The #1 Place Patients Read Online Dental Practice Reviews
If you believe online dental practice reviews are seriously important, you’ll want to finish this entire article. As I rarely invite non-member dentists to our special courses, there’s also information at the end on how you can get into a one of kind to the profession course for online dental practice reviews that normally you couldn’t have access too.
So, what’s the #1 place patients go to read online reviews for physicians, lawyers, and dentists?
By total website traffic data, it’s now the Yelp platform. More consumers now use Yelp reviews for research as part of deciding to be a client or patient for physicians, lawyers, and dentists than any other review platform.
Google is a close second. Google, realizing that reviews mean traffic which equals ad dollars from local businesses, has stepped up its game (again) and is focusing on Google My Business which puts a heavy focus on reviews. Thus, besides Yelp for online dental practice reviews Google+ is also a biggie.
Online dental practice reviews present great opportunity and danger for every practice without a plan on how they will handle this.
Here are the 10 biggest opportunities related online dental practice reviews:
1) Free Patients – the only variable cost this may add is if you decide to reward for certain types of online dental practice reviews (which you most definitely should).
2) Free Niche patients – elective case patients will make decisions based on what they read at the review sites. Thus, if you have some niche you focus on securing online dental practice reviews are an important part of your total marketing plan.
3) Enhances good marketing – patients seeing your information in online and offline ads will often type “your name + reviews.”
4) Competitive market research tool – you can look directly into competitor’s practices for the good and bad and use online dental practice reviews as a tool to make changes in your strategies.
5) Quality control (feedback) tool for your practice – patient’s no longer respond to surveys so reviews are now the best way to find out what’s wrong in your operation from your patient’s perspective.
6) Increased referrals for specialists (your generalists will be reading your reviews and you’ll pick up new referring doctors if you do this right). Some patients will also SELF REFER because of reviews.
7) Allows you to easily differentiate yourself from others. You can literally have your patients tell the world what makes you special so that other prospective patients can decide if you are for them.
8) Free marketing for those too cheap or too poor to market. [If you want to truly understand how marketing works now in dentistry and where testimonials and reviews fit, this guide is a must.]
9) Provides a mechanism to get professional endorsements that are powerful credibility builders. [If you want to be learn how to be the most credible dentist in your location, you will want to take our comprehensive case acceptance training found here.]
10) If you are a skilled dentist, reviews result in you helping more patients.
Here are the 5 biggest dangers/risks of no online dental practice reviews or too many bad reviews
1) Destroys expensive paid for external marketing – patients respond to an ad, they research you at Yelp or Google+, they see bad online dental practice reviews, they never call AND they will even cancel appointments. I’ve seen this happening in multiple practices throughout North America. A phone call that cost $1000 to generate via marketing that would have led to a $20,000 case gets shot down courtesy of a bad online dental practice review that was FREE. FREE with very expensive consequences.
2) Damages existing patient retention. Existing patients often google your practice to find your phone numbers, any bad online dental practice reviews being returned immediately draw attention. Like it or not your practice is now more transparent than ever before and this has to be managed. Specialists can substitute “referring doctor” for “patient” and you have an additional risk to be negated.
3) Destroys insurance referrals – patients researching dentists “on their plan” are going to go with those with better online dental practice reviews. They’ll even drive a bit further to get there. Who wants to go to doctor “pain” just because he’s on my plan versus doctor “painless” 2 more miles from me?
4) Damages overall credibility and reputation. Drive by and walk-by traffic referrals drop as people researched you before they open your front door.
5) Social awkwardness. Friends and family are also likely to read your online dental practice reviews. The smaller your community, the more likely this is going to happen. People love to talk and they will.
Now, after reviewing the above, how many of the opportunities would you like to secure for yourself and how many of the dangers would you like to predictably eliminate?
Most would tell me that they’d like to secure most of the opportunities and remove as much risk as possible. So, what to do?
Well, practices (you) have four choices related to managing your online dental practice reviews:
A – Do nothing. Easiest solution. A saying that I use a lot as related to business building matters is “If you do nothing, you get nothing.” In the case of online dental practice reviews, you won’t get simply get nothing. If only you could be so lucky! You will ultimately wind up with more of the negatives attaching themselves to your practice as a consequence.
Doing nothing related to reviews will equal getting much for a lack of foresight! Patients apt to leave negative reviews will do so regardless of your wishes. Those reviews will hang around for years damaging your credibility and reputation. While the long term result is expensive, the front end sure was easy and FREE! (LOL)
B – Hire out. Used to work (sort of) but doesn’t anymore. Not an option under the platform rules for online dental practice reviews at Google+ and Yelp now. Ask anyone who paid Demand Force a few years back how that has worked out. Their reviews are basically worthless. Practices that had an in house system still have their reviews working for them years later versus those who counted on a 3rd party to do all the lifting.
Now there are services saying they can get your reviews up for you by text. Total BS as reviews that are the length of a text message have almost zero value. RUN!
As an aside, we do provide “hands on review assistance” to our members but it still requires an in-house point person to make effective reviews reliably happen. Again, there is no predictable way to outsource this task 100% and get the kinds of online dental practice reviews that differentiate you from other practices.
C – Develop Your Own System to manage the two most important platforms for online dental practice reviews (hint, we’ve already mentioned both today and there are only two that matter). Internally we’ve been providing a System Manual to our clients for this for almost five years. Those embracing this have nothing but good news to report related to the opportunities gained and risks removed.
D – Get Training and Delegate. Put one of your staff through my new 12 week live online dental practice review training which starts July 24th. Realizing that most practices need more help with this than a System manual, this course has been developed to make setting everything up internally in a practice related to 5 Star dental practice reviews bullet-proof. Attendee’s leave having everything they need from A-Z of setting up and managing the two most important platforms for the next 5 years. This includes peripheral marketing materials (physical things you use in the practice) that get patients to leave reviews and to get what you want posted for your reviews.
The tuition is $3497. Registration is here. Use the special code YELP before next Tuesday (7/22) and you get $500 off the tuition.
To put the tuition in perspective: The average lifetime value of one new patient for a practice ranges from $1,000-$5,000 per patient. Niche cases which also result from 5 Star online dental practice reviews range from $10,000 to $50,000+. Doesn’t take a math genius to figure out the value in something that will secure many dozens if not hundreds of free patients in the coming years.
The course is literally one of the best marketing and management investments you can make in your practice right now AND as part of it you get access to the most knowledgeable dental expert on the planet related to the review platforms.
I look forward to seeing a number of you in the private training starting this month!
