Review Shark In New York

Growing My Practice with Review Shark

Running a private dermatology practice in New York City is quite difficult these days, especially having recently dealt with the lockdown and the issues surrounding the covid-19 pandemic. But with things slowly getting back to normal my practice has begun to come back around and we have even seen a lot of growth and an influx of new patients, and much of that has been a direct result of Review Shark.

We opened our practice over 6 years ago, and have experienced slow, but steady growth since then. One of the toughest parts of being a private practice dermatologist in New York City is the sheer amount of competition you have to deal with, from both large and small practices alike. Without getting into specifics about our business, our office is located in Queens and we provide both aesthetic and general dermatology services for clients and their families. While we started off with a decent client base, from my previous years of practicing dermatology, one of the biggest issues we had was getting new patients in the door and keeping them from our competition. Being a new practice, we didn’t have many reviews and getting clients to leave a review for us started to become a chore. A lot of our clients were older, and many weren’t always internet savvy and putting up a sign that said “Review Us on Google” really had no effect. We tried working with platforms like Yelp, and we ended up having nothing but issues. We paid them monthly for marketing and hoped to get solid reviews and see new clients walking into the door. But after nearly a year, paying hundreds a month for a service I truly saw 0 benefit from we had to stop. The worst part about this experience was that once we stopped paying, our Yelp page was essentially blacklisted in some way and would no longer come up in searches and was only hurting our practice. We even had issues with competitors of ours posting fake reviews online pretending to be unhappy clients, which for a small practice without many reviews probably cost us countless patients.

Over time we came in contact with a marketing team that got us connected with Review Shark, and decided to give it a try. Our practice was doing okay at this point, but not seeing the growth we wanted or expected. The one thing that Review Shark changed for us immediately was to help make getting reviews from clients much easier! Once we signed up, a representative from the company was able to walk us through many features and able to set us up with an in-office device to have patients review us right from the waiting room. This was so helpful considering that most patients, once they leave, even if they loved the treatment, results or overall service, the last thing they remember to do is logon to Google, find us and write a review – even when we asked. At this point as a business owner and doctor, I knew reviews were important but I didn’t realize how much they mattered for smaller practices like us. Once a patient left a review using Review Shark, their experience was posted on our site and all over the search engine. Any time another patient would search our practice or we came up online, their review would be there. Almost immediately we started to get 5-10 new reviews per week for the first few months, and it had an incredible effect on our online presence. If you Google our practice, you see tons of actual patient testimonials with nothing but good things to say. And in aesthetics, this really matters! With our practice reputation improving literally every day, we started to get more calls and more patients booking appointments. Most of these patients were cosmetic patients looking for treatments like Botox and dermal fillers, and once they came in, and got excellent service, many of them became regulars for both cosmetic and general dermatology services as well.

In the past we would have to run different specials and promotions through coupon sites like Groupon to see any new patients, but we haven’t had to do this much at all since Review Shark. Without even having to speak to the client, our conversion rates are way up and we are coming up on more searches on Google which was probably the biggest surprise. From being virtually unknown in Queens only a year or two ago, we have seen incredible growth and have nearly doubled our client list and are constantly busy. You don’t realize the effect reviews have until you see it, and being able to properly display them with the level of control Review Shark gives you is priceless. For more information, or to sign up for Review Shark, visit ReviewShark.com today.