Reputation Management Archives

Why Physical Therapy Reputation Management Matters

physical therapy reputation management

Business owners have always known that excellent customer service is an integral part of running a successful business. Physical therapy is no exception, as satisfied patients spread the word of their positive experience and are largely responsible for helping a practice grow. Disgruntled patients, on the other hand, likely won’t return to your practice and may even tell other people that they weren’t pleased with their treatment. This underlines the importance of physical therapy reputation management, which must be a major focus of your strategy if you want your practice to continue thriving.

Patients May Critique Both Patient Care and Customer Service

These days, with just about everything being on the Internet, your online reputation is priceless. The [pullquote2 textColor=”#000000″]Managing what’s being said about your physical therapy practice may be the most essential marketing you can do[/pullquote2] reputation you develop is largely based on what’s been said about your practice on review sites, and there is currently an abundance of these types of sites that patients can use to speak their minds. This is why managing what’s being said about your physical therapy practice may be the most essential marketing you can do.

If you break it down, there are actually two processes of your practice that your patients can review on social media. The most common area they may comment on is their actual patient care, which is the hands-on treatment that he or she receives from a physical therapist. But they may also take note of and review your customer service and the way they are treated by your receptionist, billing department and other support staff. When you take stock of your online reputation, look at each of the comments and categorize them into customer service-related comments and patient care-related comments, so you can address their feedback with the appropriate members of your practice.

Addressing Pain in Physical Therapy Reputation Management

There are some aspects of physical therapy reputation management that can be a little tricky. Physical therapy sometimes involves pain for the patient. [pullquote2 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]If you are receiving online feedback from patients expressing frustration about this aspect of their treatment, you may want to try to be a little more compassionate and offer clearer explanations to your patients. [/pullquote2]It often involves pushing patients slightly past their levels of comfort to help them improve their strength and regain critical physical skills to improve their quality of life after an injury or painful condition. If you are receiving online feedback from patients expressing frustration about this aspect of their treatment, you may want to try to be a little more compassionate and offer clearer explanations to your patients. This will allow you to maintain the same treatment regimen with your patients, but broadens their understanding and minimizes their complaints. In many cases, complaints about physical therapy “hurting” or being “too aggressive” are really a failure in communication and not a failure in therapy.

Responding to comments as they are posted online and making sure you have a much higher percentage of positive ratings than negative ratings are crucial first steps. However, how can you focus on providing the excellent customer service your patients need if you’re spending all your time on your physical therapy reputation marketing? Can you develop internal processes to improve patient care if you are constantly monitoring your reviews online? It can be a bit of an endless cycle that leaves you spread too thin to grow your practice effectively, and you may need some additional help with these efforts.

[colored_box bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#de2022″]We would love to help you out by doing what we do best, so that you can continue providing the best customer service and patient care possible to all of your patients, which will help ensure they post glowing reviews about your practice online. Please contact us to find out how we can help your practice thrive in the age of social media. In addition to helping you with physical therapy reputation marketing, we can optimize your mobile website, send out newsletters for your practice, and handle all your marketing needs both on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as search engine based marketing on sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo.[/colored_box]

Reputation Marketing for Physical Therapists: 3 Top Tips

reputation marketing for physical therapists

In the field of medicine, your reputation is everything. Getting just one bad online review can have negatively impact your business in major ways. The worst part is, you may never know the business that you actually lost, since no one is going to tell you about it. This highlights why reputation marketing for physical therapists should be an essential component of your online strategy.

You need to be proactive when it comes to managing your reputation in the online space. If you’re not, competitors and the inevitable disgruntled patient will otherwise control the entire narrative of your practice online. With that, we bring you these three top tips for reputation marketing for physical therapists.

Use Negative Keywords When Marketing Online

Having a good keyword strategy is a necessity. However, this keyword strategy must include a way to limit your exposure to people who do not need your services. This saves your practice a great deal of money and ensures your patient base trusts you more through the door.

