about your new medical practice on the Internet? Well, you should. This is because what your target audience is writing about your practice online has a direct impact on your patient volume, revenue and online reputation. For instance, when you respond to a patient’s comment on social networks, you are getting involved in managing your brand’s online reputation.

In a nutshell, online reputation management means working to push negative or unfavorable results off the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your brand name or even doctors who work for your practice. Often, online reputation management is a second thought – something that is put into action once your practice has negative reviews online. And let us face the fact that it is not possible for any healthcare provider to please every single patient, all of the time. People are going to have bad experiences, and with a number of third-party review websites at their fingertips, they are not afraid to call you on the carpet.

So what should you do? You need to be proactive, and not reactive, about your online reputation management. The best way to manage your online reputation is by turning negative brand mentions into positive reviews. For instance, you can ask your existing patients to share their experiences about your practice with their friends on social networks, or you can ask patients to leave a positive review about your practice on a third-party review site. There are so many ways healthcare marketers can handle their online reputation, but the question is: Why should a startup medical practice focus more on reputation management? Why not improve patient engagement or initiate a healthcare marketing campaign to improve brand awareness? Why invest more on reputation management?

Here are three reasons to focus specifically on online reputation management:

1. Reputation Will Determine Your Success: In a time when patients’ trust in practices and doctors is anything but encouraging, online reputation is proving to be more valuable. Today’s cyberspace is an overcrowded room. Implementing healthcare marketing strategies to build and protect your online reputation is critical for any startup medical practice looking to thrive. The content that comes up on the first page of Google search will have an immense impact on a startup’s ability to attract patients and generate sales. By creating a positive online reputation, a startup medical practice can mitigate the risk of negative content impacting its brand image and set up the practice for long-term success.

No doubt, someday negative reviews will come to rain on your parade. This is when a stellar reputation will come to your rescue. You can use a good reputation as an insurance policy. Here, the best approach is to have an online presence that engages patients regularly, and not about appointments or when complaints and concerns complaints come knocking at your door. Start building a strong relationship with your patients by exchanging useful content. Respond to their comments and share relevant content that relates to your practice’s interest in social causes.

Showing that your brand serves a meaningful purpose will be crucial to building a positive online reputation. This is especially true as today’s patients demand that the healthcare providers they are consulting are working to forge a change in society.

If used properly, social networks can go a long way in generating patient interest and building a strong base. The same social networks that could knock you out with a post could also be your savior. This is because people are attributing emotional traits to a brand’s identity and have started describing brands or doctors as “cool” or “grumpy.” You can leverage social media to craft people’s perceptions of your brand. The rule of thumb is to keep your interactions with your followers similar to the preferences of your target audience. Share content that resonates with the personality of your practice. If you can get your target audience to love you for your human traits, they will be more likely to forgive and forget when you slip up.

2. Reputation Will Help Generate Revenue: What is the biggest challenge that your startup medical practice is facing? If your answer is attracting new patients and generating sales, you need reputation management to improve your bottom line. Improving sales is the most powerful reason why your new practice should focus on reputation management. Nothing is more important than attracting more patients and generating sales, right?

Online reputation management has a significant impact on your revenue. According to a study by Moz, when a potential customer finds a negative article about a brand online, the brand risks losing 22 percent of its customers. For most potential customers, positive reviews help them trust a local business. What will happen if a potential patient runs an online query about your practice and sees no results or all negative reviews? This is where reputation management rescues your new medical practice.

It does not hurt to request that your patients post a positive review on a third-party review website, Google Maps or any social media platform so your target audience will be able to find positive reviews about your startup. However, this does not end here. It is important to manage and respond to all the negative online reviews, as well. If a patient posted a negative comment, reach out to him or her, offer help and try to get the issue resolved. This will send positive signals to potential patients and people who are reading the online conversation about your medical practice – that you care and will never leave patients to deal with issues all alone.

3. Reputation Will Help You Serve Patients Better: From the first moment of engagement with your practice, the patient experience begins. From what is read online in reviews and social networks to any interactions that occur with your staff, your patient experience influences their perception of your brand. Their perception forms your reputation, which further influences word-of-mouth referrals. One happy patient will bring many more new referrals to your practice. Focusing on your patients will help you build a strong online reputation. By replying to unhappy patients, you will show that your brand is willing to invest the time and effort to address patients’ needs. Managing your online reputation through patient feedback will help you enhance the patient experience, improve your products and services, and boost sales.

The equation is simple

When a potential patient sees something negative about your practice on the Internet, he or she will not schedule an appointment with you. However, when the same patient sees something positive written about your services, he or she will trust you.

The idea here is to suppress negative reviews about your startup medical practice in a way that when potential patients search for your brand name, they read nothing but positive reviews and experiences.

