Social Media Affects Marketing

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Social Media Affects Your Marketing with Carl White

In this episode, Barbara and Carl discuss:
-What online advertisement means for marketing
-How today’s social media affects marketing
-How inexperienced doctors can get started with marketing

Key Takeaways:

“In the real world, it’s not so much about the mistake you make, but how you deal with it afterward” – Carl White.

Connect with Carl White:

Website: http://www.marketvisorygroup.com
Email: whitec@marketvisorygroup.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/healthcaremktg
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD9BLCu_i2ezBj1ktUHVmig
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marketvisorygroup

Connect with Barbara Hales:

Twitter:   @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook:   facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Show website:   www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com
Email:   Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com
Books:
Content Copy Made Easy
14 Tactics to Triple Sales
Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist
YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales

TRANSCRIPTION (115)

Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome. This is another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales.

Today we have with us, Carl White. He is the founder of the market advisory group, which focuses on helping locally owned independent businesses and practices and healthcare. To stay independent.

Carl’s passion for independent business goes all the way back to working in his family’s pharmacy when he was a kid. Today MarketVisory Group helps independent practices get more leads, phone calls, reviews, and overall visibility.

Carl is a duct tape marketing certified consultant. He lives in Northbrook, Illinois. Welcome to the show, Carl.

Carl White: Barbara, thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here.

Duct Tape Marketing

Dr. Barbara Hales: So, the first thing I want to know is what do you consider a duct tape marketer?

Carl White: So, duct tape marketing is an organization that’s been around for about 20, 25 years, I think a little bit longer. And it does a lot of things. But it’s really, it’s designed to help small businesses small and mid-sized businesses grow with like really sort of systematic marketing and it works with you know, any healthcare practice that fits that same kind of size and description.

You can become a duct tape marketing certified consultant, you go through some steps, you kind of join the organization, there’s a lot of tools and support in the back end, I joined because before Mark advisory group, I worked in large corporate America, always marketing and healthcare, which does not translate very well into the small business world where you and I live.

And so, duct tape marketing was a nice way to help me make that leap. Lots of support. As I said, there are about 150 consultants worldwide, most are in the States, but we help each other out all the time. And it was really I launched Mark advisory group when I licensed into duct tape marketing. And it’s been like the game-changer.

I’m not sure I’d still be here if it wasn’t for just following them and learning the ropes of small business lands, so to speak. Now that I’m on my own feet, so yeah.

Dr. Barbara Hales: So how long did it take from the time that you joined that organization? Until the time that you felt I’m good enough to create my own marketing company?

Carl White: So, I’m still licensed with them, because there’s just a lot of ongoing support for new tools and things, you get to collaborate with others. But on my own feet, probably about a year and change before I felt like okay, I’m good. I used to joke. My joke was my learning curve is perfectly vertical. I can’t see the top like I know marketing and healthcare.

I know the strategy. I know those things, but just translating them to, you know, independent, small, and mid-sized practices. That’s what took it a while. And then the learning curve, you know, it started to have a bit of a slope to it. I was like, I think I can see the top. And now it’s, you know, we’re always learning you as well, you know, this. So, you never quite ever reached the summit. But now it’s very approachable.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, just when you think you have everything changes.

Carl White: Yeah, isn’t it? Great? Yeah, I dread the Google core algorithm update. Notice I just come on, guys. Really? Can you just give us a break? Because they never tell you in advance. It’s only when it’s done. They’re remarkably good secret-keepers about that. So yeah, it’s great.

Change of Plans

Dr. Barbara Hales: So why is it that you decided not to stay as a pharmacist and follow in your family’s footsteps? Well,

Carl White: It turned out to be a better move than I realized. I mean, I grew up in upstate New York. And the biggest reason was, that I didn’t want to stay in upstate New York any longer. I still have some family there. But most of us left, there just wasn’t a lot of opportunities up there for it’s a smaller town, I just felt that wanted to see more. And so that meant leaving, which meant it didn’t make the family business an option.