The negative keyword keeps your ads from showing up in places you would rather not be. If you start out with a happier patient base, you risk less problems down the road. However, no medical practice truthfully has the time to keep up with the ever-changing world of keywords. One of the best investments of resources in medicine is outsourcing at least the initial research of the proper keywords to target.

Aggregate All Citations

It’s difficult to have a complete grasp of what people are saying about you online. With a seemingly-endless number of review sites—Yelp, Google and Foursquare, to name a few—it’s possible for people to talk about your practice without you ever knowing it, since you may not even know that the page exists. In addition, there are many niche-oriented deep web pages that dedicate themselves to reviewing medical practices that you may not know about.

Fortunately, with the right software or the right partner, you don’t have to know about every comment that people make about you. You can focus on your current patients while the algorithm scours the Internet automatically for all citations or mentions of your practice across the entire Internet. This information comes to you delivered neatly for analysis.

[pullquote1 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]Once you know who is saying what, you can fix immediate problems[/pullquote1] Once you know who is saying what, you can fix immediate problems. When you trace back comments to their source, you also figure out where people comment on you most frequently across the Internet. With this information, you can make a real decision about whether to monitor that space more frequently. This allows you to better control the narrative about your practice.

The number one advantage to aggregating citations is pointing out trends. It’s much easier to see problems in your practice when you have information from multiple sources in one place.

Build Positive Links Consistently

The major search engines pay attention to pages with dynamic content. They also associate pages with similar citations to each other. In short, if the underlying message associated with your practice is negative, Google will raise the profile of all websites with negative information about you. If the consensus is that your practice provides good service and effective treatment, Google will raise those sites.

Aside from providing good service, you also tip the odds in your favor through consistent link building. Crowdsourcing articles related to your practice or putting up a few video marketing examples is a great way to advertise your practice directly and build links for the search engines.

We Can Help with Reputation Marketing for Physical Therapists

[info_box]Please feel free to contact us with any question about your presence on the Internet. We pride ourselves in offering a wide variety of services that encompass the entire spectrum of what you need to succeed online. We guide your company in search engine marketing, email newsletters, websites and responsive websites, video marketing, social media marketing and reputation marketing.[/info_box]

Reputation Management for Physical Therapy: Important Tips to Implement Today

reputation management for physical therapy

Maintaining a good reputation is important for any business, but it’s particularly important for anyone in the healthcare industry. To keep your private practice at the top, it’s critical to focus on reputation management for physical therapy right now.

Don’t Wait for a Problem before Taking Action

Physical therapists often focus on the importance of prevention, and this very same concept should apply to your reputation. This is why you shouldn’t wait until your physical therapy practice has a bad reputation before you do something about it. By being proactive now, you can help ensure that people find good things about your practice when they search your name.

Hiring a good reputation management firm, such as E-Rehab, can be a great approach to tackling this issue. However, there are also some steps that you can take on your own to help boost and maintain your practice’s reputation. Below are some useful tips that will help your practice earn a reputation that reflects its high quality.

Post Your Own Positive Content

To improve your online reputation, it’s helpful to first think about how your practice will appear to a prospective patient. With this in mind, try to address the following:

First of all, if you want people to find positive things when they enter your practice’s name into their favorite search engine, then you have to ensure that these positive things exist. This means that you should be creating online content that relates to your practice.
For example, if you haven’t already started a blog, you should definitely consider doing so. A blog can help with your search engine optimization, show the world your expertise, and it can be the first thing people find when searching for content related to your practice.
You should also build social media profiles on all of the big social media sites, including some that you might not have thought about using in your industry, such as Pinterest.
Lastly, it’s helpful to build profiles of yourself and your practice on physical therapy-related websites, upload informative videos to YouTube and build a profile on all of the local review sites.

