Humanize Your Healthcare Practice
4 Ways to Build Patient Trust Online
In today’s market, consumers have more choices than ever before. With 80% of U.S. adults now looking for medical information online, it’s absolutely essential to use your healthcare practice’s website to build an emotional, human connection with consumers online. Prospective patients need to feel comfortable with their doctors, and 63% of people report that they will choose one healthcare provider over another based on their online presence.
So, how can your practice build that trust through your website? Here are four ways to humanize your practice:
- Present a clean, caring website as your first impression.
First impressions are lasting impressions. It used to be that a patient’s first impression of a doctor was face-to-face, but now it’s increasingly over the Internet, whether it’s through browsing physician profiles on the practice website or reading patient reviews. Your website is now that initial handshake or initial meeting that is so crucial to establishing a relationship.
Consumers today expect a human personality from a business, so your website should be used to establish that personality for your practice and your doctors. They want to be assured that your practice understands their needs and will address them in a caring way. You want to create a sense of comfort and peace of mind that a prospective patient has found someone who can help. - Highlight your providers with quality photos.
The ability to put a face to a name is one of the most effective ways to give a human element to a business. That’s why your practice’s website must, at minimum, feature a section to highlight your providers. This should be a prominent section that displays real, professional pictures of the providers at your practice. Real photos of your actual practitioners are preferable to stock photos of doctors – consumers have seen enough stock photos that they can usually tell when a picture looks staged.
You do want your photos to be consistent with your brand presentation and hiring a professional to do a high-quality photo shoot is ideal. You certainly don’t want it to look like your photos were all taken on an iPhone with different lighting and backgrounds for each person. These may seem like small details, but they subconsciously detract from the sophistication of your brand and will erode patients’ confidence. - Tell your story with video.
If a picture speaks a thousand words, then a video speaks a million. While being able to see a still shot of a doctor is a step toward building trust, seeing them in action goes even further. Having your physicians talk about their expertise and their philosophy of practicing medicine will allow your website visitors to understand your doctors and who they are before they meet them in person.
Your videos don’t only have to be of doctors, either. You can let your patients tell their stories of how they overcame medical obstacles in their lives with help from your practice with effective storytelling. To learn more about effective storytelling, check out our article How to Practice Effective Storytelling in Healthcare Marketing. - Above all, create a human connection.
There are other ways to create a human connection besides just pictures and videos of doctors. Any page that features images of people will feel more human to the user than a page with abstract designs. Ideally, these images should be natural, candid shots around your practice to allow users to set the expectation in their mind of a calming and caring healthcare experience.
If you’re following these tips, then you’re on the right track to creating an emotional bond based on trust with users and you’ll be more likely to see them face-to-face as real patients.
Contact Herrmann’s Chief Business Development Officer, John Albert, today at john@herrmann.com to set up a free consultation and learn more about how Herrmann builds healthy brands.
