Communicating Your Reopening to Patients Online

June 1, 2020 | 4 minute read | Practice Marketing

Managing Your Practice Online During COVID-19

If your clinical schedule slowed or stopped during the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, you may be facing the challenge now of reopening your office to patients. After you’ve put precautions in place, the next hurdle is letting your patients know that you are open once again, offering a variety of services with potentially new policies they need to be aware of.

It is our mission at AudiologyDesign to do all we can to help you utilize your digital properties to effectively provide updates taking place at your practice. To that end, we’ve provided suggested updates and tutorials below to help you inform patients!

1. UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE

Your website is an important tool that you can utilize to communicate to both current and future patients. Even after you’re 100% back to normal business operations, we recommend continuing to alert your patients of your status on your website with a prominent or brightly colored alert. Without it, they may not know if your site is up to date, and as a result, may not be confident in your hours and open/closed status.

Example banner language: “We are OPEN! Office hours are 10-4 by appointment only. Click here for more information on how we are keeping you safe during your visit.”

As always, we recommend against having a pop-up on your website for the simple reason that it can be confusing to visitors, and difficult to navigate around on a mobile device. A banner across the top of the site is an ideal placement for the notification.

If your website is with AudiologyDesign, please contact us and we will add the banner notification for you. There are never any fees for an update like this!

2. UPDATE YOUR GOOGLE MY BUSINESS (GMB) LISTING

Many current and potential patients will search for your business and see your Google listing first, without ever visiting your website. Because of this, we recommend also updating your business hours and description in your Google My Business listing whenever you make a change to your operations.

There are three key areas to update in your Google listing:

Change your permanent hours or set special hours within your Google account to help communicate changes to patients at a glance.
Adjust your service listings to reflect current offerings and add Telehealth within your listing if you offer digital options. This will help new patients who are seeking specific appointment types find your listing.
Make a public post to keep patients informed and draw in new views by offering specials or digital events.

If you are part of AudiologyDesign’s SEO program, please contact your Account Manager and we can take care of these updates for you!

3. ANNOUNCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

To stay connected with family and friends, the amount of time your patients spend on social media daily is higher than ever before. This makes your clinic’s social profiles even more critical for getting the word out to patients. It’s important to also remember that they may only see your most recent post, so you should include a quick summary of pertinent details on each.

Example post: “Thank you for your patience as we prepare our office for patients. As of this morning (June 1st), we are now open Monday – Friday 10am to 4pm. As a reminder, you must schedule an appointment via phone by calling us at (123) 456-7890, as walk-ins are not accepted at this time.”

RESOURCES TO HELP YOU GET THE WORD OUT

We are offering social media images, tools and full Google My Business instructions to all AudiologyDesign clients. Please contact your account manager at service@audiologydesign.com for access to these items.

If you are not currently working with AudiologyDesign and want to learn more about how we’re supporting our clients, please contact sales@audiologydesign.com to schedule a call.