Five simple ways to earn your patients’ trust

When patients choose a health care provider, they consider countless personal, practical, financial, and emotional factors. But when they find a provider they feel they can trust, everything else becomes secondary. So rather than focusing your marketing on the hundreds of reasons a prospective patient should choose you, focus on just one: trust (and the hundreds of ways to build it).

Here are five particularly powerful ideas:

Build your reputation with a compelling story.

Consumers choose doctors and hospitals for deeply personal and emotional reasons—not always rational ones. You can trumpet your quality rankings and other measurable data all day long; it’s just noise to patients who make health care decisions with their hearts.

What these patients do pay attention to is what their neighbors are saying, what they read about you online, and how you’re perceived in the community. Word of mouth is critical. If you tell your story authentically and keep your message consistent and relevant, your reputation and your business will benefit.

Your reputation grows naturally from personal recommendations and your brand image.

So naturally, it’s what your patients trust the most.

Create a seamless care experience.

When patients encounter your organization, they don’t want to spend time figuring things out or trying to understand your org chart. They’re looking for care, and they’re counting on you to deliver it.

There are a lot of steps in the process, and how you communicate can help alleviate confusion. Start by becoming proactive and efficient in the backroom. Provide clear direction that helps patients move through the experience quickly and intuitively. And create easy-to-understand tools and resources that show patients the way. Be transparent. Be informative. Because when patients know they’re walking into the right office, they’ll feel confident they’re in the right place.

Your patients don’t care about the health care system.

They care about their health (and trust that you will, too).

Address concerns before patients are even concerned.

A visit to the hospital or doctor can be a stressful, even scary, proposition. Many patients worry about bad news, poor treatment, or other unfortunate possibilities, and these concerns weigh heavily on their minds. To them, there’s no such thing as a routine procedure.

You can use your marketing messages to assuage these fears and anxieties. Think from your patient’s point of view as you craft communications that present your health care facility as a safe, caring, and dependable place to receive care.

Don’t underestimate the power of the fear factor.

Or the ability of a powerful brand story to alleviate those fears.

Deliver the information your patients are already searching for.

Welcome to the world of “no symptom left unsearched.” When considering treatments, costs, and medications, patients trust information that comes from a doctor or hospital. But before they even make an appointment, they will often consult online sources, whether that’s your website or some of the thousands of others dedicated to health care topics.

So be up front in providing access to information. Use your web presence to provide relevant, reliable communication. By becoming their go-to source, you’ll gain their confidence and trust before they even meet you.

Start the conversation before your patient walks through the door.

They’ll be much likelier to choose your door to walk through.

Speak with one brand voice.

People tend to trust other people most—certainly more than any marketing message. But your brand doesn’t exist only in brochures and ads; it’s a part of how you look, feel, sound, and act. In fact, it’s lived in everything you do, in every interaction your staff has with a patient.

It’s important, then, that your people are trained to engage with patients and build relationships in a way that’s consistent with your brand. They don’t always need to read from the same script, but they do need to speak the same language. As your team brings your brand to life, the service they provide will be more authentic, more effective, and ultimately, more trustworthy.

When you tell an authentic brand story, it becomes compelling.

When actual people deliver it, it becomes real.