We get it, running a healthcare practice is expensive, and the last thing you want to do is pour more money into costly marketing campaigns. Well, you may work in healthcare, but we’ve got the prescription for your budget woes: reputation management. It’s not just the cheapest way to get new patients; it’s also incredibly effective.
Why, you wonder?
Reputation management leverages the power of your existing patients and free online platforms to build trust and attract new patients. Technically, the only cost reputation management incurs is the labor involved; however, to truly get the most out of it, it pays off to invest in automation and centralized listing management.
Today, we explore the reasons behind the affordability and effectiveness of reputation management with the goal of bringing this marketing tactic closer to you and helping you craft a cunning plan to see the actual ROI on reputation.
Leveraging Existing Resources
Using what you have is always a good idea, especially when exploring affordable ways to grow your patient base. Reputation management relies on free and existing resources to grow your healthcare business and amplify its reach:
- Rely on Current Patients: Encourage your satisfied patients to leave positive reviews and share their experiences with the care you provide. This’ll help you build a strong online presence and increase online visibility at no additional cost. Online reviews are, after all, the modern word-of-mouth, and when amplified through digital platforms, can significantly enhance your clinic’s credibility and attract new patients.
- Use Free Online Platforms: While you’ll run into various healthcare-specific review sites that come with a price tag, the most commonly used platforms patients rely on are actually free for all and well-known to everyone. Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect come first because of their ample exposure on the largest search engines, but Yelp, Healthgrades, and similar platforms can also offer valuable opportunities to improve online visibility. These platforms allow you to provide essential business information, engage with patients, and showcase reviews, all without imposing extra costs on your marketing budget.
Word-of-Mouth Amplification
You can pay for advertising (and you should, especially through predictive targeting that yields triple or quadruple ROI, but we digress), but your patients’ experiences will do a much more convincing job than a cold display ad without investing additional marketing dollars.
- Building Organic Reach: Positive reviews and high ratings naturally attract more patients, as people tend to trust recommendations from others over paid ads. This organic reach can significantly boost your online reputation and visibility, placing you at the top of local healthcare-related searches on Google, Google Maps, and Apple Maps, otherwise known as the holy trinity of search all across the US.
- Reaching Viral Potential: Leveraging positive experiences from satisfied patients on social media can create viral potential. When these stories gain traction, they provide free publicity and draw in new patients, relying on the power of word-of-mouth to amplify your marketing efforts effectively.
Improving Patient Retention and Referrals
A strong reputation doesn’t only serve as a cheap way to get new patients; it helps keep the ones you already have.
- Enhanced Trust: A well-established reputation, fostered through a strong online presence and positive reviews, builds trust with potential patients and makes them more likely to choose your healthcare business over your competitors.
- Building Patient Loyalty: Happy patients are more likely to remain loyal and refer their friends and family your way, creating a self-sustaining cycle of patient acquisition. Building patient loyalty reduces patient churn and promotes continuous growth through word-of-mouth referrals, ensuring your business grows and thrives in a competitive healthcare market.
Streamlining Reputation Management
Now that we’ve established why reputation management is the cheapest way to get new patients, let’s see how you can effectively implement it.
We wrote extensive guides about reputation management, so this won’t be one of them; instead: we’ll give you a run down through the most important steps and heartily encourage you to read on should you have any doubts, dilemmas, or other nuanced questions.
Encourage and Collect Patient Reviews
Collecting patient feedback can sometimes feel a bit daunting, but you can achieve much higher engagement rates with little to no effort once you set up a successful workflow.
- Ask for Feedback: Regularly ask all your patients for feedback after their appointments. To avoid the in-person fuss and the risk of patients forgetting about it, follow-up via email or SMS a few hours later. Review requests can, of course, be automated for both your and your patients’ convenience.
- Make it Easy: Don’t go running all over the place! Provide clear instructions on how and where to leave reviews. Instead of including multiple links, send your patients to one preferred platform to increase the number of reviews. A healthcare-specific marketing platform will even allow you to segment your review requests to cover multiple platforms of choice.
- Offer Incentives: Consider small incentives, such as discounts, loyalty programs, or a chance to win a gift card, to encourage patients to leave reviews. To keep things on the ethical side of both marketing and medicine, don’t steer your patients in any direction other than honesty and transparency.
Monitor and Respond to Reviews
Stay on top of what’s being said about your practice and always be part of the conversation.
- Regular Monitoring: Regularly visit the review platforms to ensure you notice and react to new reviews timely. For practices that manage multiple listings across different platforms, this can be a challenging task. Centralizing review management through a healthcare marketing platform can help you streamline this process.
- Respond Promptly: Timely respond to reviews, both positive and negative, thanking patients for positive reviews and addressing any concerns raised in negative reviews professionally, empathetically, and with regards to PHI and HIPAA regulations.
- Apply Patient Feedback: Whenever possible, make improvements based on the patient feedback, showing that you value their opinions and are committed to improving your practice to better suit their wants and needs.
Promote Positive Reviews and Testimonials
Hey, share the good news!
- Feature Reviews: Highlight positive reviews and testimonials on your website, social media pages, and even in your office to amplify reach and promote a patient-centric approach.
- Share Success Stories: With patient consent, share detailed success stories on your blog and social media to showcase the positive impact of your care. If your patients are enthusiastic, you can even apply the ever-popular video format.
- Leverage Social Proof: Use positive feedback as social proof in your marketing materials, demonstrating the high level of satisfaction among your patients.
Automate Reputation Management for Higher Ratings and More New Patients
Reputation management is a crucial strategy for attracting new patients and retaining existing ones: even if it were to cost an arm and a leg, it’d still be one of the pillars of a successful healthcare marketing strategy. Luckily for healthcare providers, it is, instead, the cheapest way to get patients and build a robust, trustworthy online presence.
Take your reputation management to the next level with SocialClimb’s comprehensive healthcare marketing platform: automate your review requests, centralize listing management, and simplify review replies with a HIPAA-compliant template library.
Going beyond reputation management, SocialClimb allows for a holistic healthcare marketing approach, offering a wide array of tools that cover predictive targeting in healthcare, ad management, automated patient surveys, and detailed HIPAA-compliant tracking and reporting that relies on PM/EHR interactions and offers insights into the healthcare marketing KPIs.
Marketing in a healthcare landscape can be challenging, so take it step-by-step: start with low-cost approaches such as reputation management, and build your way up as you go. And we’ll be right here for you, whether you need actionable advice or contemporary software!
