BLOG: Are you marketing your reputation or just managing it?
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For the purposes of this post, reputation refers both to the practice and the doctors. Unfortunately, by the looks of search results, most practices and doctors are not doing much to manage their reputations and even less to market them.
Why is reputation a critical marketing process? Your practice is based on as much as 80% word-of-mouth referrals, so who cares what those review sites have on them? (Aren’t they rigged anyway?) But if you take a moment to question your patients, you will find, as many studies have found, that when a doctor is recommended to a friend, the friend will still look up the doctor’s online reputation before they make an appointment.
In the old days before social media, doctors would be approached by their friendly Yellow Pages rep to pay for a quarter-page (or larger) ad because “all of your competitors are doing it and you don’t want to get left behind.” Then it was a race to see who had the biggest (and most) ads. Not much of a reputation strategy, is it?
Well, nobody uses the print Yellow Pages anymore, so now we doctors are being called on by Yelp and RateMDs reps to pay for a listing. Funny, they’re using the same line the Yellow Pages reps used: “You need to keep up with your competitors.” Of course, it is important to be listed on all of the major physician review sites and directories as well as the top local directories. And for an extra fee, you can get a premium account, which gets you a preferred listing. But, at best, you are still merely managing your reputation. Newer technology, but still not a growth strategy.
That’s because managing your reputation is required but insufficient. Why? Because if nobody knows you have good reviews, then you are squandering an opportunity. You are relying on a prospective patient actively seeking you out on specific review sites. As your listings grow and as you build reviews, you will get the benefit of rising in the search rankings, but you need to be doing more proactive and outbound reputation marketing to really show prospects your five-star status.
So, how do you turn your online reviews into a reputation marketing strategy? By having a process that collects great reviews and then uses them in different formats as media assets that become part of your marketing messages.
Have you heard the saying that one unhappy patient tells 11 others? Well, that was before online reviews and social media. Now, one unhappy person posts a one-star rating on a review site and posts their poor experience on Facebook where it is seen by everyone visiting your profile and shared with hundreds of their friends. By the way, the average person has approximately 200 friends and followers. (Remember this statistic. There is a post coming that will teach you how to use that to leverage free promotion for you and your practice.)
Sadly, most satisfied patients don’t take the time to post a favorable review because once they get home they get busy with other things and their wonderful patient experience is no longer top of mind.
What if you had a process in place for encouraging five-star reviews as soon as patients are wowed by your service? What if you had a process that took those five-star reviews and turned them into marketing assets? Here’s a list of assets you can have your graphics and media people produce:
Put a five-star review on a social cover — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google My Business, etc.
Make a digital post or digital ad with a review and post the image on your social networks.
Take a couple of digital review ads and insert them in your monthly newsletter.
Make a video showcasing the review — quote it in the video, maybe with a professional voiceover. Post it on social and video sites.
Create an on-hold audio snippet with two or three reviews recorded, something like “Here are a couple of reviews that our latest LASIK patients left: Read review 1. Read review 2.”
Your call to action: Many of you have purchased reputation management services. Now it’s time to implement reputation marketing processes.
Later on we will discuss the nuances between reputation and reviews and how they fit together in your comprehensive marketing strategy.
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