There are many ways to manage negative content regarding your new practice:

1. Join the online conversation.
2. Highlight your positive aspects.
3. Contact the patient who posted the negative review and offer help.

Here is the deal

You need to regularly scan the Internet for the negative comments related to your brand name because a lot of people will not tag you on social networks. This is an easy way to deal with negative online comments.

You cannot get rid of all of the negative content about your startup. So it makes sense to focus only on what you can control – positive reviews and constructive feedback.

Encourage your existing patients to share your posts with their family and friends on social networks and ask them to post reviews on various third-party review sites. You can reach out to satisfied patients through emails and phone calls and ask them to share their experiences in the form of an online review.

The best thing about online reputation management is that it will make your startup medical practice look trustworthy and credible to the target audience. The more time you invest in reputation management, the better the rewards it will reap for your practice.

Want to learn more about online reputation management for doctors? Visit us at mypracticereputation.com or call us at Toll-Free: (844)544-4196.

Word-of-mouth travels fast, and with so many healthcare practices under fire for not putting their patients first, it is increasingly apparent how much patients value a patient-centric medical practice. Patients are quick to leave a practice if they believe their needs are not a priority.

Building a good online reputation is important for any medical practice to succeed, but in order to improve and maintain that reputation, a practice has to be patient-centric at its core – not as an afterthought. In addition, when practices succeed at putting patients first, patients are more likely to recommend and stay with a practice longer.

Why Patient Centricity Is Important

Many reasons motivate medical professionals to start a new healthcare practice: passion, money, dedication and fame. However, regardless of the motivation behind setting up a medical practice, there is an aspect that is common to all medical practice owners: If you do not acquire and retain patients, you will not survive.

And, from this simple answer, you can derive the importance of being patient-centric as an entity. A medical practice that ignores its patients is destined to fail. Such as practice will offer the wrong products and services, hire the wrong employees and lose reputation in the market.

A patient-centric practice proves the opposite case. Every staff listens to patients and is aligned with that goal. In turn, the practice offers services that meet patient needs, anticipates patient demands and provides a level of service that keeps patients coming through the door and recommending the brand.

So, how do you keep up with this modern marketing challenge? By becoming patient-centric.

Patient-Focused or Patient-Centric?

A patient-focused strategy is critical, but patient centricity is even more important. A patient-centric practice is one that enables a good patient experience before, during and long after the appointment. It is one that puts the patient first, no matter what, and it is a brand that is empathetic, trustworthy and respectful. It is something that is felt in the practice’s culture – at the front desk, in marketing, and from the patient engagement team.

Beyond that, a patient-centric practice’s stellar reputation is likely to bring in new patients because people are more willing to visit a practice they believe will treat them well and personalize their experience. According to Forrester, 77 percent of customers chose, recommended and paid more for a brand that provides a personalized experience.

Understanding the definition of a patient-centric practice is one thing. But applying it and gauging the patient centricity of your practice is a different ballgame altogether. Here are three questions to ask yourself to see just how patient-centric your practice is:

Question #1: How well do you know your patients?

Are your patients happy? Understanding your patients can take time, but they are a store of valuable information that can be used to improve your practice as well as its patient satisfaction score. In order to be a patient-centric practice, it is essential to create a space for patients to voice their thoughts and opinions. It is even more important to listen to what your patients want. Online surveys can help you understand your patients’ needs and demands. Online communities will allow your patients to not only engage with one another but also with your practice. You can get to know your patients through online surveys because they are an easy way to check on your practice’s patient satisfaction score and understand your patients’ pain points.

Question #2: How well do you support your patients’ needs?

Once you know your patients, you can focus on better serving them and, as a result, improving your overall reputation as well as the bottom line. One way to support your patients’ needs is proactive patient engagement; reaching out first promotes meaningful patient relationships. It is your chance to learn what matters to your patients and how you can focus on their top concerns. Chat and messages enable practices to reach out first with personalized messages to patients on mobile devices. You can use chats and messages to greet patients, offer help before they ask and provide information they might not even know they need.

Question #3: Do you empower your staff to support your patients?

Understanding and supporting your patients is key to being a patient-centric practice, yet it is equally important to empower your staff. The best way to empower your staff is to equip them with the right knowledge and training. Just as patients are sources of valuable insight for your improvement, so are your employees. The right tools and trainings can enable your staff to provide competent and quick assistance to your patients.

Being a patient-centric practice is no small task, but it is worth the time and effort spent to get there. Getting to know your patients enables your practice to support their needs and improve your practice’s reputation – and a happy patient means improved word-of-mouth, more patients and a healthy bottom line.

