Your med spa business is a relaxing and healing place for customers who want to unwind and treat themselves and their bodies. Whether they want to manage chronic conditions, enjoy a massage, or treat aging effects, you are there to help.
What’s less relaxing, however, is managing your brand reputation, garnering positive reviews, and responding to criticism. Reputation management for med spas is incredibly important, as the patient feedback you receive via online reviews and ratings can have a major impact on your business success. After all, a med spa with bad reviews and a negative reputation isn’t going to bring in as many new customers as a med spa with glowing reviews and a stellar patient reputation.
So what can you do to manage your reputation? This article will give you tips for monitoring your online presence and reputation as well as help you understand the value of a positive brand reputation and the overall importance of reputation management for med spas.
Why Your Reputation Matters
Running a med spa means that you are involved in a highly competitive industry. There’s a lot of competition to provide the best experience, and with a large number of competing businesses, it’s important to hold on to loyal customers and not give them any reasons to try a different spa for their next appointment.
Brand reputation is a huge part of garnering a loyal following and maintaining a steady flow of new customers. People want their relaxing day at the med spa to be an enjoyable experience, and in order to ensure that they get that premium experience, they will turn to reviews and ratings from other customers.
Patient Perception is Patient Reality
Patient perception is the overall reputation your business has, even without someone going to visit. This perception forms the reality that the patient will accept. If they perceive your med spa to be a negative experience, that becomes the reality for patients.
A trip to the med spa can be an expensive trip, and customers also want to make sure they are getting good service for what they pay. In order to make the most informed decision, they’ll do their own independent research into different med spas in the area to find one that has a great reputation, positive reviews, and meets their needs. You can manage your reputation by meeting customers where they are and delivering the perception that they need to give your business a try.
Managing Your Online Presence
Your online presence is an important factor in reputation management for med spas. Your reviews and online materials are what leads will be looking for and making their purchase decisions off of.
Your online presence includes your website and materials as well as reviews and ratings from websites like Google, Yelp, Angi, or Tripadvisor. Managing your website is the easiest way to start managing your online presence. A clean, beautifully designed site will build a sense of professionalism with your leads, and packing in plenty of positive and detailed reviews and testimonials can help convince prospects to give you a try.
How to Grow Your Reputation While Remaining HIPAA-Compliant
As a med spa, you perform more than a skin or day spa offers and provide medical procedures that require HIPAA-compliant practices to be in place. For some med spa owners, this might add a layer of confusion to online brand management as you can’t disclose some of the specifics of treatments and customer feedback.
While this may be true, you can still use best practices for getting more reviews from customers. A review written and published by a customer can include whatever medical information they wish to disclose without your business ever having to worry about HIPAA compliance laws.
Tips for Monitoring, Replying, and Management
In order to successfully build a 5-star patient reputation, there are several tips and tricks you can implement that will help you succeed in growing your online presence in an engaging way and build a positive association with your brand.
Tip #1: Ask Customers to Review
If you don’t ask customers and patients to leave reviews for your spa after they have an enjoyable experience and express their gratitude, you are missing out on a great opportunity. The truth is that there are many people who will only leave reviews after negative experiences and won’t write anything after a positive experience.
Asking your customers nicely to leave reviews and being proactive in your approach will help you build a strong base of positive reviews and high ratings that can help combat any negative reviews that come up.
Tip #2: Follow Up with Customers
Keeping in contact with your customers not only helps bring them back in for another visit, but it can also provide another opportunity to ask customers to leave a review. In your follow-up emails, you can thank customers for their business and ask them to leave a review on the sites you want to see an increase in. You can even help them by giving direct links to where they can go, so it’s as simple as a click for customers to get to the right spot to leave their reviews.
Tip #3: Respond to All Reviews—Even Negative Ones
A common mistake that businesses across all industries make is to ignore negative reviews about their brand. While some might see this as taking the high ground and avoiding conflict, what you are actually doing is telling potential customers that the negative review is accurate since you don’t dispute it.
It’s important to take a measured approach when you respond to negative reviews. Never respond in anger or lash out at the customer, but acknowledge their bad experience and apologize. You can also offer to make it right, or, in the case of a falsely negative or defamatory review, provide your side of the story clearly and without making accusations. This will help prospects reading the review see you as professional and willing to make bad situations better.
Tip #4: Add Review Links Everywhere
As mentioned earlier, including the link to review in your follow-up and thank you emails can help bring customers to the right pages to leave reviews. People want to follow the path of least resistance, so creating opportunities for them to leave reviews through links is a great way to cut the majority of the work out of finding the business on reviewing platforms.
You can add review links to your emails, website, and social media accounts. This will help you catch your customers wherever they may find your brand and remind them to leave a review. There are even plug-ins that will allow website visitors to leave a review right on your site without having to navigate to a third-party web page. Surefire Local offers a reviews and reputation tool just like this called GeoJuice.
Tip #5: Keep Your Information Updated
Whether it’s on your website or Google business listing, people want to ensure that the information they are viewing is up to date and accurate. If your website is outdated, only has reviews from several years ago, or has missing information about your current services and offerings, you will miss out on potential business.
Customers want to know that the med spas they visit are legitimate, and making sure your information is clear and up to date is an important step in building a positive patient reputation.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Reputation management for med spas is a project that requires dedication and hard work. While you’re putting in the effort to build a positive patient reputation, you shouldn’t get bogged down and stuck on marketing tasks. That’s where Surefire Local comes in.
Our marketing platform helps you send requests, automate follow-up reminders, and respond to reviews all from one central location. You can also run brand sentiment analysis to find out how patients truly feel about your business. Learn what Surefire Local can bring to your business reputation management by attending one of our platform demos and get started growing your med spa practice today.