My father had sort of transformed it into a, like a home medical equipment supply store, you’d sold the pharmacy, but even then, staying in that, that went the way of large chains also. And so, you know, independent pharmacies are out there, they’re much harder to find same with what he turned it into. And he ended up selling it.

So that’s what I would have done in, and I would have been in my I don’t know, the late 20s. With what do I do now anyway, so it turned out to be a better choice. I just wanted to see more and felt you know, what else is out there?

Marketing as the Answer

Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s true. So, when you were making your transition and asking the question yourself, who am I? And what is it that I meant to do? How did you see that marketing was the answer?

Carl White: So, I spent about 10 years instead Sales. I sold college textbooks; I would traipse all over college campuses looking for professors of all sorts of different disciplines. And I would that was my first, I had no designs on sales, I was going to become a college professor, I entered a Ph. D program. And I left it after one week and one class.

I was nauseous the whole week. And then it’s funny, I was nauseous the whole week, it took me a week to realize this is probably not going to go away, this probably means I’m in the wrong spot. I don’t know what I’m going to do. But this is not it. So that was on Long Island in New York, I went back home. I don’t know how I happened upon Educational Publishing. But I did. That was in New York City, I wanted to get there too, you know, the drive to leave upstate New York started pretty early, long before what we talked about a second ago. And I didn’t know they needed salespeople; I didn’t know how it worked.

But then I discovered that that was the way to climb. And so, I did that sales and marketing are very close cousins, in a way, sometimes they agree. And sometimes they don’t, but they’re highly related. And that’s how it started. And from there, I did sales for about eight or nine years. And it just felt like it was getting a bit repetitive.

I was having a hard time justifying the cost of attended college textbooks. And I thought, well, if I’m a salesperson, and I’m having a hard time justifying this, and that, that means it’s becoming inauthentic to continue selling them. So now that I’m approaching 30, so I went and got an MBA at the University of Michigan Business School go blue, I loved it. And if you want to change careers, and you want to do it well and fast, an MBA is a great way to go, sales to marketing made a lot of sense to get back to health care, which made a lot of sense. And you know, thus it was born.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Do college students use textbooks anymore or —?

Carl White: I’m so out of it. I mean, it probably I’m so out of it. And when I was there, we were experimenting with different ways to do digital, the technology did not nearly support it the way it does today. One good thing that we were doing at the time is we were taking books, you know, the book is like 1000 pages, and nobody ever uses the whole thing.

And that was part of the beef of, you know, on top of these high prices, I’m using maybe a third of it, where they were trying to slice and dice the books. And each professor could sort of, you know, pick the chapters that they wanted some kind of customization.

You know, we’ll be I mean, I went back to my undergrad school about five or six years ago, and I had to go to the bookstore, it was stocked with books, I can tell you how many were being sold? And how many were used? I don’t know. But you would think that it’s a lot more flexible and a lot more may be tailored today I’d be disappointed if it weren’t, I guess with all the technology that’s available now.

Social Media and HIPAA Codes

Dr. Barbara Hales: I’m sure that you tell the clients in the health field that social media is an important part of marketing. So, what do you what would you say to a doctor or regardless of whether it was traditional or alternative care, that says I’m afraid to go on social media because I don’t want to violate the HIPAA codes, and once in violation incur the wrath of everything that is concerned with that?

Carl White: The HIPAA police, there’s no such thing that’s just the term that I use to kind of catch people’s attention. You know, the first thing that I would say is, I guess in no particular order, Dr. X, you need to go where your prospective patients go. And it’s hard to believe that none of them go on social media to hunt around for a doctor for a doctor’s office. It’s just hard to believe that that’s not the case. And so, you need to be there. Getting agreement on that first, the objection of HIPAA, that’s pretty easy.

So, you know, the easiest way to explain HIPAA is you can’t. So, if you get a review on Facebook, Instagram or Google, or anywhere else, there’s great, I’d say debate amongst the healthcare attorney community about whether you can reply to that at all. Where they all agree is you can’t disclose a doctor-patient relationship. They all say that. So, you can’t say we’re so glad you had a great experience with us. You’ve just been out of the relationship. That’s a bad thing.