Steps to Transition to a Patient-Centric Practice

Learning how to be patient-centric sounds good. But if you are an established practice with partial data, lack of patient knowledge and an organizational culture that rewards generating more revenue over meeting the needs of your patients, then you have quite a job to do.

While many practices have personas of their ideal patients, few use them with consistency. If you are one of those practices, you need to build personas based on actual patient interactions and experiences. Make them simple enough that everyone in your practice can understand and remember them.

1. Demonstrate What Great Patient Service Can Achieve: It is important to demonstrate to your team how building a patient-centric culture will help the practice achieve its goals. Your team will benefit from hearing how great patient service can affect the revenue, retention and practice’s potential to thrive. You can base this conversation on why a memorable patient experience is important to your team, your culture and your mission.
2. Make Patient Satisfaction a Priority: When you put your patients ahead of everything else, you are opting for the most crucial stakeholder in your business – patients. This is because patients pay your salaries and bring you revenue. Your staff must understand that he or she will be appreciated for putting other tasks on the back burner just to ensure patients’ experience. This also means that you need to empower your staff and give them the necessary training and authority to help them make the best decisions for your patients.
3. Hold Employees Accountable for Patient Experience: If no one knows who is responsible for improving patient experience, this means no one is. Because a patient’s experience spans across various departments, each employee needs to be accountable for ensuring a pleasant experience. In addition, patient experience needs to be a factor in all your decisions – from your vendors to the emails you send to patients to remind them of their upcoming appointments. Your staff must be willing to go the extra mile for your patients and understand that every employee has a stake in it.
4. Reward Employees for Ensuring Patient Satisfaction: In order to become a patient-centric practice, every aspect of your business should be aligned with the sole purpose of creating an optimal patient experience. For this to materialize, you must hire and train a motivated team that sees personal gains in ensuring patient satisfaction. Forward-thinking practices achieve this by linking employee incentives with patient satisfaction. You can consider rewarding employees who go the extra mile in resolving patient issues and delighting them.
5. Hire and Fire for the Patients: The process of creating a patient-centric culture in your practice starts with hiring the right employees and setting the right expectations. Any new employee joining your practice should understand the emphasis you put on patient satisfaction. Patient centricity is a core value of your practice, and your staff should be aligned with it. You will be better off without individuals who do not believe in your practice’s core values.

Conclusion

The shift toward becoming a patient-centric practice is both complicated and tedious, but do not be discouraged by this as even the smallest changes to processes can have a significant impact on both employees and patients.

Being a patient-centric practice is the Holy Grail toward unlocking the true potential of patient value. Always try to put yourself in your patient’s shoes – minimize the patient’s efforts and maximize value.

So, do you consider yourself a patient-centric medical practice?

Want to learn more about online reputation management for medical practice? Visit us at mypracticereputation.com or call us at Toll-Free: (844)544-4196.

If your medical practice has a website, it needs visitors. The more, the merrier. More traffic will translate to more online visibility and an improved bottom line. However, high but random traffic will not add much value to your website or its content. Therefore, your focus should be on driving the right traffic, consisting of potential patients who can contribute to the growth of your practice. But let’s face it, attracting the right traffic can be a very tiring and testing job. And because this is the first step in the process of generating qualified leads, it is important to do it right.

Organic traffic on your website is an important indicator of your practice’s growth. It can help you to see how well your marketing campaigns are working, gather insight about your target audience to make strategic decisions, improve your SEO strategies and search engine credibility, generate qualified leads and improve conversions.

How to Attract Website Visitors

If you already have a website, you have perhaps tried the usual tactics like content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) to increase your website traffic. These tricks often work well, but sometimes no amount of marketing can help increase traffic if your website is poorly designed. However, if your website is built professionally and is optimized for conversions, getting a jump in online traffic could mean more patients and more profits. In order to help you increase your website traffic, we have put together a list of five proven tactics.

