If you’re running a professional services organization like a med spa, there are a lot of techniques you can use to help differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Obviously, establishing yourself as an authority is going to be a big part of that. Many organizations use content marketing, and specifically techniques like guest blogging, to do precisely that. People have questions about your industry – you need to go out of your way to give them the answers. Doing so keeps your brand at the top of their minds.
But one of the most critical techniques is also the one that many small businesses in particular tend to overlook: online reviews.
Now, you may think to yourself, “I have no control over whether someone leaves me an online review. With everything else that I’m doing, how much of a difference could it really make, anyway?”
Believe it or not, online reviews make a huge difference in terms of med spa local reputation management strategies. This is especially true when you’re talking about a professional services business like a med spa, where the collective impression about your enterprise may be the key to the competitive advantage you need to stand out in a crowd.
If there are a lot of other med spas out there who do what you do, people will tend to flock to the one that other people like the most. Online reviews help make sure that it just so happens to be you.
Understanding the Impact of Online Reviews
To get a better idea of just how crucial online reviews can be to an organization like a med spa, consider the fact that one recent study indicated that about 99.9% of people read reviews when they shop online. People work hard for their money and they want to be absolutely confident that they’re spending it in the right place.
This is particularly true of a med spa, where they’re not necessarily walking away with a tangible product that they get to keep indefinitely. They’re paying for a service – something that potentially only happens once, or infrequently. The bar here is much higher and online reviews can help confirm in their mind that they’re getting the expected amount of value out of their selection.
Even going beyond that, another study indicated that about 49% of people say they trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations from their friends and family members. Overall, about 60% of people say that the total number of reviews a business has is “crucial” when deciding whether to use its services. It’s also worth noting that most people say that an average rating of 3.3 stars out of 5 (or whatever the equivalent is for the platform they’re using) is the minimum acceptable rating that they’ll even consider working with.
Taken as a collective, these statistics paint a clear picture of how online reviews influence consumer decisions in a much bigger way than many realize.
This is important even before you get to the idea that online reviews are also essential for localizing your business’ online presence. We’re living in an era in which the total volume of local and “near me” searches is skyrocketing, and about 76% of people will visit a business within just one day after performing that search.
When people leave reviews, they tend to mention the physical location of your med spa. That’s a perfect, organic way to boost your visibility in specific cities and towns that you want to be found in. The more reviews you get, the more opportunities you have to rank – thus improving your overall search engine optimization efforts as a result.
Steps to Localize Your Online Presence Through Reviews
At this point, you know that two things are true:
- Online reviews are essential for creating the positive word-of-mouth online that your med spa needs to stand out, and
- Online reviews also boost your local SEO, which increases visibility and directly leads to new customers.
Now, you can get to work on using those reviews to properly localize your online presence. This is something that you can do via a few different methods, all of which are worth a closer look.
Build a Positive Online Reputation
A positive reputation isn’t something your med spa can achieve overnight. This is one of those situations where the old saying of “slow and steady wins the race” very much applies.
To get started, encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews on all the popular online platforms like Yelp. Make it as easy as possible for them to do so. You might consider printing out a QR code that you put in your med spa lobby. As someone is paying, they can scan the QR code and go right to the platform where they can leave a review in seconds.
You’ll also want to respond to the reviews you do get as professionally and as promptly as possible. If someone has a great experience, thank them for it. If they have a negative experience, ask what you can do to make it right. As you do, include local details in your replies to give yourself even more chances to rank.
Utilize Local SEO Strategies
As you work your way through these steps, always remember to incorporate location-based keywords whenever possible. You should always do so in business descriptions of your med spa not only on your profiles, but in the review responses as well.
Speaking of those profiles, always optimize your online review profiles for local search algorithms. Create as many places for satisfied customers to leave positive reviews as possible. This includes your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, your Facebook page, and more. Make sure there are high-quality, full-color photos of your med spa in each location. Also verify that all information, including your contact information and your med spa’s business hours, is correct.
Leverage Review Platforms
One lesson that many businesses don’t learn until it’s too late is that not all audiences are created equally. That is to say, your med spa customers aren’t likely to utilize every review platform in existence. Based on the type of people they are, they’ll likely only target a few.
Armed with this knowledge, you should pick a handful to prioritize as you start to build and develop your reputation. This serves two purposes. First, it allows you to focus an appropriate amount of time on just a few platforms as opposed to spreading yourself too thin. You don’t want to become a “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.”
Second, it lets your customers pick the platforms they’re most comfortable with. If most of your customers are on Yelp, encourage them to leave reviews there – don’t make them sign up for a new account on one particular platform because they probably won’t want to bother.
Create and optimize your profiles on these platforms, following the best practices outlined above. Ask yourself what your med spa customers want to see on your profiles that will encourage them to leave a review. You should always take steps like:
- Claiming the profile whenever possible. This will help people know that they’re leaving a review in the right place so that they’re not wasting their time.
- They should be able to see recent reviews from other customers.
- They should also see your responses. This means that whenever you interact with someone via reviews, you need to do so as personally and as professionally as possible.
Encourage User-Generated Content
Since you’re already encouraging people to leave reviews for your med spa, don’t just let them stop with the written word. Let them know that they can (and should) share photos and other content related to their experiences, too. This will help make their reviews seem more credible, which helps appeal to potential new customers moving forward.
Note that you could also use this as an opportunity to show off some of that user-generated content on your website or social media profiles, too. It makes the experience more fun for them, which can encourage them to leave reviews in the first place.
Monitor and Analyze Online Reviews
Finally, be sure to set up review alerts for real-time monitoring on an ongoing basis. If someone leaves a new review, you need to know where immediately. That way, if it’s an issue that you need to respond to, you can do so as quickly as possible.
Over time, this will also give you the chance to analyze trends and patterns in reviews that you may have otherwise overlooked. If 100 people leave the same negative comment about some aspect of your med spa, guess what – that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. From that perspective, you’re not just localizing your business – you’re meaningfully improving it at the same time.
Surefire Local: Putting Online Reviews to Work For You
In the end, there are two truths that professional services businesses like med spas need to get comfortable with. The first is that people are absolutely going to leave online reviews after interacting with your business, and the second is that those reviews have an enormous amount of influence over whether other people will do the same.
That’s why you need to prioritize and actively manage your online reviews and at Surefire Local, we want to help.
Surefire Local provides a marketing platform designed to help small businesses, including med spas, establish and manage their online presence. We help create local signals across platforms and profiles that make it as easy as possible for new customers to find you.
Online review management is a big part of that. Not only does our all-in-one platform let you send review requests, but you can also effortlessly write responses to reviews. It can also act as a viable way to analyze your brand sentiment to learn what customers actually think about you and what you could be doing better.
Surefire Local also includes a number of additional features like directory management, content marketing tools, analytics and reporting, educational resources, and more. The goal is to allow you to rest easy knowing that all your online marketing needs are finally in one easy-to-use place.To get an idea of exactly what our powerful all-in-one marketing platform can do for you, click here to attend a Surefire Local demo. We’re also happy to further discuss any med spa local reputation management strategies that you should definitely be using to your advantage.