A Powerful Patient Acquisition Strategy: How to Turn Your Reviews into Revenue

For years, consumers have been trained by sites like Amazon to search for a product online and then evaluate that product via reviews and star ratings prior to making a purchase. Today, the "Amazon effect" extends beyond retail: search engines and other websites have made it possible to do the same thing for healthcare providers and facilities.

Consumers and patients now have the same expectations of their healthcare search experience as they do their product search experience. The search for a healthcare provider increasingly mirrors online shopping habits — resulting in an upward trend of writing and reading patient reviews.

Approximately 90% of patients read reviews to evaluate providers, and 69% of patients will not even consider a healthcare provider with less than a 4.0 average star rating. This is patient-driven behavior: healthcare specifically experienced an almost 200% increase in total reviews left per location from 2019 to 2022*. Today, how your marketing team manages your third-party reviews (like Yelp and Google Reviews) has more impact on the patient journey than ever before.

Ultimately, the goal is for each satisfied consumer to endorse your practice, effectively encouraging growth for you. But whether your reviews skew positively or negatively, they're going to impact your new patient acquisition — or lack thereof.

For continued growth in the digital age of healthcare, take control of your online reputation. These three steps will give you an overview of how to start thinking about reputation management (and we also have a more in-depth guide on how to create a healthcare reputation management strategy here).

Here's how you can take control of your online reputation — and turn your reviews into revenue.

The good news is that the first step in turning your reviews into revenue should be a simple one: you should start to monitor your reviews. This gives you a sense of what people are already saying about you, how you are rated, and how you can monitor your performance over time.

You will be able to see the review content as well as the star ratings. This gives you a baseline to better understand how your online reputation is at the beginning of your reputation management journey.

This data will give you an excellent benchmark as a starting point. You'll be able to set a strategy to improve your overall star rating by:

• Understanding your average star rating at a point in time. Once you see your starting average star rating, you might want to set a reputation management program goal to improve your overall star rating in a certain timeframe.

• Ingesting data for monitoring to get a sense of where most people are leaving reviews and where you need to focus your energies in generating new reviews (in the future). Are more people leaving reviews on Facebook? Are more negative reviews surfacing on WebMD? Are star ratings higher or lower on Google?

• Reading what people are saying about you and your providers. Are comments more positive or negative in nature? Are there any legal issues that need to be flagged? Based on the type of reviews people are leaving, should you create future review responses based on positive versus negative reviews?

Monitoring your reviews and measuring your online reputation is a very powerful first step in your reputation management journey and can greatly help you collect the data you need to manage your reputation in an ongoing way.

It is also an excellent foundation to always understand how sentiment about your organization is changing, so don't forget to always be monitoring, even as you progress through your reputation management initiatives.

Now that you've seen what people are saying about you on third-party sites, it's now time to think about how to respond to them. It's possible that you could get thousands of reviews per year, so responding to reviews can be an all-consuming job if you don't set up the right strategy for it.

One way to do this is by interacting with your reviews via Review Response. We are seeing the lowest response time to reviews ever (as of September 2022). Organizations have started to see the value in responding to reviews and are now responding more quickly than ever in the healthcare vertical. Why?

Review Response drives greater SEO on sites like Google because search engines reward recent activity over stale activity on a listing. Activity includes reviews left on the listing, but also reviews responded to on the listing.

Your entire goal of responding to reviews should be to:

• Increase interaction with your listings on Google and other websites so that you can contribute to improving your SEO.

• Show people who are searching for and "shopping for" healthcare providers that you take feedback seriously.

If you have limited resources, a good rule of thumb to follow in responding to reviews is to prioritize your negative reviews and begin a response strategy from there. An easy way of thinking about this is to make sure to respond to all 1- and 2-star reviews.

Once you've gained control of your negative reviews, you can move into responding to 3-star reviews. Take stock of how much time it is taking you to respond to these reviews and allocate your resources accordingly.

Still have questions? Most do. We answer your most frequently asked questions on healthcare reputation management here.

Once you're monitoring and responding to reviews, it's time to start thinking about what people are actually saying in those reviews, what you can do about those comments, and how you can report on improvements and changes as you are seeing reviews come through. It's important to collect key themes and trends for key stakeholders in your organization.

At Yext, we call this collection of data Sentiment Analysis, where you can understand what is being said in reviews and whether what is being said is positive or negative — which can help you identify trends that you might not see otherwise.

The best way to approach understanding review sentiment is to consider what people tend to associate with negative experiences with your organization, and create collections of terms that you want more insight into. For example, people are often triggered by the following topics:

• Billing

• Cleanliness

• Staff

• Wait Time

• Cost of Care

These reviews are important because you can learn a lot from what is said about you, make service recovery changes based on feedback in the comments, and even collect the reviews to promote positive compliments to your executive team members, clinic and practice managers, and individual providers. Rich data lives in review comments from patients and consumers, and it's important to generate new patient reviews whenever and wherever you can.

The feedback you receive via reviews gives you a snapshot into the experience and impressions that individual has of your organization. Collectively, this information is very important and can help you position your practice as the best choice for your patients.

Additionally, incorporating this feedback can help you improve patient experiences in the clinical setting, improve patient experiences digitally, and make a good impression in pre- and post-clinical settings.

When you manage your reputation online and focus specifically on third-party reviews, you should start to see improvements in your search results position, driving additional new patients to your booking page. Great reviews and high star ratings help with SEO. The more likely you are to appear in the SERP when a patient or consumer searches for your organization and providers, the more likely you will gain the click to your website, the patient appointment — and ultimately, the revenue.

When you're ready to start – or scale – review management for your healthcare organization, you'll need a reputation management platform that facilitates collaboration and streamlines review response — like Yext Reviews.

If you're already using Yext Reviews (or if you're considering Yext Reviews and want to see how easy it is to set up your account), download our checklist: How to Use Yext Reviews for Healthcare Reputation Management today.

*According to Yext Reviews Tableau Dashboard.