Don’t Ignore Negative Content

It’s easy to ignore negative reviews and posts from others, but doing so can actually be quite harmful for your practice. [pullquote4 bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#46c0e9″]Regardless of whether someone’s post is true or not, those who see may often change their opinion regarding your practice. This can obviously pose a problem and cause potential patients to go to your competitors for treatment instead of you.[/pullquote4]Regardless of whether someone’s post is true or not, those who see may often change their opinion regarding your practice. This can obviously pose a problem and cause potential patients to go to your competitors for treatment instead of you.

If you make an effort to communicate with the person who has complained, however, in most cases you can improve the situation. If you address the negative comment, the person who posted the negative review might be willing to delete it or amend it. Even if they don’t take either of these actions, those who see this communication will at least know that you and your practice made an effort to respond to a problem or concern that a patient had.

Gather Testimonials and Reviews

Over time, have probably had quite a high number of patients that were satisfied with the treatment they received at your practice. So, why not use their satisfaction to your advantage?

The best way to do this is to gather testimonials from satisfied patients and post them on your website
You should also encourage your patients to post their feedback on the major local review sites and directly on your website
If people who are seeking physical therapy see that your previous patients are happy with the care that you have provided, then they might be more likely to give you a call for their physical therapy needs

Don’t Overlook Your Reputation Management for Physical Therapy

As you can probably see, reputation management for physical therapy isn’t necessarily easy, and it may require a lot of work. But if you look at the big picture, you’ll see that building and maintaining a strong online reputation is critical if you want your physical therapy practice to be successful.

[info_box]Along with tackling some of these steps yourself, it’s a good idea to work with a reputation management firm that understands your practice and wants to make it a success. To find out more about reputation management for physical therapy, as well as search engine optimization and marketing, contact us at E-Rehab today.[/info_box]

Physical Therapy Reputation Management Made Simple

physical therapy reputation management

For many private practices, physical therapy reputation management may seem like a vague process. Physical therapists specialize in knowing their patients, dealing with injuries and building back strength, but when it comes to creating a proactive plan for a healthy reputation, you may not know where to start. If this sounds familiar to you, the following short primer will show you how a reputation management firm like E-Rehab can help your physical therapy practice establish authority in a digital age.

Physical Therapy Reputation Management: What it is and is not

In the most basic sense, [highlight3 textColor=”#000000″]physical therapy reputation management is creating content that matches your goals and standards so that patients know what they are getting from you.[/highlight3] If your practice specializes in spinal rehab, but your marketing information makes it sound like you’re the best place to go for arm injuries, this can create a disconnect with visitors. In this case, patients expect one thing and get another. This can lead to your patients writing negative reviews about your practice on various review sites (Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.), which will in turn hurt your reputation, even though you’re an expert at spinal care.

Reputation management seeks to establish in people’s minds what you do and don’t do well, so they know what to expect. It does not seek to create false reviews, attempt to get poor reviews taken down (this doesn’t include patently false, libelous reviews), or otherwise take pushy actions to establish your reputation.

Walk the Talk

[highlight3 textColor=”#000000″]The most important part of physical therapy reputation management is that you have information out for people to access: newsletters to subscribers, blogs to the public, and targeted marketing to the right patients and referring physicians. [/highlight3] This information must match what people actually experience from your practice.

With proper information designed and marketed to the right audience, your business reputation will increase consistent with your desired goals and specialties. Walking the talk is the foundation for all other aspects of reputation management. With it, patients will give you great reviews and build your reputation with minimal effort on your part. Without it, your patients will feel confused and let down because they did not receive the service they expected.

Marketing Materials

In physical therapy reputation management, the next essential step after establishing a clear connection between your actions and your message is creating the right marketing materials. [highlight3]From your brand to your planned content, your marketing material needs to reflect your business in both quality and content.[/highlight3]

Much of physical therapy happens at a level people cannot see, so at first they will judge you less by the results of your actions and more by the materials they see. Your marketing material therefore needs to be designed in such a way that it catches the eye of potential patients and referring physicians and displays that you do what you advertise.