The very conservative attorneys will say you can’t apply at all. Any reply that discloses the less conservative ones will say, you can thank that person. Hey, thanks for the nice comment, full stop. And then, you know, strictly speaking, you haven’t disclosed anything, but you can, you should be on there, how much at that point? You know, do you start doing advertising or get really in-depth? It just depends on the nature of your service and then the nature of the buying process, you don’t necessarily have to do all of that. You just, you know, it depends on what I’m just like I said, the service that you have, and the buying process for them.

Our clients are all on social media and kind of like a supporting role. Because people go on Facebook, people go on Instagram, and what do we want them to see a professional vibrant, up-to-date, presence that says to them, okay, they’re alive and well, this practice, they’re up to date, they’re taking care of things. This page isn’t a year and a half old, because things like that make people wonder, are they still open? What happened? You just don’t want to create those kinds of question marks? And I promise you, right? Well, sure. Or are they close or whatever?

Yeah, I mean, there’s always right, an exception, because Dr. X, you know, let’s look at who you consider your competition. And are they on there? Because if they’re on there with a, you know, a vibrant presence or vibrant enough, and you are not, I promise you, you just put yourself at a disadvantage. And why would you want to do that?

Total Online Presence

Dr. Barbara Hales: Absolutely. What may seem a surprise to many people, but not to the doctor himself, is that I had been considering going to a chiropractor to get manipulation of my bones, and take out the kinks from my muscles. And, you know, it was on the back burner. You know, I said, well, you know, I’m not in terrible distress, it’s something that probably would be a good idea in the future. It was on the to-do list.

But as you know, there are so many things on the to-do list that we tend to go for the fires first. And so, I was just casually you know, going through Tik Tok and laughing through some of the videos, and this chiropractor came up. He seemed professional; he was discussing issues that I had been interested in learning about. And I thought, and he was local.

So, I thought, well, you know, this is someone that I should look into. So, from there, I did look at his reviews and, like, looked up his history, he seemed quite professional, and I wound up calling the office and, you know, had, you know, availed myself of his services, right, but had it not been for this tic tock video that he made, I probably would never have gone to him. So, I can honestly say, it does work.

Carl White: It does. And now you prove the point, you know, go where they go, have a term I use as total online presence picked at least the major channels where people go hunting around for you and what you do, and have a good up-to-date presence there and more than presence, but just to make the point. Because either your competitors do and you got to keep even, or they don’t, you can have an advantage. There’s just there’s no downside.

Dr. Barbara Hales: What a lot of doctors don’t realize is that YouTube and TikTok are search engines. So that if someone were to just go into that little magnifying glass to search for a particular keyword, or a service, depending upon how you rank on that platform, they will tell the viewer, hey, I think this is the person that you should go to. So that is definitely something to—

Carl White: Answer. Yeah. And, you know, the bias that I sometimes uncover is and you see with different, you know, marketing tactics, this being one of them, is the doctor will dismiss it because the doctor doesn’t do it. The doctor doesn’t use it, or what I tell them is, you know, not everybody uses things the way you do.

You got to understand that the people you’re going after of them do use those channels, and maybe even if you’ve never gone on Tik Tok, or anywhere else they do, so why not be there? Why not make it as easy as possible for them to find you? And then show them stuff that is credible to you authentic to you convincing? Why not?

Posts and Sponsored Ads

Dr. Barbara Hales: What is your opinion about a post versus a sponsored ad?

Carl White: What was the first one?

Dr. Barbara Hales: A post, a post first video, blog posts as opposed to a sponsored ad.

Carl White: So, in social, I mean, I’ll pick Facebook because I know what the best posts are. The best thing about a post is it’s truly organic, right? I mean, it’s just it’s out there, and whoever sees it sees it. The potential negative of it is it’s only going to get shown to some portion of the people who are liking or following your page. That’s your organic audience if we call it that.

