13 strategies for obtaining positive reviews from your patients

Believe it or not, great musicians and speakers can incorporate audience feedback on the fly to help shape their on-stage performance. Clearly, for medical and surgical clinics, this process works quite differently.

Although feedback remains an important resource for strengthening the discourse, in this case, of sales.

The collection of online clinic reviews can happen in various ways, including:

1. Providing a way for someone to share their opinions.

2. Actively requesting feedback.

3. Seeking out feedback that has already been shared with a different audience.

Let's explore how to gather patient reviews using these three tactics in 13 different strategies.

Tactic 1: Provide Opinion Collection Formats

You can't imagine how often your patients seek to communicate with your clinic. Make things easier for them and offer...

1. Contact forms

Yes, the old contact form remains the standard format for collecting information on your website.

While site visitors certainly know what to do with the form, ensure you provide enough instructions so that patients understand it's a viable means of communication. Indicate that they can use this form to ask questions and also write comments about your medical services.

To facilitate contact, provide a dropdown menu on your website directing them to the contact section where the form is usually located.

2. Phone numbers

If your practice is local, a visible phone number is essential.

Many people don't want to write an email, especially if they have a quick question. Patients often prefer a direct phone call and this not only aligns with common preference but also provides an opportunity to turn positive experiences into impactful reviews.

3. Comments

Don't underestimate the power of providing a space for comments on your website.

→ This component allows the audience to respond to blog posts, ask questions, or express their opinions about the medical services offered.

While not applicable to all medical practices, this strategy can be highly beneficial for many specialties and types of clinics.

4. Social media

To conclude the first tactic, we must say that social media is not just a broadcasting platform. It is meant for interaction.

Make sure to inform website visitors that you are present on their favorite social networks and that a good marketing team is attentive to the comments, feedback, and direct messages you receive to respond to all of them.

Tactic 2: Request Feedback or Reviews

1. Comment messages

Yes, we already mentioned comment fields, but this strategy is a bit different. It involves persuading your patients to share their experience on the various channels you have.

For example, you can send them an email inviting them to write a review on your website or rate you on Google. You can also engage your followers in conversation through social media.

Post about a problem, symptom, or disease that a specific treatment/service resolves and invite them to share their own experiences and the results they achieved. 

Ask them to do it! People have their opinions and are willing to share them.

2. Trust advisors

A strategy that is often overlooked involves sending your materials to experts in the medical field to obtain valuable feedback.

Obtaining perspectives from a more expert approach can be an excellent way to continuously improve and build strategic partnerships.

3. Surveys

Come on, we're not reinventing the wheel here.

Surveys are and will remain one of the simplest and most affordable methods you can implement to receive feedback and reviews from your patients.

From a technical point of view, they are easy to conduct. Actually, the hardest part is knowing what you want to ask your audience.

It's best to keep a survey short and simple to improve its response rate.

4. Q&A Chats

Q&A chats are another excellent avenue if your audience is receptive enough to show up.

Previously, Hangouts and Google+ worked well, but with the boom of video formats, a free event using Zoom or Meets will work wonders.

You can organize it with people who are about to purchase your services and have patients who have already done so as guests.

The experience and reviews of others can help clear doubts. It's also useful for generating new feedback and sales.

And if the service you offer only addresses emergencies, use social media to educate your followers, share testimonials, answer questions, and get new feedback from your audience.

5. Forums/Groups on your preferred channels

Online forums may seem like a tactic of the past, but they still exist. In many cases, they have taken the form of groups on social media.

Social media groups make more sense for many clinics. Even broadcast channels like Telegram or WhatsApp.

If you're going to implement this strategy, make sure your audience actively uses that channel.

6. Email marketing

Email marketing provides a fantastic way to request feedback from your audience's inner circle.

Patients have already shown that they trust you enough to invite you to their inboxes.

→ Take advantage of this and ask them to write a review about their experience with your services.

You can write emotionally and tell them that their reviews help more patients learn about your clinic and receive the quality treatment you always want to provide.

Your request for feedback will make them feel like they are helping create well-being for all your patients.

Our agency's reputation marketing service takes care of gathering all this information for use in your positioning and sales strategy.

Tactic 3: Go Seek Feedback

1. Social media customer service/response

Setting up searches for your clinic's name on social media services and responding to comments is a demonstration of customer service in action.

This interaction reflects your concern for how your customers perceive your service and contributes to building a strong reputation.

2. Online reviews

 It's surprising to see how few medical clinics take the time to participate in online reviews.

They forget that social media requires a more active effort to respond quickly, but online reviews allow for greater flexibility in terms of response times. Additionally, if you have a specialized medical marketing team, like ours, you don't have to worry about this.

Our team will respond to the comments and reviews that patients write. This conveys how much you care that they receive the best service.

3. Behavior analysis

Studying metrics is an excellent way to study your patients' behavior.

While people can tell you they would prefer to read one type of article over another, traffic charts will show you what people are actually willing to read.

From this data, you can share on social media and other channels the changes and improvements you are making based on what your patients prefer or do not prefer.

→ Letting them know that you review metrics and adjust content based on what they want is another way of telling them they are important to your brand.

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Once again, not all strategies are perfectly applicable to your brand or business. The task you must do is consider them, evaluate them, and, most importantly, apply those you believe align best with your services to gain reviews from your patients.

Remember this: each review is an opportunity to build trust with your patients and continually improve the quality of your medical services.

And if you need help with that, you can count on us.

Optimize these strategies to boost the growth and online reputation of your clinic with our medical marketing team!