How a Dental Practice Brand Safeguards Your Online Reputation
First I Spoke, Then I Wrote, Now iPhone
There’s one main reason why you really need to brand your dental practice today: the modern smartphone. This single piece of modern technology is an information fire hose, and your prospective patients are using it to find just about every product and service, including a new dentist. Consider for a moment how much data this small device channels into our hands. What was science fiction twenty years ago is now a reality in this device, and as a result of the growing smartphone revolution, more and more of our lives exist online.
Texts, apps, posts, tweets, steaming news, voice calls, email, Snapchat, Google searches…. We can do a seemingly unlimited number of things with our phones—watch a movie, buy a car, and view satellite images of our home. Companies urge us to go paperless, create a profile, and log in. Municipalities want residents to pay bills and fill out forms online. Schools use the internet to collect homework and post grades. Taxes are efiled. We use our phones to review products and services. To get directions. To apply for jobs. To pay for groceries. Just think about how many times a day you look for your phone. We are constantly scrolling, sending pics, vines, and emojis, forwarding funny memes, and responding to colleagues while we wait in line at the grocery store.
Most people would suffer a panic attack if they left home without their phone. Maybe this is why they sell smart glasses, so you can literally wear the internet on your face. What’s next: an iPhone port in the brain? Given the current trend, this may not be too outrageous. Look up from your own phone sometimes, and you’ll see that everyone is drawn to that glowing screen in much the same way our primitive ancestors huddled around fire to keep warm.
Dentists, Develop Your Google Business Page
How to Leverage the Google Algorithm and Attract New Dental Patients Focus on Your Google Business Page The Google business page remains one of the most underutilized areas of dental marketing. While dentists are busy posting to social media and designing the perfect website, their Google business pages contain only
Like the Tide, No One Can Hold the Internet Back
As the owner of a dental practice in the modern world, how should you respond to this information-obsessed reality? Well, one thing’s certain—to succeed, you can’t ignore it. Even if you decide to be passive and do nothing online, the web will still find and brand your dental practice. Search engine bots continuously scour web pages, gathering, comparing, and categorizing information. So the lack of a webpage or pictures or social media (or, even worse, bad reviews on unclaimed business pages, those automatically generated by sites like Yelp and Foursquare) will be noticed and will negatively affect your ranking. The three largest search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, use complex algorithms to determine which practices are most relevant and list them accordingly; if your practice isn’t on the first page when someone searches for a dentist, there’s a good chance this patient won’t even see your listing. It is true that many factors determine ranking, but, generally speaking, the more online presence a dental practice has, the higher it ranks. The higher it ranks, the more visibility it receives. This, of course, leads to more calls and new patients, but, most importantly, internet presence and a high ranking advertise value. In other words, patients perceive that high-ranking practices have better dentists and better service. Moreover, it is this perceived value that cultivates the single most important element of all successful brands: trust. Trust is why people stick with the same make of vehicle, year after year, and why people wait in line for days to receive the newest Apple technology, and ultimately why people choose one dental office over another.
(Fictional) Case Study: Dr. Smith Ignores the Internet
Consider this example. Dr. Smith opens a dental practice in 1989. He places an ad in the Yellow Pages, installs a nice sign above the door, with the letters DDS, prominently displayed, and joins the local Chamber of Commerce. After meeting with some key people in the community and participating in a charity event or two, the phone starts ringing. Referrals do much of the heavy lifting to grow Dr. Smith’s practice and provide him with a comfortable income. He is able to afford some new equipment, a high-end Mercedes, and a fancy staff dinner around the holidays. When the internet comes along in the mid 90’s, Dr. Smith figures that websites are just another passing fad, and he keeps doing things the way he has for years, which seems to work for him just fine, at first.
Over the next ten years, however, Dr. Smith notices a decline in the number of new patients coming through his door. It is slight at first but grows more noticeable every year. He chalks it up to the economy and the growing number of dentists in town; he isn’t that concerned. He can still pay his bills and save for retirement. What he has failed to recognize is the rapid development online. Not only does he have more competition in town, but these new dentists are reaching out to the vast number of people searching on the web. The listing he does have on the internet is actually an online version of his Yellow Page information, and Google lists this on page 12. It’s bad enough that patients never see Dr. Smith’s contact information, but his lack of internet presence actually creates an even bigger problem. Unbeknownst to him, review giant Yelp has automatically created a business page for his practice, and this page solicits patient feedback. Now, anyone can leave permanent comments about Dr. Smith online, and this is exactly what happens one Tuesday afternoon in July.
A young woman leaves his office, unhappy with a crown. In her opinion, the edges seem too rough, and it was very expensive. She had planned to use that money for her annual girls’ trip to Jamaica. Plus, she waited twenty minutes to see the doctor, and her boyfriend didn’t return her call the previous night. She doesn’t plan to see Dr. Smith again, so she vents her frustrations online. She Googles John Smith DDS, finds his automatically-generated Yelp page, and leaves a one-star review that includes words like “substandard work” and “poor customer service.” This immediately becomes Dr. Smith’s first and only review online. It is the only comment that he has on the internet. And now that everything is online, this one comment by an unhappy patient is his practice brand. All of the people considering his office will judge the entirety of his practice by this one comment, hastily left by an over-caffeinated millennial in the front seat of her bright green Volkswagen.
Build, Build, Build Your Dental Practice Brand Every Day
It’s a good thing if the above scenario makes you panic a little. The idea that anyone can make unsubstantiated claims about your practice and post them online, for everyone to see, for all time, is alarming—especially if you have a very limited internet presence. To consolidate my best advice bluntly: You need gobs of good press to protect yourself from the inevitable bad, to create a kind of buffer that absorbs attacks on your practice brand—attacks from angry patients, disgruntled employees, and competition bent on taking you down a peg or two. If you have 100 five-star Google reviews, and someone takes his frustrations out on you, no big deal. It won’t affect your overall rating much, and readers are likely to see the review for what it is, especially if you respond in a rational, measured, and sympathetic tone. In fact, such a review can actually help by illustrating your depth of character as you take the high road and extend an olive branch.
Although protecting your brand from outside attacks is critical, the bulk of your work online must educate the public about your expertise, services, and—most importantly—your mission, the values and principles that direct your practice. Remember that prospective patients are looking for more than qualified clinicians, a list of dental services, and fees. They want to see the heart of your practice, to see if you truly care about people and have a passion for dentistry. People are looking over your website and social media to find authenticity and genuine enthusiasm. To brand your dental practice and strengthen your online presence, you must demonstrate these qualities in every online expression—every post, tweet, picture, video, blog, etc.; all of your “online real estate” must be rooted in and reinforced by altruism and the highest ethical standard.