So if you’re, if you’ve got a lot of followers, awesome, if you’ve got a handful, not much traction, a sponsored ad, I mean, we, we don’t do a lot of advertising like in-depth go into the back end of the Facebook ad platform and really get going. I do boost, which I described as you know, dipping your toe into advertising and all boosting does for those who aren’t familiar with it is you can define an audience, it can be as simple as a radius around your location, and say, show it to them, show it to some subset of them and you break free of your follower base.

It’s the other part of it is what are you choosing to boost, we will boost things like blogs, we will boost, you know, hey, we have an office that’s near this location. I’ve never boosted, and I can’t imagine, no client has ever come to me and said, hey, we have this, you know, this new laser or whatever it is, whatever this new service is, maybe we would do it.

But in my opinion, as long as you make it authentic and educational, and you’re helping people make a good decision about what they need. I’m cool with it. When it gets sales, which for a doctor is practically zero level of sales, it just starts to feel really inauthentic. It’s not the kind of marketing most doctors want to do. And so, I like it because it broadens the reach. But the content, you know, you can ever overly salesy organic post, and then to me, it’s no better than a sponsored ad, if it were the same, because the content is just not consistent with the practice.

Engaging Clients

Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you engage your clients in using press releases?

Carl White: Rarely, it’s something I’ll admit we need to get more into. And I’m trying to find some good folks who can help me out with that. The advantage of a press release, I view I view things not exclusively, but heavily from an SEO point of view. So, a search engine, you know, presumes that people are hunting around for what you do, and you want to be the easiest one to find.

Press releases can be great for SEO value for a backlink they live out there for a long time. The part that always gives me a little bit of pause about a press release is it’s better if it’s an authentic story versus something, you know, self-advertising, not that that’s bad. But if I were to rank them, and they’re out there for a little bit, and then they kind of gone. And so, I’m much more about consistent things that gained traction over time.

And so, I just, you know, a point in time event, whatever it may be, can be done, and it can be successful. But I always view those a little more, I don’t know, scrutiny, honestly, I guess, because they are a point in time. And you know, to get a good press release, like from somebody who knows what they’re doing. It’s just got to make sense from $1 point of view, and it’s going to be out there for a little bit and then disappear forever.

Like I don’t you know, I just there’s so many things that we could be doing that live on for the long term that can pay off, you know, month after month, or at least the visibility, I just, yeah.

Identifying Advertisements

Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, for our listeners and viewers, they may not know what an advertorial is, which is basically a paid ad. But it looks like an editorial where a physician or a professional is discussing the latest medical breakthrough or a medical condition, and what the treatment options would be. So, unless you look at the tiny, tiny little font on top that says this is an advertisement, it does read does not read as an advertisement at all. What is your feeling about that?

Carl White: Well, if there was anything, I think the more that a doctor can educate. And by virtue of doing a good balance job, they are checking a lot of boxes that I think they want to check in terms of trying to attract a patient, they’re being helpful. They’re providing new information. It’s obvious that if the doctor is writing about treatment X, they probably offer it.

So hey, you know, if you have more questions or you know, you want to see if this applies to you contact the office et Cetera. That’s the approach we take to educate, to attract. I just kind of made that up. But that’s the theme of, you know, as an approach to how a doctor can market themselves. I think it’s just, you know, I’ve yet to have a client say to me, we want to go, you know, what we consider like a traditional advertisement.

We want to be salesy, and I’d much rather educate people and have my clients educate people by virtue of showing their expertise in a helpful way you build trust, they must know what they’re doing better. That TikTok video that you saw, was probably educational in some way. And that’s part of what got you to stick Round and watch the whole thing and left a positive impression with doctors out to be doing.

Dr. Barbara Hales: It wasn’t just the dancing.

Carl White: The dancing hounds your attention like what the heck’s going on but the words that came out of his mouth are probably helpful, right? And not just where he is. But he or she is but you know, some sort of problem that.

