15 November 2011
Posted in
Pearls in Ophthalmology
By Andrew Doan, MD, PhD
Word-of-mouth marketing has always been the most effective way to attract new patients. Happy patients will attract dozens of new patients to a practice. The Internet and social media, when utilized appropriately, are quickly becoming the new word of mouth.
Here are seven pearls to accelerate your online word-of-mouth campaign.
1) Search your name on Google and see what your patients see. As physicians, patients are referred to us by other doctors, friends, and family members. It is common for patients to search our name and do research about us before making their appointment. I have worked with physicians with damaging information on the Internet or with numerous bad patient reviews who have lost patients. Be proactive and know what is published about you.
2) Monitor and manage online doctor review sites. Address the bad reviews and encourage patients to submit reviews. Do not pay for positive reviews, generate false reviews, or have your office staff submit reviews. Submitting false reviews is fraud, and you may face medical board sanctions, hefty fines, and legal ramifications. Doctors have been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for falsifying patient reviews, which is fraud.
3) Don’t be afraid of a few bad reviews. Learn from patient feedback and improve. Having a few bad reviews will build patient confidence because a doctor with mostly good reviews and a few bad reviews appears real to patients.
4) Social media will accelerate word-of-mouth marketing. Every doctor should have a public Facebook page. The public page allows patients to comment and recommend your services to all their friends. When a comment is placed about your services on your public Facebook wall, all your patient’s friends in their network see the comment.
5) Publish a profile webpage with a simple URL for your patients to easily review you and your practice. For example, http://www.andrew-doan.com
6) There are numerous review websites allowing patients to review doctors. As patients, how do we know the reviews are actually from real patients? As doctors, how do we know the reviews posted about us are from our patients? It is important to work with a company that will post Verified Doctor Reviews for you and your practice.
7) First mover advantage is important. Doctors with more positive reviews will attract more patients through the Internet. The sooner a doctor attracts positive reviews online, the more reviews the doctor will have with time. Some practices are attracting nearly 25% of their new patients directly from the Internet.
Questions, please contact Andrew Doan, MD, PhD – contact form