Promotional Design

Much of the marketing in physical therapy is specialized and therefore needs to be done by specialists. For example, if you offer therapy that helps address the symptoms of insomnia and narcolepsy, you do not want your advertising materials for it to be bright yellow, orange or green. When marketers want to communicate sleep-oriented products, they create a dark blue color scheme to communicate peaceful sleep. This is one of the many tricks-of-the trade which marketers use to communicate to the public beyond just word. Style matters, and it pays to have experts in style design your marketing materials.

[highlight2 textColor=”#000000″]Simply put, reputation management is producing the right materials to let patients know what your practice offers and the core values you hold as a physical therapist. This is accomplished by using modern marketing and networking materials and techniques with a goal to educate your audience and establish your authority in the physical therapy field.[/highlight2] [squeeze_box4]If this all sounds overwhelming and you feel that you need some extra assistance with your physical therapy reputation management, have no fear: we can help. At E-Rehab, we specialize in all aspects of online marketing strategies that can help your reputation improve and your practice prosper. Contact us today to find out how we can help you develop an online reputation that reflects the quality of your business.[/squeeze_box4]

Why You Need a Blog to Improve Your Physical Therapy Reputation Marketing

Are you struggling to create a successful physical therapy reputation marketing approach? If so, you should strongly consider writing blogs if you’re not already doing so. Although blogs are often treated like an afterthought by many businesses, they can be a powerful tool for boosting the reputation of your physical therapy practice.

Why You Should Blog to Improve Your Physical Therapy Reputation Marketing

Business owners often neglect the importance of a blog when it comes to reputation marketing, but that is a huge mistake: [highlight4]blogs are actually one of the most effective ways to spread your brand and reach a potential audience.[/highlight4]

This is even true of a physical therapist like you: a well-written, fun, and informative blog can provide your patients with information about common physical problems, easy self-fixes, unique personal stories, and treatment angles they would have never considered otherwise.

Build Your Authority

By way of illustration, marketing expert Steve Olenski of Forbes magazine delved deeply into the world of blog-based marketing and found that it offered a unique approach to the following: content strategy; demographic marketing, and authority building.

The latter point is especially important: if you come across like a true expert on physical therapy (by offering well-researched and engaging blog content), your reputation will grow by leaps and bounds.[blockquote align=”center”]Blogging also offers a unique way for your patients to interact with you via the comment section found in most high-quality blogs. Here, they can praise your blog content and your services, which will create a positive feedback loop that will continually enhance your reputation for years to come.[/blockquote]

Even if they come to your blog to complain, you can still turn that into an advantage by directly addressing their concerns and soothe their fears by offering a free examination. You will come away looking humble and willing to fix your mistakes: a major reputation boost.

Researching Blog Topics

Consistently updating a worthwhile blog requires finding topics you want to write about. That’s actually much trickier than it seems, especially as a physical therapy expert, since you already have an extremely extensive understanding of the subject matter. On the other hand, the audience of your website doesn’t have this same understanding, and figuring out what they’d like to learn about can be a struggle.

In this circumstance, it’s best to step back and think about an industry or service which you know little about, such as auto repair, and consider what confuses you about it. Then, you should brainstorm similar topics for your blog, such as:

Common injuries or painful conditions
Relevant treatments used to address these issues
Other techniques and services you may use during treatment
How long each treatment session takes, and how many sessions may be needed for certain injuries

Next, try to center each of your blogs around these ideas, such as ACL tear rehabilitation, to create a plethora of possible blog topics. If you get stuck trying to find a good topic, use a tool like Google AdWords to pinpoint commonly searched keywords that are relevant to physical therapy.

For example, keywords and phrases like “torn ACL” and “did I break my ankle?” commonly show up in Google searches. Pitch your blog around these keywords, adding a unique twist, such as “home remedies for a broken toe,” and you have a potential blog topic.

