Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing podcast, where we talk about everything related to concierge medical practices and their marketing to help our physicians succeed in their businesses. My name is Steve Schwartz, and I’m your host.

Today, we’re interviewing Scott Lauer, a digital marketing specialist and techie.

Scott, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Awesome. So today, we’re gonna talk about the importance of five-star reviews for concierge medical practice and the process by which we help our clients get more five-star reviews. Also, kind of a cool way how we can request feedback from a physician’s patient privately so that the physician has the opportunity to hear if one of their patients are not happy to give him or her the opportunity to make it right and possibly even improve their company and their process so that they have more happy patients.

So, Scott, why don’t we jump right into it today? Let us know, first of all, what do you think is the best way to explain the true importance of why a medical practice needs to have lots of five-star reviews?

Well, reviews in the in and of themselves are what I like to say, they’re probably the most psychologically motivating factor when it comes to having somebody go from a perspective lead into engaging with you and getting into your sales process. Now, well, you know, that’s obviously going to vary based on, you know, what type of practice you are, and and that’s gonna, you know, like I said, vary quite differently between each practice.

However, like I said, being as it the most psychologically motivating, we want to make sure that people have the opportunity to see that you are a good practice, that you’re providing quality care. You know? If you have a great bedside manner, we wanna make sure that people are putting it out there until you can keep acquiring new patients into your practice. One thing I will say is when it comes to specifically on the concierge side, you’re transitioning away from a traditional practice. So you’re not necessarily gonna have that waiting room experience as a patient to where you get to sit there and have a little bit of small talk, and you might have some, you know, a new patient speaking to a veteran patient and then, wow. I really love this doctor’s bedside manner. And I really love what this doctor handles with my, you know, the way that I’m being treated while I’m here. So removing that within the concierge side, you wanna make sure you’re still allowing for people to be able to have that somewhat of an experience, and they can do that through the review side.

Right. And I was thinking as well, when a person is considering a concierge medical practice or physician to become their doctor, they might go to Google. In fact, probably lots of them do and do a search on concierge medical physician near me. And let’s say there’s three businesses listed in the Google three-pack, the map pack. And if one of them has hundreds of five-star reviews and a 4.9, total review rating, and the other ones only have a couple of reviews and a lower aggregate star rating, who are they likely gonna choose?

Right? Yeah. Exactly. You’re gonna choose the person with the most amount of reviews. And even to an extent, I have seen a certain situation of we’ll say, for example, you have fifty reviews and you have a 4.8-star rating. Right. And then the next competition, they have five reviews, but they have a five-star rating. People are gonna be more likely to go to that 4.8. Even though it’s a little bit lower, there’s much more trust and faith. You know? Five is a lot less than fifty. Right. You know? So you do have to take that into consideration. Getting as many good positive reviews as possible is going to help you naturally just be able to acquire new patients a little bit easier.

Exactly. And I read an article not too long ago that said that having lots of positive reviews on your Google profile can actually help increase your rankings on Google. And Google is more likely to reward your practice with higher rankings because you have more five-star reviews. Have you seen that as well?

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all engagement. So Google is going to see that this Google business profile is having clients or patients interacting with it. They’re leaving their review, so they obviously feel satisfied enough to engage with the business and leave that review and showcase where they had, you know, their pleasure, points of the visit or what they really wanted to get out and tell the public about their experience. So Google’s gonna see that, and it’s gonna say, okay. Well, if people are interacting with it, more people might wanna see it. So let’s push it to the top more. Let’s show more people because people are actually engaging with it.

Yeah. Love it. It’s so true. It just I can’t understate how important it is for a medical practice to have a steady flow of five-star reviews coming in, you know, every day if possible. Several a week is great, but it needs to happen. And if a practice does not have a method in place by which they actively ask for reviews from their patients, they’re missing a huge vital part of their digital marketing strategy, and it’s hurting their practice and certainly hurting their growth.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, and that’s also an issue. You’re running your practice. Right? Your front office is making sure that your patients are getting in and out on a timely manner. You have everybody on your team has specific goals and tasks that they have to do on a daily basis. So, you know, it opens up the question of how do you implement and how do you create an effective strategy for gaining these reviews on a regular basis without inundating one of your team members or without having to hire team members specifically for sending out review requests.

Right. So you were telling me earlier about a method of automating the “please review us” messages, whether emails or text. Can you chime in a little bit about that now?

Sure. Absolutely. So we use an awesome automation tool called HighLevel. It also acts as a CRM. So if you want to, you can entirely exist within it, in and of itself and only have to be in one place on a daily basis. But what would happen is whether we’re utilizing their calendar system or if we’re just syncing your patients into the system. So that would be, like, name, first name, last name, email. Make sure we’re gathering that in an appropriate and efficient manner that does comply with all of the regulations in regards to marketing outreaches. Then from there, if you have it, just say, boom. Just click this button that sends them an email. Wait an hour, sends them a text message. You could do either or. You could do both, which gets really dependent upon you. I have ways to configure it to do do it, really, whichever you want to do. The great part about it is it’s automated. Right? So if, you know, we’re set we could set it up into a way to where after the appointment, if it’s their first visit, however we wanna delineate where we’re designating who wants to get the review request. It just kinda goes off on its on its own. You don’t have to have somebody constantly sitting there and saying, okay. This person, I wanna send a review. This person, I wanna send a review. And I have to write the email up every time, and I have to send it. You know? You just click in a button, and, boom, that review is getting sent out.

