How to Measure Online Reputation Management Success in Healthcare

More than ever, consumers are turning to the internet for information about your healthcare organization. Online, patients are reading – and leaving – reviews on everything from your facilities to your providers.

Approximately 90% of patients read online reviews to evaluate providers, and 69% of patients will not even consider a healthcare provider with less than a 4.0 average star rating. The message for marketers is clear: after all the time you've spent optimizing every channel in the patient journey, you simply can't afford to neglect your reviews.

Drawing on 20 years of experience helping healthcare organizations navigate an increasingly digital world, we're sharing everything we know about the basics of online reputation management for healthcare. This is the fourth installment of a five-part series – including four blogs and an actionable checklist for healthcare marketers – on using reviews to boost your digital presence, improve discoverability, and build trust in your brand.

So far, we've explored the benefits of healthcare reputation management, how to create a reputation management strategy, and then we answered all the lingering questions. Now that you know how to act on an online healthcare reputation management strategy, you'll need to know how to measure its success — and that's exactly what we'll learn today.

Just catching up? Read the previous blogs:

• The Benefits of Healthcare Reputation Management

• How to Create a Healthcare Reputation Management Strategy

• FAQ: Online Reputation Management for Healthcare

Coming up next:

• [Checklist] How to Use Yext Reviews for Healthcare Reputation Management

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If you've been following this whole series, you should be ready to create an online reputation management plan. That's a great start — but you'll still need to show the value of your program. How will you measure the impact of everything from monitoring your reviews to full review generation? These efforts certainly require the investment of both time and money.

So, what key metrics should you look at when you are creating your reports on your online reputation management efforts?

Analytics tools can give you a sense of what people are saying about you across review sites and social media platforms. You can track your performance progress over time. You'll also want to set up your reports with the future in mind, for ease of scale.

To measure the success of your healthcare online reputation management strategy, you'll need to organize your reviews first.

Start by setting up your reporting with the right folders and/or labels so that you can review your performance by different groupings. This is easy to do within the Yext platform. (If you don't work with Yext, make sure your reputation management software can separate your data into your key strategic areas.)

An example folder or label structure could be:

• Provider types: (For example, "Cardiology" or "Neurology" or "Primary Care.") When you run reports, you'll be able to see how certain provider types are performing over time — and compare reputation by specialty or provider type in specific locations. In the future, you'll also be able to share reports with specific providers or groups by folder or label.

• Locations or Facilities: (For example, "ABC city" or "Main Street Practice"). Monitoring locations and/or facilities is a good way to start to see trends in your locations (like mentions of parking, front desk staff) and compare regions, location performance, and more over time.

• Departments or Service Lines: If you are listing your departments or service lines, it would be useful to see if there are overarching trends associated with the department — and then later on have the ability to share department- or service-line level metrics with department chairs or administrators.

• Regions: If your organization operates in different regions, you'll want to monitor your online reputation locally and understand performance by location.

Once you've set up your account with labels and folders, you're ready to get started with running reports. Some questions you might have include:

• Why are we getting positive and negative reviews?

• How do we tie this into our larger healthcare brand reputation management strategy?

• How do we share patient feedback with a provider or facility to encourage better patient experiences?

When you manage your online reputation, you will want to look at the metrics like:

• Total number of reviews over time, which is helpful to measure the success of review generation efforts

• Average star rating over time, which tracks the progress of your online reputation management strategy

• Key sentiment changes over time, which helps you understand what drives positive reviews and how you can drive more positive patient experiences

It's important that you are focusing on these metrics over time. Data at a single point in time is worthless, but monitoring trends via sentiment analysis can help you make real-time decisions to improve patient care and satisfaction.

You'll also want to share these reports with various stakeholders in your organization. Based on the folder and/or label structure you've created during your review monitoring phase, this should be an easy export from your reputation management tool.

When designing your reports, consider stakeholders like:

• Location managers

• Facility managers

• Service lines

• Departments

• Provider groups

• Individual provider

Using the above metrics, you can also set up specific dashboards for these groups. You may want to isolate the top three and/or bottom three service lines, for example, to showcase what is going well and what is not going well to an executive.

A robust reputation management strategy will only become more valuable as we move into a fully consumer-focused digital world where the consumer or patient has far more options to select and book an appointment with a provider of her choice.

Managing your reputation is a big project, but it leads to valuable insights that can have a major impact on your organization.

Over the course of this blog series, we've explored the basics of healthcare reputation management, how to build your strategy (and increase discoverability across search engines), the day to day of managing patient reviews, and how to measure success. From here, hopefully you feel comfortable getting started with your own healthcare reputation management strategy.

Now, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to hit the ground running. That's why the final installment of this series is a checklist on how to use Yext Reviews for healthcare reputation management, so you can take action right away.

We hope you found this series helpful — and that if you are still looking for the right healthcare reputation management platform, you'll schedule a demo with Yext today.