Representing Brands

Dr. Barbara Hales: One thing that you didn’t touch upon just like a second ago, maybe you didn’t realize it, but I want to highlight that is that any content that you put out, should be in sync with what you represent your brand and the procedures that you do. You may be an orthopedist who has an antique car collection as your hobby or racing cars as your hobby.

But putting that content out and attracting the car aficionado, is going to do absolutely nothing for your brand. So, while you may enjoy these hobbies, this is not the place to talk about it, that it’s important in strengthening your brand to only put out content that is in sync with it. Wouldn’t you agree?

Carl White: Totally agree. Just because you’re a car aficionado doesn’t mean you’re a great doctor. It just means you know a lot about cars, you could be a terrible Doctor Who knows a lot about cars. And when I’m hunting around, I want to know what kind of a good doctor you are, not what your hobbies are, as personal life and professional life. Rach keeps it separate, at least at a first impression, you might break through that with certain patients, you develop a deeper relationship fine, but people aren’t choosing you because of your hobbies.

Marketing Advice

Dr. Barbara Hales: Absolutely. So, if a doctor wanted to stick their toe into marketing and hadn’t been doing it yet, what tips would you give them? Like? How would you advise them?

Carl White: So yeah, that’s a great question. The two things that really need to be in place one is, let’s start with the website. Because your website, it’s your front page, it’s the anchor of your online presence. It should be there are a number of boxes that your website should check, both from what people look at as well as what Google looks at. So, the whole technical search engine optimization side of life, should both be in place. It’s not terribly difficult to do that. But it should be moderate. It’s where people it’s where you want people to go.

So, I don’t love this analogy. But it works. You know, if your waiting area was hideously out of date, would you leave it that way? Or would you monetize you probably modernize it, right? Same with your website, only B, I love that because a website’s a lot more than a waiting area. But it’s an important piece of property, really. And it’s where you want a lot of people to go. So, make sure that you’re checking the right boxes there.

The other place that I always tell people to start is reviews online. Here’s the sad stat about reviews online. People trust reviews from strangers online, as much as they trust recommendations from their friends and family. I mean, isn’t that sad? What a bunch of strangers is as influential, you know, more or less, as your friends and family. They create a really good first impression.

And, you know, if you are Dr. X, and you’ve got 10 or 15 years of experience doing what you do, but you have, you know, a small handful of reviews, and they’re kind of old, the first impression that you’re creating is not that you’re really experienced and good at it, it’s not much of an impression at all. And so, what a mismatch between the reputation you’re showing online and that versus the reputation that you actually have.

And so, start getting reviews, just join it, you know, you can’t beat it, you can’t fight it, your competitors, at least one of them has more than you do. So, join it, start getting reviews, it’s work we do with a lot of clients, I know that you do as well. And, you know, get that going and then come back and look at maybe that’s enough marketing, those two things are maybe you need some more, take it one step at a time.

Convincing Patients

Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you advise doctors to increase or incentivize their patients to leave reviews?

Carl White: It’s just getting in the habit of asking. So, you put in your make it really easy for the patient to leave a review. There are systems out there that make it hard, lots of clicks, where do I go? Or the process is hard. But the number one reason why the clients that I have that do well with reviews versus those that do not is that the ones that do well have built the discipline of asking and asking can be looking a patient in the eye. Hey, would you please leave us a review? We’re trying to get the word out. Or it could be you know, it’s an automated kind of ask so to speak, like when the patient checks out or some other automated way.

Either way, get in the habit, get the reviews, and, you know, get up to date because having a handful of reviews is bad. Here’s the other thing. Once a review reaches about three months old, the reader of that review starts to discount its strength in their mind a little bit. And the older it gets, the less they pay attention to it. So, people want new reviews too.

So, if you’re getting, I mean, it depends on your patient volume, but one or two new reviews a month, you’re good. And then over time, that gross number will take care of itself. The other sad fact is that unhappy people will make all sorts of time to complain about you without being asked. But the happiest need the asking. And it’s just, you know, think of yourself if you’re listening, as you listen to this, when’s the last time you had a great experience somewhere like a restaurant or a doctor or anywhere, and then you just drove off and didn’t even think about it, you need to be asked, and then it needs to be really super-duper easy for you to leave the review fast, don’t have to think about where to go.

