Trustworthiness
Your Website has several tasks, but certainly one of the most important ones is to convey a sense of solidity and trustworthiness.
Yes, you have to have a compelling headline to pull people into the site, and the site has to reassure people that they’re in the right place by showing them something relevant to their search or to the link that got them to click over to your site.
Yes, the site has to be easy to navigate and to understand, and it has to have good “Calls to Action,” and an easy way for people to set up a consult, and a way to capture email addresses so you can continue to market to your visitor.
At the end of the day, however, none of those things will matter if people don’t trust you. If you don’t convince people that you’re trustworthy, they’ll never even get to considering whether you’re talented and compassionate and that you’ll work magic. They’re justifiably worried about all the website breaches and hacks and compromised personal data they’ve read about, and about the fact that you’re going to working on them with a scalpel or a needle, and they need to be reassured.
Let People Know Your Website Marketing is Honest
Your marketing task is made much easier by establishing your reputation and by letting your visitors know that your website is secure from hackers and other bad guys.
Reputation
You establish your reputation by assuring visitors that you are reputable. You’ve got a headstart on that, because doctors as a class are pretty highly-regarded. On the other hand, everybody’s got, or at least has heard of, a cosmetic surgery nightmare. Your perfect prospect has a tiny part (or a large part) of her mind worried that she’ll get the lousy result, not the magic result.
You counter that worry and concern in several ways, because different people are impressed by different things.
- Number of Facebook “Likes,” or Twitter followers or Google +1’s.
- Awards you’ve received.
- Testimonials. (Real ones, please, preferably with name and place and a picture. And audio if possible. And video if possible.)
- How long you’ve been in business
- How many procedures you’ve done
- Information about your particular expertise or specialty
- Your mentions in the press and appearances on TV
- Endorsements by notable people
- “Good Practice Seals” (BBB and similar)
- Easy-to-find Privacy Policy
- Good design and a professional look
It’s definitely worth your time to spend some time thinking about all this, and getting as many reputation-enhancing elements as possible on your site. Don’t be shy—people need to know this stuff about you to trust you.
Exactly how you do all that could take another dozen posts, or a hundred.
Testimonials, as an example, can be done in several different ways. You might have a separate page for testimonials, or put them on your “About” page, or sprinkle them throughout your home page, or put them in a sidebar on your home page. Some people put one right next to the “Call Us” or “I Want a Consult” buttons.
I mentioned above “Information about your particular expertise or specialty.” I don’t guess I’d go quite as far as the guy whose website was “DrNoseJob.com”– just doesn’t seem very elegant– but if you have hundreds of patients delighted with the results of their rhinoplastys, or you consistently get great results with jowls or turkey necks or lower blephs, it’s OK to crow a little about that. Show the testimonials and the before and afters and talk about how it’s a specialty of yours, and how smart patients choose doctors who do a lot of the procedures they’re interested in.
All these things are easy enough to test, of course, to see what works best for you.
Security
Security seals, such as the “McAfee Sure” badge, the VeriSign badge (which is now the “Norton Secured” seal), the Thawte seal, and several others can help assure your visitor that their personal information is safe with you. Just like with testimonials, you can test to see how different placements work.
There is plenty of documentation to demonstrate that posting a seal can boost sales or registrations substantially and reduce the number of people who just bounce off your site, never to be seen again.
VeriSign/Norton posts a case study showing a 36% increase in registrations by one of their customers when it posted the VeriSign seal on their site. That was a commercial site, selling physical products, but the lesson is clear.
This is a very brief treatment of the subject of making your website marketing more effective through enhancing your visitor’s sense of comfort with your site. But if you pick just one or two items above, and as we always say…TAKE ACTION…then 9 times out of 10 (or maybe 99 times out of 100) you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.
There’s a 20-page article at http://blog.kissmetrics.com/build-a-trustworthy-website/ that discusses these issues in quite a bit of detail, including a lot of screenshots, even down to where on the page you should put your security badge.
Of course, you should be doing procedures, not messing around with your website. Now that you know some more things to consider, consider letting us, or someone like us, implement some of them. You’ll be glad you did.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Scott