1. Revamp your website: A basic, nonappealing website is not going to attract your target patients for a long time. You will need to ensure that the content on your website is geared toward attracting and engaging your target audience. The terminology and vocabulary provided in your marketing materials must be available on your website. Visitors who are looking for a high-end experience will not be very impressed if your website is slow to load or has technical issues.
2. Use SEO to help searchers find your website: Can potential patients find your website easily? When patients search for healthcare practitioners online, you want your practice to be one of the top results for that search, especially since one-third of all clicks go to the first three organic results on Google. The top position is a key component for generating sustained and qualified traffic to your website. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of refining your website to improve its chances of ranking highly in search results for relevant keywords.
3. Share useful content: Most visitors do not even have time to read dense content. If your website content consists of long sentences that are difficult to comprehend, not many visitors are going to stick around. One of the biggest reasons for visitors leaving a website is that the content is boring or difficult to consume. Be sure to avoid thick blocks of content. In order to make your content easier to read, make sure the font size and line spacing are sufficient. Increasing the font size and line spacing on your website can give a significant boost to your customer engagement levels. The heading and subheadings also play a key role in maintaining your readers’ engagement levels.
4. Create effective calls to action (CTAs): CTAs are triggers for your website visitors to perform the desired actions. CTAs, if used properly, can boost your patient engagement rate. The best ways to create compelling CTAs are to use the right language and place them strategically. The best time to request your visitors to take the desired action is after they have finished reading through your content. A strategically placed CTA might give your website visitors a reason to explore your website longer.
5. Start a blog: Blogging can add fresh content to your website on a regular basis and help with SEO. Consistently posting fresh content on your blog shows that you know your business well and are trying to keep your patients engaged. On your website, you may also provide information about general procedures, share healthcare tips, announce discounts and provide updates about your practice. You can promote your blog using social media and use it to engage with existing and potential patients.

Best Practices for Engaging Your Website Visitors

Having a beautiful website goes beyond a fancy design. A pretty website may impress your visitors, but if that is all you have to offer, you may not get the best return on investment. Your website must serve as a marketing platform for your medical practice and convert visitors into patients. On top on it, with such intense competition in the healthcare market, it is critical for your website to override your competition and help you stay ahead of the pack.

Healthcare marketers understand the importance of having an attractive website and getting regular traffic. However, gaining traffic is only half the battle. The challenge is making your potential patients stay on your website long enough to find out more about your services and, even better, schedule an appointment. Patient engagement is a critical metric in determining the effectiveness of your website. The longer you are able to keep visitors around, the more invested they will be in your practice, and the more likely they are to schedule an appointment with you.

Engaging visitors and converting them into potential patients requires a strategic approach. It merely takes a few seconds for a visitor to decide if he or she wants to continue browsing your website or move on to your competitors’ website. If, in those few seconds, your visitors are not convinced with the range and quality of your services, they will leave your website. So, is your website capable of engaging and retaining potential patients? Here are some best practices that will help you build a website that not only attracts visitors but also engages them:

1. Highlight your unique value proposition (USP): Use compelling language to convince potential patients how your service will address their health problems. What features make your practice or staff better than your competitors? If you can get your visitors convinced about your practice and make them schedule an appointment, you will see your conversion rate improve.
2. Establish credibility: Potential patients are less likely to enter their contact information if they are concerned your website is not trustworthy. You must communicate your trustworthiness by displaying security badges and patient testimonials on your website. You can also highlight security measures and precautions taken in your privacy policy. Make sure your contact details are easy to locate so that visitors know they are interacting with a trusted brand.
3. Improve website speed: If your website takes longer than five seconds to load, it can frustrate your visitors and may give them a reason to quit. In order to increase your website’s loading speed, consider removing nonessential videos and large images that may be taking the time to load. Compressing the images will also help reduce the page load time.
4. Simplify the contact form: Contact forms should collect the minimum information required to communicate with potential patients. Ideally, your contact form should only have four fields – name, email, phone number and comments. Any forms containing additional fields will reduce conversion rates. If possible, make the contact form accessible on all pages. Placing the contact form in a prominent place is a popular tactic for maximizing the conversion rate.
5. Include video content: Video clips can add a human element to your website in an appealing manner. In order to get the best results, keep your videos under two minutes long and capture some great visuals of your practice, staff and services. You can also create patients’ testimonials in the form of videos.
6. Display patient reviews: Patient reviews can be one of the most popular sections of your website because a lot of potential and existing patients will take an interest in reading them. Including reviews and testimonials on your website will not only enhance your credibility but will also increase conversions.
7. Upload actual pictures of your products and services: In order to increase the effectiveness of your website, real images can work wonders. You can upload photos of your office, waiting rooms or other services. Picture of a neat flower arrangement in the waiting room can add a pleasant touch. Pictures will help potential patients connect with your staff and convert at a higher rate. However, do consider HIPAA laws and regulations regarding patients’ privacy before uploading pictures.
8. Make your website responsive: With more and more people using mobile devices to access the Internet anytime and anywhere, a nonresponsive website may hinder user experience. A responsive website will provide an optimal viewing experience by making the interaction comfortable since the interface will become easier to read.

Conclusion

These are only some of the many tips and tricks you can use to drive traffic to your medical practice website. Getting more visitors to your website will not happen overnight. It takes months of hard work and dedication. Just implement a mix of these proven healthcare marketing strategies and you will start seeing a jump in your website traffic.