And then it gets back to Dr. X. If you want to reply to that review. Just be careful from a HIPAA point of view, make sure that when you’re if you’re sharing the patient’s name, and their email address or their phone number, that together those things count as protected health information, you’re doing a HIPAA compliant way. We set all that sort of stuff up. And then it’s just very easy to kind of get going, but it’s building the habit one way or the other.

Testimonials

Dr. Barbara Hales: In terms of the possibility of HIPAA violations, what is your approach to testimonials?

Carl White: You mean like, what do you mean? Like, like going, outpatient? It’s like,

Dr. Barbara Hales: As a loyal patient. I wanted to say, like Dr. White was, like, fantastic, he cured me, he put it put five hearts in my uncle. And now he runs the racetrack, you know, whatever. And, and I put my name at the bottom. Do you allow that? Or do you advise people to just have like the initials and where they’re from? Or do you feel that that really looks made up? If you do that, you know, how do you approach the situation?

Carl White: It’s a really good question. So, the first thing I’ll say is I’m not a healthcare attorney. And I strongly believe that every practice owner should have a healthcare attorney kind of on their team, just for questions like this, but I’ll tell you what I know and what I understand. So, if I left a review for Dr. Barbara hills, and I left it on Google, my understanding is that I can say whatever.

So, I know, I can say whatever I want. Because I’m the patient, I can say whatever I want about my condition, it’s you who are restricted in what you can share, as the doctor, you are the covered entity. So, my understanding is that if I put that on Google, which is not your property, it’s like an independent, it’s a third-party property. That’s okay. And my name will show on that review, however, I set up my Google account. So, if I set it up as Carla white, my full name is going to show, if I set it up as Carl W or anything else, that’s what’s going to show when that review, if you want to sort of stream that reviews back to your website.

Now in Illinois, that’s where I am, there are certain conditions, like the patient can say things like best is the best, you know, she’s the best doctor ever. Because best is a superlative claim, you can’t really back that up. And because it’s on your website, even though you didn’t craft that review, it’s seen as you are advertising it. And so, you’ve got to kind of take care of that. And every state is different, or they might be different. So, this is yet another reason why a health care attorney who knows these do’s or don’ts is necessary. As well, you know, should the review be anonymized or not? I will tell you we’ve got I’ve got a couple of clients where they deal with children, their clients or children.

So, speech therapy, speech pathology, we’ve had psychotherapy before. And for those we anonymize the reviews because we thought in the speech therapist case, no parents really going to want to disclose to anybody that their child needed speech therapy, so it made sense. So, we just attacked it in a different way. And we said, you know, you’re using me to anonymous, just please put your initials in. And we took the compromise because your you know, your questions, right? I’ve reviewed with a full name, you would think to compare it to a review without a full name would be more believable, all the things being equal.

But this was a compromise that we made with our eyes wide open because we felt that we wouldn’t get any reviews. If a parent, you know, and we wanted to tell parents like the look, your name might show here. And you should know that. And so instead we said let’s just anonymize them because some things some reviewers are better than no reviews. So that’s just a compromise that we made. Generally, I would say if you can get the full name Get it because it’s just more authentic. And but be willing to make a compromise if you must, because some reviews are better than no reviews in my opinion.

Choosing Reviewers

Dr. Barbara Hales: Whenever I go to have my nails done by my manicurist. And I leave, I always get a text message from an automatic service, saying, you know, we hope that you had a great manicure. And could you please, color the number of stores and they gives you the stores. So, all you have to do is click, and they say if you’d like to say anything additional, that will be great. And just hit submit. I mean, it couldn’t be easier.

On the other hand, if a doctor were to do that for every patient, they may be sending it to people who may not be loyal. Yes. So, what is your feeling about asking everyone and having an automated service versus just asking the people that you think had a stellar experience?

