Guest post by Garrett Smith
Fertility clinics help patients through one of the most difficult times of their lives: growing a family. Given the sensitivity and life altering nature of infertility, finding a high-quality fertility clinic is the number one priority for patients.
Today, most patients head online to find their fertility doctor. Even if they’ve received a referral from another doctor, friend, or family member, there’s little chance of them NOT checking you out online. What will they see?
That’s where online reputation management comes into play. Ensuring that the offline realities of the great care you provide are properly reflected online should be one of the main priorities of your marketing. In fact, your online reputation could be the main reason you get - or lose - a potential new patient to another fertility clinic.
5 Online Reputation Management Tips for Fertility Clinics
If you have used Google to search for restaurants near you, or for a mechanic that is trustworthy, chances are you have encounter online reviews of those businesses prominently displayed in the search results. After all, Google and other prominent websites want to show patients the best results for their particular search.
It makes sense to prominently show those businesses that customers (and patients) have rated the best. After all, who wants to work with a 2 star plumber? Your fertility clinic is no different.
So what can you do to better manage and improve the online reputation of your fertility clinic? Here’s 5 easy to implement tips to help your fertility clinic with their online reputation!
Do Some Research
When you’re trying to piece together exactly where you’re starting from when it comes to managing your fertility clinic’s online reputation, the first step you’ll need to take is doing some research.
It’s important to know what your online reputation currently is before creating a strategy and implementing a workflow to manage what information about your clinic is online.
This means Googling “Fertility Clinics in (your city),” ‘Best Fertility Doctors Near Me,” and other important terms. Does your clinic appear on any of these searches? If so, what information is appearing – and is it good or bad?
You can also search for the direct name of your clinic and the names of providers who work there. Get a good look at the reputation of everyone associated with the practice and you’ll know just how big of a project this will be.
Claim Your Online Profiles
Getting your profiles all claimed is one of the most proactive steps you’ll take. This means you’ll want to make a list of all the profiles your fertility clinic has online. Keep in mind that this list doesn’t just include profiles you’ve purposefully made – businesses often have dozens of profiles on professional websites that were generated by users or automatically.
If you have a login and password for a profile, make sure to test it and confirm that you have actually claimed that business and are the only ones who can control the information that is listed.
If you don’t know the login for a specific profile, you can move forward with the steps provided by that specific website that will lead to you claiming that profile. Often, this requires you to create an account with the profile and use an auto-calling feature to confirm that you are the owner.
Make An Online Reputation Management Strategy
Once you have finished claiming your profiles, you can move on to creating a reputation management strategy for your fertility clinic. RepCheckup has written extensively on the topic of creating good management strategies, including this blog written exclusively to help business owners create their own reputation management plan in 2018.
Overall, your strategy should include constant outreach for reviews, like asking clients, customers, and patients to leave a review on a specific website (to help minimize the work that they need to do) before they leave your building.
Set Your Schedule to Stay Consistent
Once you have a plan in place, make sure its upkeep is built into your schedule! This means that you should appoint a specific person to manage your profiles, check in on and respond to new reviews across your different profiles, and making sure that no fake reviews have been posted publicly without some investigation.
Use a Reputation Management Tool
Many business owners have schedules that are too packed to go through this entire process. For most fertility clinic managers and practitioners, there isn’t enough time in the day to cross off some simple “to do” items, which is why using a reputation management tool is the preferred method of many clinics.
Tools like RepCheckup will centralize all of your profiles onto one dashboard, saving you the time and energy of keeping a log of all the profiles you need to check and logging in/out of each website. You can also solicit reviews directly to clients en masse by sending out texts and emails asking for them to leave you a review.