“It takes seven interactions with your brand for a potential customer to remember you and make a purchase.” (Dr. Jeffrey Lant, Rule of Seven for Advertisers)

Applying this principle to your email marketing campaign is easy. Every email interaction you have with your subscribers should stay consistent with the rest of your digital marketing efforts in order to reinforce your brand identity.

Did you know email marketing can also help you create and improve your brand awareness? It is a relatively low-cost channel compared with other digital marketing channels. The best part is that email marketing campaign results are almost immediate and fully trackable when compared with other marketing tools and strategies.

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels to attract new leads and engage existing patients. What makes email marketing so effective is the fact that it helps you communicate to an engaged target audience that has already signed up to receive your emails. They are already becoming familiar with your brand through their inbox. Your subscribers do not have to look for your practice on search engines in order to stay updated, and you do not have to spend precious marketing dollars to lure them to your practice. It is a win-win!

Email marketing is an effective way to market your unique products and services and get the word out about your practice. This marketing tool can help you deliver informative content to your existing and potential patients, at their own convenience. Emails also help instill the loyalty and trust of your target audience in your practice. With an email marketing campaign, you can build and strengthen long-term relationships with potential and existing patients as it gives you a chance to speak directly to them.

Emails That Improve Your Brand Image

Developing a strong healthcare brand is essential to your success. Not only does effective branding differentiate your practice from competitors, but it also helps establish trust and loyalty with potential and existing patients. In order to build a strong brand, you need to represent your brand consistently in all your digital marketing efforts, including email campaigns. Here are five email marketing tips to help you increase brand awareness as well as optimize the patient journey:

1. Make your brand stand out: In order to establish a brand image through email marketing, it is important to make your brand stand out in the emails you send. If you want to make your emails consistent with your brand, consider adding your logo to the newsletters you send. This will make your practice easily identifiable to users and build brand awareness around it. Recent studies indicate that when the logo is at the top left of the page. This will significantly improve the brand recall value. In countries where people read from left to right, left of the page is where a reader’s eyes first settle and seeing your logo there will help them identify your brand.

For your routine email communications with patients, make sure your email signature features your logo. This will spread awareness about your brand and you can use the opportunity to link it to your website content or latest offers.

Other crucial things to consider in your emails are font and colors. You will likely have a color that is associated with your brand already. Regarding the font, make sure it is easy-to-read and professional. You can choose the same font that you use on your website or for other marketing collateral materials.

2. Consistency is important: If you wish to give your patients valuable content experience and increase your brand awareness, then being consistent with your emails will be your best step forward. If you can gain the trust of your subscribers, it can help you have a lifelong relationship with them. This, in turn, will not only take your brand awareness to the next level but will also help boost your revenue.

From the frequency of your email to its delivery schedule and formatting, everything should be consistent. It will work wonders toward giving your subscribers a unique brand experience and increase the chances that they transform from prospects into your loyal patients. Your brand’s overall look should resonate throughout the email, making it easy for patients to identify your brand from start to finish. Consistency is key – both for building brand awareness and for creating emails that your recipients can associate with your practice. You can use email templates to make all your emails look familiar to your readers. With a consistent template, subscribers will know where they can find their favorite content, making it easy for them to browse through your emails quickly.

3. Provide value with your content: The content of your emails is an important aspect, and a strategy must be planned in advance. The content should be aligned with the type or nature of email that is being sent to the subscriber. For instance, if you are nurturing a lead, the content would differ from the one that is included in the welcome email.

It would help if you deliver relevant and valuable content to your subscribers and not merely send emails asking them to book their next appointment. You must know the needs and wants of your target audience as this would help you improve your interaction with them. The content must be crisp and concise so that the reader gets complete information at one glance.

You can leverage emails for sending insightful content related to your industry, staff information, latest discounts, new treatments added, etc. You can take your brand awareness to the next level by organizing informational sessions, free health camps and webinars, and send the invites for them. It would make them value your brand while increasing engagement levels.

The subject line should convey the intent of the email. Keep it attractive and simple. Overall, the content should add value to the subscribers’ experience and provide insights about your brand.

4. Pay attention to personalization and segmentation: The number of emails sent and received per day has crossed 281.1 billion in 2018. Making your email marketing campaigns stand out amid such staggering figures is an uphill task. This is where personalization and segmentation can play a role. If you wish to establish your brand awareness and get an edge over competitors, make segmentation and personalization a priority.

Segmentation is nothing but dividing your subscribers based on age, gender, demography, recent history, buying behavior and sales funnel position. This process makes it easy to target potential patients with a personalized approach. From personalizing the subject line to sending trigger emails, you can adopt a host of strategies to make your email campaigns attractive and effective.