Right. Using the technology to automate the mundane tasks of running a practice is gold. Right? We know it gets done. We know it gets done correctly, and it is not reliant on an overworked or extra busy human. Somebody at the front desk or somebody behind the scenes at a medical practice. So automating the process. So you mentioned about having an email go out or a text message to go out or both to the patient requesting feedback on their visit. What does an email say ballpark to engage them to leave a review?

Part of what I love to do is I get into a meeting with my clients, and I say, okay. There’s an email we’re gonna send out. How would you like it to sound? Right? You know, I wanna make sure that I’m properly capturing the tone of the business and and of the practice. You know, I wanna make sure it sounds as how they would like to be spoken in terms of. Right? Because, you know, we’re speaking for the client and setting these items up. So it’s fully customizable. We can go sit down together and write out a page long email if you want. You could put five words in there. It’s entirely up to you. And then from there, we either have it say, hey. Thank you for the, you know, thank you for the time and the appointment today. Did you have a good trip? Did you have a good visit? Would you feel comfortable with providing some feedback? And, you know, depending upon if it’s good feedback or if it’s, you know, not so good feedback, we wanna give them the opportunity to either leave that publicly facing or if, you know, maybe they didn’t have a good visit, you wanna give them the opportunity to share that information, but not in a way that’s going to negatively impact you. You know? Again, we are talking about, you know, medical, practices. So there is a chance that, you know, they might not want some of that information to be put publicly on the Internet. So if you give them the opportunity to leave a private feedback form, they can feel much more comfortable in really stating what the issue was.

Right. So what you’re saying is that we send out an email thanking that patient for being a patient of this practice. We appreciate you. It would mean the world to us if you would share feedback on your visit with us so so that we as a medical practice can always do better and be better. And so it gives them an easy way to click a link and go right to your Google page or your Facebook page or health grades or any one of these different, you know, Better Business Bureau, different places where the patient is invited to leave a five-star review so that they don’t have to go hunting for it, I guess. And then on the other side, if the patient has some constructive feedback, if they have some issue or a gripe that they they wanna be heard. I think this is what I’ve discovered in my many years of being in digital marketing is that most times, if a customer of a business whether medical or otherwise is not happy, they typically don’t want to blast the business, but instead, they wanna be heard and they wanna have some sort of resolution.

Right? And so if we give the patient an opportunity to fill out a form and say, you know, here’s who I am and here’s what happened, and I’m not happy with how x y z occurred. I need some help getting this thing, this issue resolved. That information goes straight to the physician, gives them an opportunity to receive that information privately. And through that, the physician can then pick up the phone, call the patient and say, mister and missus Smith, I’m so sorry about what happened. Thank you for sharing that feedback with us and whatever it is, trying to turn a negative situation into a positive situation. You know, let’s face it, every business has issues from time to time. Every business. And that can be from how a person is treated or somebody had to wait too long to get assistance or, you know, I don’t know. They didn’t spend enough time in the examination. Whatever the situation is, every business has some sort of hiccup from time to time and we as business owners want to have the opportunity to make it right because we love our clients. We love our patients, and we want them to be one hundred percent satisfied with doing business with us. And so we appreciate the fact that if someone is unhappy about something that they can reach out to us privately, give us a chance to make it right, and in doing so turning a negative situation into a positive situation, turning a potentially negative review into a positive review.

If there was a situation where somebody was unhappy and they shared that feedback with me privately, gave us ability to make it right, and then we did make it right. I would love to have a five-star review that says, my name is so and so. There was a problem that happened. I reached out to them privately. They made it right, and I’m a happy patient of this practice, and I will continue to refer them because even though there was an issue, they took care of me and they made it right. That kind of review speaks volumes for potential patients of a practice to read and say, you know what? I like this company. I like this doctor. I like how this situation was handled. Scott, do you agree or any thoughts to add to that?

I agree. Absolutely. You know, we are all humans, and we all do make mistakes from time to time. And showcasing, one, that you are admitting that you made a mistake, You’re coming to the table to try to find a resolution. Right? That does a few things. Right? So you wanna make sure you’re trying to you will have an opportunity to retain that patient. You know, if there was a negative situation, you can correct it and turn them into a long-standing patient and a very long term, very loyal patient by showing, you know, hey. I messed up. I made a mistake. Here’s what we’re gonna do to make it right. And then like you said, that that type of review is fantastic because it shows everybody, wow, they acknowledge that they made a mistake, and they made moves to correct it. And that might even also have influenced their methodology moving forward so that maybe that mistake isn’t gonna happen again in the future. Right? You know, if you stagnate, you’re gonna kind of get left by the wayside. So being able to be flexible and adapt and utilizing real feedback from your patients to influence your methods and your practice, operate, procedures, it’s gonna be fantastic for you.

Excellent. Well, thanks for sharing. So just as a very quick recap, number one, it’s super important to have lots and lots of five-star reviews on your Google profile, as well as other places, but Google is certainly the most important in my opinion. And it’s important not just to have a lot of reviews, but to have them coming in on a regular predictable basis. Number two, you don’t want to count on a staff member to have to do the work of requesting reviews, but instead use an automated system or a process technically that does that kind of mundane work for you to make sure it gets done, make sure it gets done correctly. And like a software like we use called HighLevel, which works great. And then finally, to encourage happy patients to leave reviews on Google, Facebook, BBB, health grades, wherever. And if they’re not happy for any reason, we encourage them to share the feedback back with the practice privately to give the physician first of all the understanding and knowledge that somebody’s not happy, what they’re not happy about, and it gives them the opportunity to make it right privately. Okay, so that dirty laundry isn’t really shared out on public view or platforms for public consumption but instead gives the physician a chance to make it right privately changing a negative experience into a positive experience, a potential negative review into a potentially very positive review. So that’s, that’s great. Thanks for sharing today, Scott.