Reviews in Healthcare Marketing

Healthcare organizations have always been on the hunt for ways to improve their services. We know that patients are better informed now than ever before, and they expect more from the care providers. It’s no surprise then, that healthcare businesses are increasingly turning to patient reviews as a way of getting feedback about their performance. With Patient Reviews you can get an idea of what your customers think about your organization before you even start marketing or advertising yourself to them. At the end, Patient reviews are nothing but your online reputation.

What’s more is that Google gives preference to websites with high ratings in search results pages which means increased traffic and conversion rates! If you’re looking for a way to grow your business without spending loads of money on marketing — consider investing in building up some positive patient reviews!

All reviews are not the same!

There is quite a difference between a normal user reviews and patient reviews.

for instance,

“ABC grocery store is so good, they have all the groceries at affordable price”
-User Review

“No one cares you like ABC hospital does. While my mother was hospitalized the nurses were available 24/7 and doctors visited every 3 hour once. Very good hospital in the region.”
-Patient Review

The difference between “user” review and “patient” reviews is that the latter has so much more life than the former.

What other patients say about your hospital in the region has 60x gauging factor.

Patient reviews are vital for any business as it provides an honest opinion from the patient who has actually experienced the service. It is therefore important to have at least a few well written, positive reviews on your listing page.

One of the most effective ways managers and marketers plan on gaining these reviews through email or coupon mailers and providing review discount codes IS ABSOLUTELY WRONG!!!.

Giving discounts for reviews will motivate leads???

Healthcare don’t sell auto parts or hand crafts….Healthcare saves lives.

Most common mistake marketers commit is promoting the Healthcare as a product and not as a service.

Speaking of which, We recently stumbled upon an ad copy with description “…….spacious patient waiting area…..” who cares?

Going back to my point about Healthcare being a Service — As a healthcare professional, we are in fact selling product; except it’s not a physical thing but health itself. Making small mistakes like this will certainly lead to negative reviews on Local directories, Google etc.. . As per my observation (and various other marketing agencies) pushing offers for gaining reviews will instantly result in bad reviews as the patients will lose interest in writing good review.

So How to Get A Patient Review?

There is a potential of 5 ways to get reviews; but you can choose one or two that best fits your local listing.

#1 — Publicize your review page on other platforms (website, facebook, etc..) so when patients visit those pages they are automatically redirected back to your profile page and see the reviews you have there. Sometimes people don’t remember which treatment place they went too and this will help them to instantly figure it out.

#2 — Encourage every single patient who comes inside the clinic to write a review in google locally . There is high probability of conversion as most of the time patients know exactly what to say about their experience with us. Also contribute towards Google’s efforts for helping small businesses by promoting good reviews and discouraging the bad ones.

#3 — Anytime someone write an awesome review, make sure you reply appreciating the specific person and not with a prefilled google review template “Thanks and Welcome”

#4 — Ask the frontdesk staffs to interact with patients. Let them interact about how the hospital started, merits of doctors and how affordable the hospital is…This will instill positivity of the healthcare center in patients mind and they wouldn’t hesitate when we ask for a review.

We used to do this for most of my clients and it works like a magic

#5 — Encourage patients who visit the hospital / clinic — as well as their friends share about how good they feel now or what they got after visiting your hospital/clinic on social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, etc..) . This will promote yourself as a person who is doing great work in the community. People always like to support organizations which are contributing towards betterment of people’s lives.

For clinics and healthcare organization with small team doing this manually can be tedious, yet there are plenty of patient review automation software available in the market and we can choose one that fits our budget.

They range from $10 to $149 per month depending on the package you choose.

We can use these tools to suggest patients to write reviews and also send automated emails (after every visit) that asks for review — copy paste template with content personalized based on patient’s response.

Patient reviews are important for healthcare business. The more positive patient reviews you have, the better it is for your practice and the greater chance of patients coming back to see you again in the future. I hope these tips on how to get a patient review will be helpful 🙂

Check out how we manage Online reputation with a proactive automated process!