Pay attention to what resonates well with your subscribers. Gather the relevant data through surveys and analytics. The best way to keep your subscribers engaged is by providing solutions to their problems and addressing their pain points. Once you know your target audience’s preferences, you can create emails that bolster your brand’s awareness. Segmentation will increase email open rates, decrease drop-off and strengthen confidence in your brand. There is also a greater chance of subscribers sharing your content with others.

When possible, add some personal elements to your emails, such as personalized greetings, offers, consultations, health tips, etc. Showing the human side of your brand is important. You could consider adding a call to action (CTA) asking subscribers to get in touch if they have any concerns or questions. The more your email is personalized, the more they will appreciate your brand.

5. Include strong CTAs: No doubt your email content is important. Segmented and personalized content can even increase your open and click-through rates. But what next? You can increase brand awareness by prompting the subscriber to take further action. That is why it is important to have a strong and effective CTA for enhancing the reader’s experience while establishing your brand image. However, be sure to use a single (but strong) CTA in your email while making the intent and results of that CTA clear. This will help retain the subscriber’s attention and encourage him or her to drive through the next level of the patient journey.

Final thoughts

Email marketing continues to be the fastest way to get in front of your potential and existing patients. It is an opportunity to reinforce your brand. The more consistent you are in your approach, the more likely subscribers are to remember and trust your practice. There are many ways to build great relationships between your practice and patients, and email marketing is one of them. It is convenient and cost-effective, and it works.

Building brand awareness with email marketing is not an uphill task as long as you employ the right strategies to achieve your goals. However, developing a trusted brand takes time. You may not be able to apply all of these tips right away. Start small, and keep in mind that the more consistently you convey your brand across all your marketing touch points, the more recognizable you will become, and the more likely your target audience will be to engage with your brand. Just incorporate the tips mentioned above within your email healthcare marketing campaigns and see how you emerge a winner in the long run.

With more than 326 million monthly active users, Twitter has proved to be a great healthcare marketing tool for medical practices, especially small practices. If you implement Twitter strategically in your overall healthcare marketing plan, it will help you engage with your patients, increase your reach, improve your brand image and generate qualified leads.

Regardless of the size and specialty of your practice, you can use Twitter to find your target audience and make a strong connection with them. These connections will help you create an entire network of loyal patients for your practice.

With 85 percent of small and medium businesses using Twitter to provide customer service, there is an immense opportunity for healthcare practitioners to make the most of this free and effective marketing tool. If you post the right images and share the right content, your potential and existing patients will soak up your message without any strategic marketing efforts. Twitter could be the magic spell for attracting potential patients and growing your practice without sounding pushy. This social media platform can play an integral role in converting passive patients into loyal and paying patients.

How Is Twitter Different From Other Social Networks?

Your approach to every social networking site should be different. For instance, your Twitter marketing strategy should not be the same as your Facebook or LinkedIn marketing plans. Understanding how Twitter works and where it can fit in your social media marketing strategy will shape the way you use it.

The fast-paced nature of this social networking platform helps businesses communicate with their target audience who are overwhelmed by short attention spans. Twitter is like a marketing pitch for your brand – an effective way of getting your point across quickly, connecting yourself with a wider audience and achieving some great PR for your practice.

According to Forrester, for every 1 million followers on Twitter, businesses can expect nearly 300 interactions. Twitter thrives off effective communication. Most healthcare brands post one-dimensional tweets, which are just broadcasts. Being more conversational and posting interesting updates will yield higher engagement, which is likely to result in increased activity for your Twitter account. In addition, being responsive and replying could result in new patients.

However, it is important to post meaningful posts. Your Tweets should not just consist of inspirational quotes, headlines with a link or funny statements. They should open the door for effective two-way communication with your target audience.

Why Market Your Practice on Twitter?

When it comes to patient engagement, Twitter is at par with, if not better than, all other social networks. No wonder so many famous healthcare brands have an active presence on this platform. Because your target audience is on Twitter, you should be there, as well. Twitter is an efficient way to promote your practice in front of thousands of potential patients – even if you are running a small setup.

Cost

Twitter is a free social media platform unless you opt for paid ads. Twitter Ads let you build a tailored campaign around your practice goals, budget and target audience. With flexible management options, Twitter ads give you the power to promote content, drive traffic to your practice website and attract new followers.

Usage

Twitter supports more than 40 languages. This could be the reason that only 69 million of those 326 million monthly active users are located in the US, while 257 million are international users. According to reports, nearly 21 percent of American adults use Twitter. In addition, 36 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 use Twitter. Even Twitter admits that 80 percent of its users are millennials.

Engagement

If you are looking to target audiences who are willing to engage with your posts, Twitter is your place. According to published stats, a day’s worth of tweets can fill a 10 million-page book. According to Twitter’s spokesperson, the platform’s overall ad engagements increased 99 percent year-over-year in Q3 2017. However, healthcare marketers must create content that can drive views and engagement on Twitter.

