How Leveraging Online Reviews Will Bring in New Patients and Boost Confidence

This month we let our friends at podium.co take over the Wonderist Agency blog to talk about 3 simple ways to help your dental practice increase exposure and increase new leads!

In today’s digital landscape, it can be difficult to cut through the clutter. Every day businesses find new, creative ways to increase exposure, gain the trust and respect of consumers, and increase profits.

One of the most common ways in 2015-16 for business to accomplish those 3 things is to collect consumer reviews thereby increasing their local online exposure.

When reviews online increase your exposure, they can also help impact your dental search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, instill trust in your brand, act as social proof (customer case studies) and so much more.

It’s arguably the easiest way and quickest way to boost confidence in your brand and dollars for your business.

With that said, let’s discuss how you can create and implement a strategy in under 14 days.

Find the review sites that your target demographic most often visit

This is one of the most important steps your business can take in boosting confidence and dollars for your business. The last thing you want to do is invest time and money into reviews sites that your potential customers will never see — it also happens to be one of the biggest mistakes we see businesses making.

Rather than sending them to a review site/web page that your potential customers have never heard of, look into the most common sites: Google, Facebook, and Yelp, and then back into the one that seems to best fit your demographic.

Here is a helpful article on matching your demographic to a review site.

Next, be sure to understand the industry-specific review sites. If you’re a dental practice, you should likely ensure you’re optimized for sites like ZocDoc, Healthgrades, and RateMD — this will provide more exposure and increase the likelihood of being found.

Collect reviews by simply asking

Surprisingly, we see many businesses come up with expensive and creative ways to collect reviews, but rarely do they ever work out as planned. The easiest way to ensure your business collects reviews is to simply ask.

If configured correctly and baked into a repeatable process, you can avoid awkwardness and increase the number of reviews you collect.

For example, if you’re a dental practice, we’d recommend urging a review to be left while they are sitting in the chair with not much to do — maybe while waiting for the next step in their visit.

An easy dialogue to follow is: “Hey <patient’s name>, while you have a little bit of down time, we’d really appreciate if you could hop on and leave us a review and some feedback — that helps us improve and make your experience even better the next time you visit”.

Whatever your script, be sure to ask. If you’re not completely comfortable asking, move onto the last step.

Use an online review management tool

A pretty easy way to accomplish the last two tips in addition to accomplishing so much more, is to find a review management tool that works for your business.

While the other two tips are free, and this tip generally requires some sort of budget, the realized ROI can be seen pretty quickly. That’s because an effective review tool can streamline the review collection process, show you which sites your business is best performing on, aggregate reviews for multiple sites into one place, and increase transparency into your business.

Most businesses that use an effective review management tool quickly see a boost in confidence for their business and an increase of customers mentioned online reviews as a source for their visit. By utilizing a good tool you can create a hands-off experience that still produces results and decreases headaches.

Conclusion

If you can follow these 3 tips, you can quickly realize an uptick in consumer confidence and revenue for your business. The SEO benefit alone is enough to justify the practice of collecting reviews, not to mention all the ancillary benefits that come along with the practice.

Create a systematic approach for yourself or an employee to ensure you’re consistently collecting and managing your online reputation. If done correctly, you can quickly realize more exposure for your business, more foot traffic into your business, and more transparency into how your customers think, how your employees treat customers, and how your business can become more profitable and efficient.
What other tips do you have for boosting confidence and increasing dollars for your business?