(Newswire.net — March 5, 2014) Tampa, Florida — In today’s digital world, the online reputation of any business is vitally important. There is a good chance that the first impression any prospective patient will have of a physician, medical practice or dental practice is through the information they find online – namely in Google as Google dominates over 70% of the search market and is also the primary provider of mobile data.
If that information a prospective patient finds in Google or other places online contains negative reviews, the chances of that individual becoming a new patient go down dramatically!
With the average yearly cost of medical school running between $30,000–60,000 a doctor has spent approximately $125,000 (and easily more) just to get the license to practice! Throw in the huge time investment and the costs of running a practice, malpractice insurance and the patient acquisition costs and one can quickly understand why it is highly unwise to leave your online reputation to chance.
Lane emphasizes with his doctor clients that absolutely nothing is more important than their reputation. “If your online reputation is ruined by bad reviews, what do you really have in your community?” preaches Lane Houk. “All that money and time invested over nearly a decade or more goes down the tubes if you have a tarnished online reputation.
In this internet age, the reputation of a person or business is almost exclusively online and what is said about you determines a lot of about your success. “Even the traditional word of mouth conversations have largely shifted online,” says Lane Houk (reference Facebook and Google Reviews for example). Prospective patients have all the information about you at their fingertips and in the palm of their hands.
The challenge for most doctors and other busy professionals is that getting patient feedback alone is a daunting task. Filtering out the negative reviews so a staff member or the physician directly can intervene and find out what happened from the good reviews which Lane says need to be leveraged and marketed across multiple mediums is even more difficult.
“Physicians and medical practices are simply not equipped to handle the entire patient feedback loop and they are failing to ask for that feedback and worse are not marketing the success stories they are having. Thus, what the world reads about doctors and dentists is largely the negative stuff because an angry patient will jump through 20 hoops to leave a bad review” stresses Lane.
These challenges prompted Lane Houk to develop a holistic solution for the healthcare industry that would be able to automate the process of getting the patient feedback but also be able to apply “smart logic” to the type of review (good or bad) and respond accordingly. Good reviews are success stories and thus we have a team of people who share and post these success stories of our doctors and dentist clients online! This is called reputation marketing and it is immensely effective in multiple ways in helping a medical/dental practice really grow and provide a quality patient experience.
With its new Reputation Buddy solution, MedRx Marketing takes a proactive approach to online reputation management, monitoring and marketing. While most digital marketing agencies provide only a reputation management or monitoring service, the Reputation Buddy solution implements a proprietary reputation marketing process to provide the search engines and social media channels with positive, accurate information that customers can find on the first page of the search rankings. When Google’s first page of search results is filled with glowing reviews from actual customers, in multiple places, it is much more likely that a searcher will take the next step and reach out to the medical practice versus the competition… wouldn’t you?
While reputation marketing is relevant for all businesses with an online presence, it is especially important for health care professionals. Choosing which doctor or dentist to see is one of the most important consumer decisions that an individual or family will make, so they are very likely to head to the web at some point in the process. Even just one negative review can be all it takes to lean them in the direction of picking a different provider. For medical practices, clinics and dental offices that wish to grow their patient base, paying attention to their online reputation is a serious matter.
Lane Houk and the team at MedRx Marketing Solutions are proud to work with clients in the medical industry to help them not only monitor and manage their online reputation but also to market it and leverage it for further growth. For more information about their services, please visit their website at www.MedRxMarketing.com
