This article is part of our Complete Guide to Chiropractic Marketing.
A Simple 4-Step Strategy
A recently released Moz study found that, out of 1,000 consumers surveyed, more than two-thirds of them admitted to using online reviews to help them determine which local businesses were worthy of their hard-earned money. Additionally, more than half ranked online reviews as either “fairly important,” “very important,” or “absolutely important” when it comes to making buying decisions. This makes getting your patients to share how much they enjoy doing business with you a great way to help your chiropractic practice grow.
Additionally, the more positive reviews your patients post about your practice online, the higher you rank on top sites such as Yelp and Google. Since the Moz study also found that a majority of people (50.4 percent) don’t ever look beyond page one when searching for new local business providers, this alone can put you miles ahead of your competitors when it comes to attracting new patients who are actually searching for your services.
Unfortunately, there are some chiropractic professionals who leave online reviews to chance, merely hoping that their satisfied patients will praise them on the Internet. However, taking this action-less approach isn’t going to help you create a strong, economy-proof chiropractic practice that is still around in 10, 20, 30 years, or more.
Instead, an alternative option, and one that can actually help you increase your patient base and improve your revenues (based on both your stellar online reputation and the mere fact that potential patients will know you exist due to great search rank), involves the development of an online review strategy.
Developing an Online Review Strategy
Development of an online review strategy is just as important to attracting new chiropractic patients as the development of a business plan is to setting up a service-based business that can withstand the test of time. However, a lot of chiropractors don’t know how to develop this type of strategy…so they don’t.
Don’t do this to your chiropractic practice. Don’t leave online reviews up to fate, putting the success of your business in other people’s hands. Take control over your own destiny by building your online reputation in a way that also helps you build your practice.
And don’t let yourself feel overwhelmed either because this doesn’t have to be difficult to do. In fact, creating an online review strategy for your chiropractic practice is as simple as following these four fairly easy steps:
Step #1: Be Selective About Review Prospects
Not every patient is a good prospect for a review.
Step #2: Encouraging Patients to Post an Online Review
How to work with happy patients to encourage them to write a review.
Step #3: Make the Review Process Easy As Possible
When a patient is excited to write a positive review, make it easy for them to do that!
Step #4: Follow Up With the Patient After a Review
If the review is a positive, contact the patient to thank them. If the review isn't positive, contact the patient to see why they had a bad experience and how you can fix it.
A Word About Fake Reviews…
In an attempt to enhance their online reputation quickly, some businesses have posted fake online reviews. While this “quick and easy” route may be tempting, especially if you’re hurting for more business, the reality is that these types of reviews are often easy to spot and can quickly erode public trust in you. And once trust is gone, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get back.
Think of creating your online review presence as more of a marathon than a sprint. You might not get there as quickly as you’d like, but as long as you follow the proper steps, you’ll get there eventually…and with less aggravation and pain because you did it the right way.
Putting Your Strategy Into Action
Follow these four steps and you’re now ready to develop an online review strategy that sways new patients through your door (versus the door of your competitor) while improving your search engine rank at the same time.
In this case, everyone wins because you’re able to grow your business and more people will have a higher quality of life because they chose you over your competitors. It really doesn’t get any better than that.