Advertising

Twitter advertising is all about increasing your brand awareness. According to reports, engagement rates for Twitter ad campaigns grew by 151 percent last year, mostly due to the popularity of video ads. The beauty of Twitter ads is they are not annoying. Most of the ads are scrollable and integrated into the feeds of followers. Twitter confirmed that 41 percent of its users purchased a product within 30 days after exposure to an ad.

How Can You Attract More Patients on Twitter?

Twitter is a great way to get your practice in front of thousands of potential and existing patients. The world of healthcare marketing is changing at the speed of light, and almost every day we hear of new strategies that require less time, yet produce amazing results. One of the best ways to make your medical practice stand out is by promoting the treatments or services that make you unique.

So, how can healthcare marketers make the most out of this platform to drive patients to their practice? Here are some tips to attract more patients:

1. Make use of Twitter chats: Twitter chats are an excellent way to gain exposure, grow your followers and engage with your target audience. The reason Twitter chats are so effective is because users who participate in them are usually the ones who enjoy actively engaging on social networks. These types of people will reply to your tweets, retweet your content and spread your message. In order to be more successful with Twitter chats, you must be more than a receiver or a spectator. You must add value to the conversation and make your brand stand out.
2. Get listed in Twitter directories: Apart from helping you increase brand visibility, Twitter directories make it easy for you to find influential people in your industry and connect with potential patients. Some of the top Twitter directories include Wefollow, TweetFind and Twellow. Using directories, you can easily find potential patients based on categories. You can be listed for free on most of these directories and get more exposure without having to spend money.
3. Attract relevant followers: Attracting followers is one thing, but attracting the relevant ones is a different game altogether. Followers “relevant” to your practice can be defined as people who are interested in your services and like what you post. Such people are not just potential patients but they can also be likely promoters of your practice. Relevant followers can help spread the word about your practice or services either through word-of-mouth or their social media accounts. You can get quality followers by finding people who are considered leaders or authorities in your industry. You can also search for people who share the same interests.
4. Hashtags are critical: Hashtags are essential for your tweets as they allow potential patients to find you even if they have never heard of your practice before. In addition, hashtags let you reach a wider target audience by increasing your content exposure. One of the most effective ways to include hashtags is to see what your competitors are using. You will know what is working by observing the level of patient engagement your competitors are generating.
5. Host contests: Contests are a proven way to get your followers involved in your tweets while making them interactive. Hosting contests will create buzz around your practice and this will have a significant impact on increasing your practice’s followership. You can host contests such as “Share this post to win a free consultation…” The information that you will gather from these contents will allow you to analyze patient engagement levels and the best time to tweet.
6. Include visuals in your blog posts: Twitter is one of the fastest-growing social networking platforms to drive new eyeballs to your blog posts. You can consider using text-based images that highlight key points in your content. Alternatively, you can consider complementing your content with an illustration. This is an excellent way to drive traffic and improve your SEO ranking.

Wrapping Up

Regardless of the size and location of your practice, Twitter is an effective channel for promoting your practice. Healthcare brands all across the world are utilizing graphics and videos to increase their online visibility and connecting with the target audience. By following the tips discussed above, you can develop a strategy for including Twitter in your healthcare marketing plan.

The social media marketing experts at myPracticeReputation can help you get started on Twitter marketing. Contact us to learn about our social media marketing services and how we can help you grow your medical practice.

There is something about patient psychology. Most patients would love to see social proof of your practice’s credibility before they schedule an appointment. According to a study by Nielsen, nearly 92 percent of potential customers trust a recommendation from a friend, and almost 70 percent of potential customers will trust a recommendation from someone they do not even know. That’s the power of reviews, recommendations and customer testimonials. This is the reason an increasing number of healthcare practice owners and marketers are focused on building a positive brand experience by displaying and promoting positive reviews.

Online reviews are both exciting and intimidating. While a positive review is a strong form of social proof, a negative review can leave you fighting negative publicity. Today’s patients are tech-savvy and resourceful. When researching online for a healthcare practice or provider, they reference all of the information they have at their disposal. However, there is one thing most searchers pay more attention to than the rest: online reviews. Here are some stats to prove this point:

• 88 percent of potential customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
• Customers spend 31 percent more with a brand with “excellent” reviews.
• Four out of 20 potential customers form an opinion about a brand after reading up to three reviews.

(Source: Capterra)

Customer reviews matter because they are considered a solid and unbiased piece of information in a world that is characterized by biased and paid forms of media. And with over 85 percent of customers relying on online reviews and testimonials when researching local businesses, it is important to include social proof in your healthcare marketing strategy. By including online patient reviews in your marketing strategy, you will be able to use storytelling techniques through your own patients’ experiences.

