Building Patient Relationships Online

With the advent of websites like MySpace.com, Facebook.com, and a host of others, the online community is more of a community than ever before. This has sent a strong message to the web marketing industry: relationship is critical. When it comes to choosing a dentist, and especially an orthodontist who they will see regularly, relationship-building online can have a great, positive effect on the decision-making process in selecting a provider.

Just like reading this article won’t really help you to get to know me, the author, the simple text of your website doesn’t foster a true relationship online. Until relatively recently, that’s all a website was – text. MySpace is by-and-large just a text-based, but there’s correspondence involved on MySpace, which is where the community and relationship happens. Websites in the orthodontic field are still one-way communication tools for the most part, which limits the amount of relationship-building that orthodontic websites can accomplish.

Some doctors have experimented with adding Chat functionality to their websites. Chat, being two-way in its communication, would be a logical next step in the evolution of medical websites, but potential patients have largely balked at this idea. Chat is too intimate for the average website visitor in search of a dentist. To them, chatting is tantamount to placing a phone call, and in today’s society, consumers prefer to keep providers at arm’s length until they are absolutely certain that they want to use a particular provider. So the challenge becomes: how do we engage a website visitor to build a relationship when the visitor doesn’t necessarily want to talk to us?

The answer is: diversify your website’s offerings. Visitors appreciate the steps that you take to tell them about yourself and your practice. If you have a website, when you look at your website statistics, you’ll notice that if you have an “About Dr. Soandso” page, that “About” page is likely one of the most viewed pages of your site. This is because people want to know who you are so that they can decide if they like you and can trust you enough to be their orthodontist. You can begin to build a relationship with your visitors by giving them more opportunities to get to know you.

Video is one of the most effective ways of doing this. It goes back to the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words – this has always been true on the web, but now these pictures move and talk. Video will enhance your credibility just by being there. It shows that you are a technologically advanced practice. Many times people will prefer to watch a video just for the ease and fascination of it.

Video can’t replace the text on your website because people are in too much of a hurry to watch a video that covers the entirety of your practice, but what they will watch is a video that tells them about the most important part of your practice – you. When the visitor can see you and hear your voice, your website suddenly takes on a new, more personal tone. Your videos should also include clips of other people talking about you. This should include your staff talking about your chairside manner, and especially patients talking about their experience with you as their orthodontist. These testimonials are hugely powerful.

Another tool for building relationships online is a blog. Blogging is frequently confused with Chat. In the professional world, blogging is mostly a one-way dissemination of information. On some blogs, commenting is turned on and allows readers to post comments regarding a particular blog entry, but commenting is purely optional. For the orthodontic practice, a blog is a section of the website affords a quick and easy way to keep the public updated on happenings in the practice, answer frequently asked questions, and post informative mini-articles without the need for a web designer.

“Our blog gives us a chance to connect with the public so much more intimately than with a website alone,” says San Francisco dentist, Dr. Josh Bernstein. People are starting to relate with the idea of a blog, and are curious when they see that you have a blog. They want to know what’s on the practice’s collective mind. It is your opportunity to connect on a more conversational level even though it’s still only a one-way communication.

You can also foster relationship by identifying someone in the practice, other than doctor, who can act as a point of contact in the office. One of the biggest barriers in people contacting your office is that they don’t know anyone in your office. If the most important objective is to get prospective patients to contact your office, let them know who that person is that they should contact. This helps the visitor know that it’s okay to just call or email the office with a small question (i.e. Where are you located? Or, do you offer any financing?) without “bothering” the doctor. You can label a call-to-action item with the point person’s face, “Just Ask Jan” or something similarly light. By taking away the pressure of perceived commitment that people feel, you will find that your practice receives more emails than before.

People respond to emotion on the Web. Their guard is down for the most part, and if you can impact them with a strong relationship-building technique, they will be more likely to respond to you than a competitor who also has a website. Make your website experience stronger, more personal, and more diverse than just text on the screen.