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Top 3 Ways to Optimize Patient Reviews for Healthcare Marketing
In the age of healthcare consumerism, patients view their medical care as a personal interaction and not as a medical transaction. Here’s why.
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
When done right, online reviews can be a highly effective strategic tool to establish your company as an industry leader. Here are the top 3 ways to optimize customer reviews for healthcare.
In the age of healthcare consumerism, patients view their medical care as a personal interaction and not as a medical transaction. With 75% of consumers spending time researching doctors and medical providers online before making their first appointment, online reviews are a key component of the decision-making process. As such, healthcare providers must invest in the patient journey to ensure that new and returning patients are getting the level of care and customer service they expect.
According to the healthcare marketing experts at Response Mine Health, here are three must-dos when it comes to strategically leveraging online reviews to attract new patients.
Keep Them Up-to-Date.
Having online reviews is a great way to showcase your company’s credibility and dedication to providing superior service. However, when your reviews are out of date (more than a year old), this can be off-putting to new patients looking for care now. For example, if the last review posted was from 2017, patients may question what has occurred since then.
Your online reviews should be used to affirm why you are the right choice for their healthcare needs and having recent reviews helps to illustrate why you are a top provider. If possible, be sure to encourage patients to share their experiences with your organization, following every patient visit.
Have a Variety of Reviews.
If you offer a wide variety of services, it is always best to have reviews that reflect each type of service you provide. Since new patients are likely to thoroughly read through your reviews, being able to showcase your services and the level of care you consistently provide can be a great way to market your service offerings.
Taking time to audit your reviews every quarter is important as well. If you find that some services have not been reviewed in the past 6 months, reaching out to former or current patients for a review can be a good idea to make your reviews accurately reflect your wide range of services.
Make Them Accessible.
Having reviews is only useful if prospective patients can find them during their initial online research. If you collect reviews while patients are in the office, be sure that they are uploaded online in a timely manner. And, with nearly 70% of all patients acknowledging that positive patient reviews are extremely important when choosing a new healthcare provider, getting your reviews online where they can be seen should be a top priority.
Whenever possible, encourage patients to leave reviews and ratings on your website and/or social media pages. Providing access to tablets during check-in or check-out times for patients to leave a brief review can also be an easy and efficient way to get your reviews online as quickly as possible. In addition, posting video testimonials that describe the patient’s experience on your social media channels can be an effective marketing tool to attract new patients looking for care.
It also matters in developing trust factor with your patients if you take time to go through as much reviews as possible on your social media pages and appreciate patients for giving you good ratings. You should respond to not only good reviews, but also the negative ones. However, you need to ensure that the positive reviews appears first to the viewers. Not only new patients find it credible, but you also gain loyalty of your current patients.
It is important that your website performs flawlessly on different platforms, such as iOS, Android, and Windows. You should test your website speed every once in a while. Patients satisfied with your services will only put efforts to put reviews when they have easy access. Emphasizing on excellent user interface on your website is the key to encourage patients to write their experiences.
Reviews Can Lead to More Reviews:
When your healthcare center gets genuine online reviews, it encourages other patients to talk about their experiences. Showing a few reviews on your site will help other patients to be confident and they won’t hesitate to submit their own opinion on your services. Experts consider it as micro-marketing technique that benefits the business in the short and long term.
When done right, online reviews can be a highly effective strategic tool to establish your company as an industry leader. In this digital era, this is one of the most effective ways to build brand reputation and brand value. It should also be consider the ideal guideline for your company to improvise service quality. If online reviews optimization is done it in the right way, sooner of later it will benefit your business. If necessary, you can also hire a digital marketing expert who takes care of all these activities with measurable results.
When done right, online reviews can be a highly effective strategic tool to establish your company as an industry leader.