Manage Your Online Reputation by Building a Better Brand
How Online Reputation Management Influences Your Brand
One of the quintessential goals of any online reputation management strategy must be the preservation of your professional brand. Whether you measure mentions, traffic, sales, or reach, reputation is your practice’s online currency, and the strength of your brand can enhance and protect that reputation.
But how do you begin? How can you build and grow your brand? And how can you keep it out of harm’s way?
Increase Brand Awareness Through Online Reputation Management
When you first decide to practice cosmetic dentistry or plastic surgery, building a brand may be the last thing on your mind, and it should be: patient care undoubtedly comes first. But the strange thing is, once you make that decision, you’ve already taken the first step toward building your brand.
When it comes right down to it, your brand matters most to your patients. When they first consider a procedure and turn to the internet to research your practice, what will they find? Will they be convinced to make the call and schedule an appointment?
3 Actions Steps to Help Monitor Your Brand
By monitoring online reputation, you can ensure current and potential patients find a clear representation of who you are and the services you provide. This is why creating a proactive reputation management strategy is essential to the success of any aesthetic healthcare practice.
Here are 3 steps you can take today to help bolster your online reputation and increase brand awareness.
- Encourage current patients to post online reviews
- Create Google Alerts for your name and the name of your practice
- Get the word out about practice events and new technology
Build Credibility First to Inspire Trust Later
As David Horne writes in a guest post on Spin Sucks, “3 Steps to Building an Incredible Brand,” any brand needs to begin with a solid foundation, and that foundation is credibility.
“Credibility is defined as the ‘quality or power of inspiring belief.’ There is no way to build an incredible brand without trust.”
Your current patients have become loyal return patients because they believe in your practice, they trust in the fact that you will provide them with safe and effective care. Once you can inspire this same trust in your new patients from the moment they come into contact with your brand online, you will know you have built an incredible brand and reinforced your online reputation.
How to Build Trust Among Your Patients
Horne writes there are two types of credibility: current credibility, which comes from delivering on promises; and past credibility, which is built over a period of time.
Any successful brand relies on a steady combination of both, but how do you get started? Horne offers the following three steps to take advantage of your current credibility and begin to build your brand and increase awareness both online and off.
- Instill Confidence
- Show Competence
- Be Consistent
Social Media Provides Direct Connection to Your Brand Builders
Seems easy enough, right? You probably satisfy all three steps without dedicating too much extra effort. However, in the age of social media, I would add one to the list that requires a little more effort, but has the potential to help you quickly earn more credibility and brand awareness.
Protect Your Brand with Proactive Engagement
The online chatter centered on your practice will go where it wants to go, there’s no direct way to control how your patients view your brand. However, monitoring that conversation, and engaging with the audience will help you satisfy each of the goals laid out by Horne and inspire them to continue to build the brand.
While the main benefit of engaging in this online conversation is the chance to inspire your loyal patients and brand advocates to spread the word and help build your brand, a secondary benefit comes in the form of increased security.
The stronger your brand, the more active your audience, the more effective your online reputation management strategy becomes.
Still have questions? Want to tell us how you engage with patients online and how that helps strengthen your brand? Visit the Rosemont Media Facebook page and fill us in.