2020 threw a lot of obstacles in our way—or AT us. Let’s take a moment to look back on some positive highlights as we lay out our top 10 SocialClimb blog posts published in the last 12 months.
Last year was a long and difficult year. Hopefully, the first few months of 2021 will see us resolving difficult situations (vaccines!) and moving forward stronger than ever. It’s a great time to look back on the top 10 SocialClimb blog posts from 2020 that captured your attention.
This list includes the 10 blog posts published in 2020 that had the most traffic. If you haven’t read them yet, now’s the perfect time to catch up so you have all the tools in your arsenal to power forward into 2021.
#1: How to Negotiate with Upset Customers and Patients
In healthcare, the customer isn’t always right. It’s also true that the patient isn’t always happy. Even the best doctors get an occasional upset patient if the outcome was not what they desired, they had a bad experience with any member of the staff, or if they just had a bad day.
This article covers what to do when you’re confronted with an upset patient in person or online. And the key is—maintain control of YOUR patience. (Easier said than done, right?) As a medical professional, you can’t always give a patient what they want, but you can be empathetic, listen, and respond compassionately.
Read through these seven steps you can take if you ever have to face an upset patient. (They work for other types of customers as well.) If you haven’t read this one, go read it now so that next time you face this situation, you’ll be fully prepared to resolve it.
#2: HIPAA Compliance and Online Review Responses
Responding to online reviews while remaining HIPAA compliant can be tricky, but it’s worth your time and effort to show your patients and potential patients that you care about them beyond just their visit to your office or their time on your operating table. Keep in mind that it’s important to respond to both positive and negative reviews so you don’t run the risk of being perceived as uninvolved in the patient experience. And it is possible to do that in HIPAA-compliant ways!
Healthcare consumers read reviews and provider responses when they search for a doctor online. Responding gives you the opportunity to provide support for your patients on all fronts. And when that inevitable bad review pops up, you can show your concern for the issue the patient brings up and provide a different viewpoint.
This article offers seven points to keep in mind when crafting your HIPAA-compliant review responses. You’ll even find some examples of how to respond—and how not to respond. Read the full article.
#3: Elective Surgeries, Another Casualty of the Pandemic
Doctors, medical practices, and hospitals across the nation took a huge hit when elective surgeries were put on hold. Many of you are likely still recovering from the effects of those delays. Hopefully, things will get back on track as more people are vaccinated and feel comfortable coming in to get those neglected procedures taken care of.
The restrictions resulted in widespread financial burdens, causing many healthcare facilities to make difficult decisions in their fight to remain in business. The added strain on the already struggling healthcare system made a hard year for healthcare professionals even more difficult.
This article discusses the impact to the healthcare industry as well as three ways to get financial help to stay in business. Read the full article.
#4: Questions About Your Google Business Profile?
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is a huge part of your marketing efforts—well, if it’s not, it should be. With Google commanding 92% of search traffic, it’s important to know how to use their system to be seen by patients searching online for medical care.
This article covers everything you need to know about your GBP listing as a medical professional:
- How to claim your listing
- How to reclaim your listing from someone else
- How many listings you need
- Why reviews are so important
- The most important information on your listing
- What GBP pitfalls to avoid
- How to make changes to multiple listings at once
Get on top of your GBP so you can start being seen online by patients searching for a new provider. Read the full article.
#5: Are You Measuring Your Marketing ROI?
If you want to know the impact of your marketing efforts, you need to be able to measure your return on investment (ROI) and your patient acquisition cost (PAC). This article covers how that’s possible with healthcare marketing—trust me, it’s possible.
The key to calculating both your ROI and your PAC is knowing where your new patients are coming from, right? That’s kind of been the whole problem all along. How can you know if that ad you put in a magazine was the carrot that caused someone to call in and set an appointment?
SocialClimb makes it easy. Our platform can track which of your patients were attracted from your GBP listing or an ad you sent out through Google, Facebook, or Instagram. And our reports put it all together for you. Read more about measuring the impact of your marketing spend.
#6: Start Up Your Boost Ads
Our Boost Ads are reputation ads that use predictive analytics and big data to identify and target individual patients that are ideal for you. We’ve set up our platform to make it easy to send out targeted ads and start attracting the patients you need to grow your practice.
This article covers how we’ve made the same big data that hospitals have been using for years available to individual doctors. Our system uses the collected data to find people at high risk for specific conditions so you can target them with your ads. We literally make it possible for one doctor to reach out to one specific patient with an ad right in their critical decision-making moment.
We’ve also set up playbooks that let you easily create ads with appropriate keywords, negative keywords, and structure. Think of it as no-stress marketing that gets you seen by specific patients in their time of need. Read more about our Boost Ads.
#7: How Important Are Online Reviews for Doctors
When we need information, we turn to the internet these days. It’s a veritable treasure trove of all things anyone would ever want to know, after all. It’s no different in healthcare. When patients need to find a new doctor, they turn to the internet. And when they search online, they look to reviews to learn more about the doctors they find.
Online reviews give patients an outlet to share their experience. Healthcare consumers looking for a new doctor can read those reviews and responses to get a feel for who the doctor is, how they interact with their patients, and how patients feel about the care they received.
It’s important that your online reputation accurately reflects the expert level of care you provide so healthcare consumers can make the best choice in provider. Read more about online reviews and what you can do to improve your online reputation.
#8: Yext, Is It Worth It?
If you are using Yext to manage your accounts, you need to read this article. Don’t have time? Here’s a quick summary.
You don’t need Yext. SocialClimb can help you manage your online presence at a lower cost and with greater benefit. Yext makes it easy for you to sync the correct NAP (name, address, and phone number) across multiple platforms. The problem is, when you quit using Yext, those changes may go away because the new information is layered over the old information.
Our platform allows you to easily update and optimize your online profiles across the platforms most relevant to healthcare. Yext does have a paid add-on for healthcare, but their platform was not built for medical practices or doctors with more than one location. At SocialClimb, we know healthcare. We were built for you to succeed.
Read the full article to see the difference SocialClimb can make.
#9: Google Posts for Healthcare
Did you know that you can add Google posts to your GBP listing? You can and you SHOULD. Our platform makes it easy to create and schedule posts that you can publish on multiple listings at once.
This article covers the why behind Google posts and how you can use them to your benefit. Posts allow you to share important information with the community like Pandemic updates, new practice location announcements, introducing a new doctor to the community, and upcoming educational events. You’ll also improve your online visibility with more keywords to help you be findable.
Read more about why Google posts are important to your practice and how to set them up.
#10: Improve Your Patient Mix to Get a Better Payer Mix
The reimbursements you receive from two patients who have undergone the same procedure may vary widely due to their coverage. Medicare reimbursements will be vastly different from self-pay patients and even from private insurance. It all depends on the contracts you have in place with various health insurers. That’s why it’s important to have a good patient mix—a mix of insurance coverage and self-pay patients that is best for your practice.
Read this article to learn how you can use predictive analytics to improve your patient mix to get a good range of reimbursements that will put you in a financially strong position. You can identify the type of procedure you want to focus on and market directly to those patients. You can also identify patients who have the type of insurance coverage that’s best for you.
You don’t need to leave your financial stability all up to chance.
Bonus Pick
Take a couple minutes out of your busy day to laugh a little with (at) Dr. Mitch. Since I’m highlighting the top 10 blog posts from 2020, I thought it only appropriate to also include a link to our beloved Dr. Mitch. He continues to be a popular go-to on our website as he talks about the benefits of using SocialClimb’s platform.
Enjoy! And here’s to a great year in 2021.
