Positive online reviews can generate a lot of new patients for your medical practice. The best scenario is actually to host a review site specifically for your medical practice. This way you get to control what gets published onto the Internet for others to see. This is one of the best ways to market a medical practice.

Imagine a review site that notifies you every time one of your patients writes a review. Then you can decide whether that review gets pushed out over the internet and to search engines like Google and Yahoo. Essentially you get to control your Medical practice’s reputation online. This kind of review site for your practice can literally be set up in minutes.

It’s a win-win for both you and your patients. Your patients feel like you are interested in what they have to say. It engages them and actually creates buy-in and loyalty from your patients. Your advantage is that you have leveraged the positive word-of-mouth of your existing patients and their effort in typing in favorable information online and turned that around into an excellent marketing vehicle for yourself. It is like giving a bullhorn to your happiest patients. For those patients who are unhappy or have a legitimate constructive concern, you can use that to improve your practice. Such reviews do not need to be published onto the Internet.

The big advantage here of this kind of marketing program is that it is extremely low cost and it is an ongoing process, so that favorable information about your practice continues to be captured, grows with time, and occupies more and more of the Internet shelf space, so that you are more likely to be found when a Medical patient is walking down the aisle of the Internet looking for which Medical Doctor to pick for their Medical needs.

For a moment, let us assume that you have an online marketing plan, whether that is simply putting up your own web site and tinkering with it, so that you think it is more appealing to people who happen to land across it or, alternatively, if it involves online click-through advertising versus banner ads.

The simple truth of the matter is most prospective patients looking for Medical services typically do a validation of where they are going to go, and it could be a validation for reasons that are completely unknown or completely not relevant to what you may think is important. For instance, if a patient is told about your practice by a friend, surely the major source of referral is a friend of that prospective patient. But that friend may not have told them exactly the location or the address, or they may only partially know the doctor’s name or know the street intersection. In these situations, what prospective Medical patients do is they go online into a search engine and type in a partial version of the Medical Doctor’s name or the Medical practice or, alternatively, put in the street address, or they may just do this simply to get a phone number to make an appointment. If you are not controlling your online reputation, in the next several years, you are going to have one or two Medical patients who are disgruntled. What these patients typically do is go to some third-party web site where they are going to write a review that is quite unfavorable.