Always Utilize a Reputable “Author” for All Content

Creating a blog without a reputable author is one of the biggest ways you can destroy the effectiveness of your physical therapy reputation marketing. Don’t farm it out to just anyone: either write the blog yourself, find a skilled intern willing to do it for some extra cash, or find reputable physical therapists willing to occasionally guest blog for you.

Focusing your blog on truly informative and knowledgeable writers creates a sense of “author authority” that will make your blog stand out in an over-saturated market. People will immediately trust what you have to say and, as a result, your blog—and your reputation—will grow exponentially.

[squeeze_box5]By now, it should be apparent that you simply can’t avoid setting up a blog for your physical therapy practice. The boost to your reputation will be too immense for you to ignore. However, if you’re still struggling to set up a good blog or come up with a great reputation marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact us at E-Rehab right away. Our physical therapy reputation marketing experts will help fine-tune your marketing approach, help you design an eye-catching and memorable blog, and get you on the road to success. After that, the hard work of keeping up with your blog should be a heck of a lot easier.[/squeeze_box5]

10 Reasons Physical Therapists Need Reputation Management

physical therapy reputation management picture of quality

Reputation management for physical therapy is an important aspect of modern marketing and business practices. Your business reputation is important, and in the social age, people can say things about you anytime, anywhere and have a drastic impact on your business processes. The following reasons PT businesses need reputation management show the value of proactively engaging your online reputation.

Knowledge – The first part of customer service is knowing what your customers are saying about you. At this stage, even the bad reviews are valuable to you. Knowledge about what people are saying gives you power to respond positively and turn negative customers into positives (if possible), increase word-of-mouth from positive customers, and address and fix systematic issues.
Visibility – With changes to Google’s algorithm, website management is social management. For your SEO to perform, for your website to be seen, you have to manage your reputation on social media sites. From accurate information (have you checked your Google+ page recently?) to creating positive dialogue (when was the last time a customer got a personal Facebook response?), reputation management creates an online presence for your business.
Manage Multiple Presences – Your business is PT. Marketing 25 years ago was simple: phone-book, physicians and hospitals, and a good location would be the primary methods of reaching your customers. With the internet, marketing has changed. You must maintain local listings on the 3 major search engines, create regular posts on Facebook and Twitter, create videos on YouTube, and do regular email updates.
Track Customers – Many people just see reputation management as taking care of social media, but a good program will integrate with websites and internal databases to locate where customers are coming from, giving you control over advertising as well as managing your reputation.
Videos – With increasing access to high-speed internet and 4G services growing in both service and technology (LTE), users are looking for full audio/visual communication from service providers. Good reputation management programs will not only set up a YouTube channel, but help you create and post videos to let people know about your business.
Review Creation – When a customer has a great experience with your business, they will want to tell their friends on Facebook or Twitter about it. If you create surveys, online comment forms, email receipts and more with Facebook and Twitter links embedded in them, you bring customers’ friends to them with the click of a button.
Technology Tracking – Reputation management experts know SEO, SEM and social marketing. It is their business. A good reputation management program works not only today, but with the changes down the road, too. Whether it is the increase in mobile technologies or changes to search algorithms, reputation management helps your PT business stay technologically relevant.
Inform Prospects – A reputation management team focused on PT knows what your customers want. From medical libraries to Privacy Policy and FAQs, a reputation management package should include management of your information on your website: giving customers the information they need and creating dialogue on various sites through social network links.
Manage Physicians and Patients – Your PT reputation is affected by both patients and physicians who refer them. The best teams will understand that physician relationship management is entirely different than customer relationships, and give you tools to reach both groups and build your reputation.
Website Maintenance – Now with mobile platforms and social networking, integrating all of these marketing platforms with your website is an essential part of a reputation management program. Physical therapy practice owners often times don’t have the knowledge and/or resources to stay on top of the constant changes that occur with online marketing. Therefore, it is important that you have someone you trust keeping an eye on this because it does impact your online reputation.