In addition, merely telling potential patients that your practice is the best will not make them visit your office. However, hearing the same feedback from your existing patients might make potential patients consider your practice. So if you have not been thinking of incorporating patient reviews into your healthcare marketing strategy, now is your chance. You must strategically utilize patient reviews and show the potential patient how great your practice is.

Ways to Promote Patient Reviews

If you think patient testimonials are only meant to be shown on the homepage of your practice website, you are losing the competitive edge. A lot of healthcare practices these days are using patient reviews and testimonials in the most unconventional places to strengthen their marketing efforts.

Sharing your patients’ positive experiences on your website, blogs, case studies and social media posts will help prove how you deliver on your promises to your patients. A positive review might bring to you what other marketing activities will not.

Patient reviews can provide value in the different stages of the patient journey. Here are some ways healthcare marketers can leverage patient reviews to draw interest from potential patients and grow their practice:

In email campaigns: Emails are often the first line of marketing strategy and are a great opportunity to use patient reviews to ease potentials into the buying cycle. This can be done by including a link to a third-party review website at the end of the message or including words from the review in the subject title. Some healthcare marketers may choose to utilize links to patient reviews in their email signatures so that the recipient can read those reviews. You can send targeted emails with relevant reviews that focus on specific services. Patient reviews and testimonials are the perfect tools you need to drive your return on investment.

Host third-party reviews on your practice website: You can add links to patient reviews and testimonials that are appearing on third-party review sites on your practice website. Choose the reviews that talk about the benefits of your staff and services. Embedding review quotes is an easy way of proving that your services are liked by your patients. And if the review mentions how your brand measures up against your competitors, you have hit gold. Such reviews must be placed prominently on your website.

Create case studies: Another great use of customer reviews is in case studies. Case studies with patient reviews can help your practice immensely by highlighting your success. You can depict how your products or services assisted a patient in turning his life around. While writing a case study, focus on one patient problem that your service solved uniquely. Marketing teams create most case studies, and handpicking patients to highlight your success can be a challenge. However, by asking those who have already written positive reviews of your practice, you can easily get patients for a case study. Case studies are powerful weapons in every healthcare marketer’s arsenal. Considering the gradual transition of a potential patient in a buyer’s journey, case studies can be highly effective in influencing those on the fence and brand building.

Use in infographics: Infographics are one of the most effective pieces of marketing collateral because they quickly highlight key areas of a solution for your potential patients. You can try mixing in quotes from reviews that emphasize your skills or products to drive home the point that your marketing team is making. Aside from facts, figures, charts and statistics, incorporating patient reviews in infographics can empower your marketing team by adding credence to your claims and may help potential patients make the right decision.

Incorporate reviews in blogs:  Blog posts and positive patient reviews make a super-effective combination. Imagine a first-time prospect who lands on your practice website through your blog. If your blog is resonating enough for your visitors, the patient testimonials can act as icing on the cake. However, respect patient experience and do not be intrusive. In order to create a good patient experience, you can place the reviews on the sidebar rather than in the middle of content. In addition, if you want to display multiple reviews, use a carousel widget to display more than one review.

On social media posts: Using the power of patient reviews should not be limited to your website or email campaigns alone. You can also use reviews for your social media campaign to promote your brand and services. Many healthcare brands have used patient reviews on their social networking pages to drive traction and generate quality leads. If social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are relevant to your practice, you must share the testimonials with your followers. This will not only improve your reputation but will also help you attract new patients. However, while sharing patient reviews, keep HIPAA guidelines in mind.

On your website’s landing pages: About Us, Home, Services and Contact Us are some of the most prominent pages on your website that drive sales and boost conversions. In fact, by placing positive reviews directly on your website strategically, you could tilt the prospect’s decision in your favor.  However, do not add patient testimonials to just about every page. Be very precise in picking the right page to showcase testimonials. When used in the right manner, testimonials can make your Contact Us page powerful and may help you generate a higher number of inquiries.

Next to calls to action (CTAs): CTAs are arguably the most effective tool in your marketing mix. They prompt a prospect to take the desired action and help you strengthen your lead-generation campaign. While CATs are a tried-and-tested winning formula, they can work even better when combined with patient testimonials. For instance, if you want to encourage your visitors to download an ebook or white paper, you can place reviews of those who may already have done so and benefited from the contents. All you have to do is make sure the testimonial is contextually relevant to your CTAs.

Final Thoughts

Patient testimonials are the most valuable marketing assets a brand can have. When used correctly, you can achieve optimum ROI, drive sales and improve conversion rates. Just remember to use them intelligently, not to go overboard with them and combine them smartly in the right context.