Carl White: So, I’m going to speak carefully here, because the online platforms where reviews live, don’t always agree with what I think?

Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, we’re asking for your opinion.

Carl White: That’s true. Okay. So, my opinion. So, Google, let’s take, let’s take Google and Yelp, since I’ve, through different experiences, gotten to know them pretty well. Google, in my opinion, in my personal opinion, if we were in the offline world, which we do live in sometimes. And I was asking somebody, it’s my father, but go back to my father’s pharmacy, he would sometimes ask people for reviews. And he would ask happy people and unhappy people. But he dealt with the feedback differently.

If somebody came into the store and started spewing and screaming how bad the service was, what do you think he would do? He would try to take them outside or somewhere private and hear them out. But he would try to take them out of public view. And anybody else who noticed that wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with that at all if I walked into Google’s lobby, but to get on a soapbox here for a second, if I walked into Google’s lobby right now and started screaming about how bad they were, security would probably come and escort me away, or something similar, and anybody else who saw that wouldn’t think anything wrong about it?

And yeah, it’s on April 12, 2018, Google changed its opinion about that kind of thing in the online context about, you know, taking negative feedback, private, they said, you know, you should, you should give equal chance to anybody who’s unhappy or unhappy to say what they want to say in private or public. And I just looked at that and said, I can’t fight it, because it’s Google. And I’m not, but I 100% disagree because that’s not how it’d be treated in the offline world.

So, I tell my clients, you want every bit of feedback that you can get because it’s all valuable. But in my opinion, negative feedback should be handled more privately than public feedback. Now, the other thing to say about reviews is that there’s a one to five ratings, you know, one star to five star, the most trusted aggregate review is somewhere in the mid-four point something’s because the world knows that nobody’s perfect. So, nobody’s really a five-star all the time, and that people make mistakes, and that in the real world, it’s not so much the mistake you make, but how you deal with it afterward.

And did you try really hard to fix it? And can you demonstrate that, and that becomes the most sort of trusted level? And so, you know, I don’t encourage my clients to get a couple of bad reviews to get the overall, you know, off of a 500 a four-point something, but we do talk about what you know, should it ever come, but it’s going to be painful at the moment, but it’s not the end of the world, it’s actually going to be helpful in the long run, as long as you deal with it, it becomes a chronic problem, it’s something else.

Yelp’s kind of similar, they’re actually, even more, they don’t like it, when you proactively ask, they think it should all be, you know, self-generated that you were so happy that you decided to leave it on your own. And in concept, I can’t disagree with that. But we know that happies are much less likely to do that on their own than the unhappy czar. And so, it can create kind of skew. And so, you just kind of deal with each platform as it is, but that’s how I view it. But I’m very mindful of the power that Google has, and, you know, more than my opinion, I don’t want my clients to get, you know, penalized by Google. So, we observe their rules very faithfully.

Final Advice

Dr. Barbara Hales: What is one tip that you could leave our listeners with today?

Carl White: Start asking for reviews. Try to pick one thing, if you’re not already doing it. And if you’re doing it, you know, ask yourself, Am I really doing it consistently? Ask yourself, you know, in the past month, how many patients how many new patients do we have? And of them? How many does the owner think we’re happy with the services? You know, what percentage and it’s usually a very high percentage.

So, if you had, you know, 50 patients in the past month and 90 of the 4545 are happy. How many did we ask to leave us a review? The answer is usually none. Just fix that somehow, however you do, because that kind of reinforcement Have your reputation your trustworthiness, your dependability all the things that you want patients to say about you to be lost. People who actually experienced it just walked out the door and resolved to fix that somehow.

Dr. Barbara Hales: If listeners would like to reach you, how can they do so?

Carl White: Yeah, two ways. My phone number is area code 847-802-8479. That’s direct to me. My email. It’s a mouthful. It’s whitec@marketvisorygroup.com. You can also go to our website marketvisorygroup.com. And there’s right on the homepage. There’s a big button to schedule a call. You can do that as well.

Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, it has been absolutely delightful speaking with you today, it’s Carl White with another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time!