By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

Being able to shape how people perceive your brand is critical for any business but especially in dentistry, where trust is at an absolute premium thanks to persistent dental phobia.

For someone searching for dental care, reading what real patients have written about a clinician who is gentle and a great communicator is the best kind of content there is for establishing trust. That’s why online reviews are so valuable.

They also come with other benefits that are linked to search performance depending on the platform, for example when you get enough Google reviews you are more likely to rank high on the first page of Google and Google Maps.

But how do busy practice owners ensure a steady stream of online reviews? We put this question to Guy Meyers, head of customer success at SOE, which recently announced a partnership with the online review platform Reputation.com.

“Most new patients come from word of mouth, and between Google and word of mouth you’re probably looking at 80 per cent of your new patients. If you recommended a practice to me the first thing I’d do is Google it, and if I had no recommendation to go on I’d simply enter the word ‘dentist’ and the place where I was. In both cases I’d end up on Google and become very aware of reviews at this point.

When I know the name of a practice Google will show me their website, Facebook and Google+ account and all of these have the ability to show star ratings so that I get an immediate sense of how good they are. If I’m looking for a dentist on Google Maps the local search can also show Google star ratings.

This is all really helpful for patients and dentists, but getting reviews isn’t easy. To leave a Google review, for instance, a patient needs a Gmail account and they need to be logged in. We wanted to simplify that, which is behind the partnership between EXACT, SOE’s practice management solution, and Reputation.com.

We wanted to simplify the process both in the dental practice and externally on Google, Facebook, Yell, NHS Choices — anywhere where patients can post reviews. The goal is to help dentists attract more new patients and automatically manage their online reputations.

We’ve developed some simple ways to do this. In the practice we suggest having a kiosk where you ask leaving patients to write a review on touch screens, with a one to five star rating, a comment and their email address. This feedback will pop up on the practice website through a widget which you can control, which looks great and is good for SEO because it’s new content every day.

After your patient leaves the feedback they will be automatically sent an email to say thanks and encourage them to leave it elsewhere too, with a link to the desired site, whether it’s Google, Facebook, Yell or wherever, so that they only have to click once for it to be posted there.

This is a numbers game; you have to send a lot of invites to Google reviews to get a hit, but it’s well worth it, and none of this takes you any time. If the patient doesn’t leave a review at the kiosk they’ll still receive an email, so you don’t miss anyone.

In practices using our software we have seen numbers like 10 more Google reviews a month, six more Facebook reviews and 16 more NHS reviews. Some practices have seen an 80 per cent increase in new patients since they introduced our system.

We launched a new version of EXACT last year, version 12, which incorporates the Reputation.com features in a single product. It includes a marketing package with a dashboard so you can see how you’re doing as you go. This is really useful if you receive a bad review because it will alert you so you can respond quickly. What’s important in those cases is to respond publically, showing other users that you’re conscientious.

If you haven’t got a system in place to manage your online reviews the likelihood is you’ll get extremes: many one star reviews and some five star reviews. With a system encouraging higher throughput you get a more balanced picture, a more consistent number of four star reviews.

The difference Google reviews can make to your ranking is enormous. People with enough Google reviews can overtake companies who used to rank at the top, so this is really good value for money, although you do still need an optimised website too.

The other key part to this process is to have an online booking facility. If someone clicks through at 8pm and they can’t book online they’ll simply go elsewhere. You have to complete the patient journey, and we have a solution for this on EXACT.

There are so many online review tools out there, so many platforms, so why choose EXACT? The reason is it’s all integrated. You don’t have to extract lists and input them into pieces of software. It all fits together with the data you already have on your patients.

Reputation.com is the global leader in online review management, so we’re offering the best system out there in an automated way. There’s certainly nothing stopping you using MailChimp and doing the whole thing yourself, except you’re probably too busy, and if you pay a company to do that it can become much more time consuming and expensive.”

If you would like to find out more about how this could work for your practice email Guy at SOE: guy.meyers@soeuk.com.