Five Reasons Why Patient Reviews Are So Powerful
Patient reviews have become an essential part of running a successful dental practice in today’s digital age. Reviews not only help build trust and credibility among prospective patients, but they also yield SEO benefits that attract new patients to your dental practice. Patient reviews indeed offer genuine patient stories that potential patients use to judge the dental care services they’re considering. Additionally, these reviews encourage patient feedback, making it easier for dental service organizations and multilocation practices to meet their bottom line.
Read through this blog and discover some significant reasons why patient reviews should be at the forefront of the dental marketing strategy at a multi-location practice or dental service organization.
1. Building Trust and Credibility
In the digital age, word-of-mouth recommendations have evolved into online patient reviews. When people are searching for dental care services, they’re likely to go online to search for reviews before deciding which dental office to visit. Positive patient reviews help to build trust and credibility, which is essential in attracting new patients to your dental practice. Almost 80% of people would trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations when it comes to making informed decisions about which dental office to go to.
Trust and credibility are important for any dental practice, but they can be especially critical in the context of multi-location practices and DSOs. This is because you are also trying to build (or maintain) a cohesive experience around their name or organization.
Negative reviews, on the other hand, can harm your dental practice’s online reputation, leading to a decrease in the number of new patients. An essential part of building trust and credibility is having a policy in place to manage and respond to negative reviews.
One great tip is to offer patients the opportunity to provide feedback via email or a link in a text directly after their appointment. This way, if your patient has any negative feedback, your practice can deal with it directly, before it becomes a review.
2. Patient Review Have Powerful SEO Benefits
We all know that Google and other search engines use online patient reviews to determine the relevance and quality of a dental practice. The better the consistency and quality of your patient reviews, the higher your dental practice’s search engine ranking will be. Therefore, dental practices with many positive reviews are more likely to rank high in search engine results. This helps to attract new patients who might not have discovered your practice otherwise.
3. Real Patient Stories
People who share their experience on online patient reviews do so because they want to share genuine experiences with others. Prospective patients find these stories meaningful and relevant when deciding which dental care services they want to access. Real patient stories help to provide social proof of the services you offer, making it easier for prospects to trust your dental practice.
4. Promoting Patient Reviews
Patients are more likely to leave a review if they’re encouraged to do so. Dental practices that have a strategy for promoting reviews on popular platforms are more likely to receive them. The use of patient engagement software is a significant boost in this regard. This software makes it simpler to encourage patients to leave reviews, monitor incoming reviews, and respond to negative reviews, among other things.
As we’ve talked about a little bit already, promoting patient reviews and responding to negative reviews can go hand in hand. Requesting feedback from your patients seamlessly via software can be an easy way to do both. Patient engagement software will often offer you the ability to automatically send a link – which can prompt the patient to leave a review on the platform of your choice!
5. Patient Reviews = Patient Advocacy
In so many ways, running a dental practice is not just a healthcare endeavor. It is also a business. Meeting your bottom line will inevitably be a concern that your organization has to manage.
When you have many satisfied patients leaving positive reviews, they become advocates for your dental practice. These patient advocates become instrumental in marketing your dental practice to other potential patients. They help to increase awareness of your practice and help to attract new patients. This is especially for dental service organizations and multi-location practices that are looking to meet their bottom line.
How Intiveo Helps You Manage Multiple Locations
Intiveo’s offers two products to the multi-location solutions, Multi-Location and Enterprise/DSO. Both products are designed to simplify communication between healthcare providers and their patients across multiple locations. With this innovative communication platform, medical clinics and hospitals can easily:
- Manage their patient communication system and improve their accessibility
- See data from a centralized dashboard that allows healthcare providers to manage appointments, send reminders, and communicate with their patients
- Communicate via SMS, email or voice messages.
- Customize according to size and specialty
- Reduce no-show rates, increase patient satisfaction and retention.
Look out for an exciting announcement from Intiveo on October 18th about new innovations for managing data for multi-location practices.
Patient Reviews & Beyond
Patient reviews are a critical component in growing multi-location dental practices and dental service organizations. Through building trust and credibility, yielding SEO benefits, providing real patient stories, promoting patient reviews, encouraging patient feedback, patient advocacy, and the use of patient engagement software, your dental practice can create an engaging experience that attracts new patients and keeps existing ones coming back. Watch your practices thrive through the power of patient reviews!
Curious to learn more about how Intiveo can elevate your organization? Book a meeting today!
