Any good cosmetic surgeon knows the importance of accentuating assets. Help a woman achieve a balanced figure with breast enhancement. Rekindle the spark in a handsome man’s eyes with a blepharoplasty. You know the drill.
Which makes it all the more perplexing to us why it’s so challenging for many of our clients to get serious about taking outstanding patient before and after photos. We can’t be any clearer: these photos are your #1 MARKETING ASSET. You MUST build out a healthy library of before and after plastic surgery photos on your website if you’re going to maximize your online marketing.
What’s Holding You Back?
Let’s take a look at some of the common reasons we hear why clients are having a tough time building out their before & after gallery. And we’ll offer a solution or workaround for every single one – so keep your excuses in check!
Problem: Keeping track of patient sign offs – No doctor wants to be caught posting photos that a patient didn’t really want shared online. You need to make sure you have documentation from every patient approving the use of their before & after photos on the web.
Solution – If you haven’t already, make this approval part of your initial patient paperwork. Do not pressure patients to sign off on sharing their photos. Just note whichever choice they have made. To keep photos of patients who have agreed to share their photos separate from the patients who have not, we suggest setting up two folders where you store the photos. Something like “Photos – Web OK” and “Photos – Web NOT OK” should work.
We also suggest that whoever is taking the photos is trained to remind patients of their choice on their post-op visit. For instance: “I see that you agreed we could share your photos on our website. Are you still comfortable with that?” Or “I see you indicated you don’t want us to share your before & after photos online. We respect and completely understand that decision. Is that still the best option for you?” If a patient changes her mind, your staff member can simply move her photo folder to the appropriate parent folder.
Problem: Nobody to organize and edit photos – Even if a patient has said it’s OK to share his photos in your online marketing, there are still a number of steps to take to make that happen.
Solution – A bit of improved process combined with some outside assistance can tackle this problem with ease. The first thing you need to do is settle on a phone/device to capture all patient photos. This eliminates the problem of patient photos ending up in many places and on many devices, which can also be a significant HIPAA liability.
From there, the challenge is to get the photos housed somewhere they can be shared. We’d recommend creating a Dropbox or Google Drive account to store photos. These secure sites make it easy to organize photos and select who they’re shared with.
If your internal staff has the bandwidth and know-how, you can task them with cropping photos and adding them right to your gallery. If on the other hand your team is more strapped for time, enlist the help of your online marketing company to take care of the photo editing and posting gruntwork. Work out a good process with your online marketing team so that they know as soon as new photos are added that are approved to go on your website.
Problem: Not sure what equipment to use – At this point, you’d have to try pretty hard NOT to have a good enough device to take high-resolution photos that show off your results well.
Solution – Buy a tablet that’s dedicated only to taking before & after photos. Without a doubt, there are some very nice standalone cameras for the same or less cost than a tablet. But in our experience, while you can get stellar photos, a standalone camera is not the greatest tool for photo gallery bliss. Why? Because a tablet camera makes it much easier to organize and upload photos into folders, which is an essential step in successfully posting before & after photos.
So buy a tablet, put a big label on the back of it saying “For Patient Photos Only” and make sure it remains in the exam room where pictures are taken, or in a similar consistent, secure place where it can be accessed at any time when taking a patient photo may be needed.
Problem: Inconsistent images – It’s not reasonable to expect the same staff person to take every patient photo. And other factors in the office can easily lead to inconsistencies in how before images look compared to after images.
Solution – We talked a lot about taking consistent before & after photos in a post last year so we won’t repeat ourselves too much here. The biggest way to maximize photo consistency is to create a guidebook/style sheet for your staff to reference. The shorter the sweeter – ideally your notes and instructions can fit on a single sheet of paper that can be posted near where photos are being taken, or better still as a reference document right on the tablet your staff uses for photos.
Is Something Else in the Way?
We’ve talked about several common roadblocks that have prevented our clients from getting in the groove on posting patient before & after photos. But is something else holding you back? PLEASE make time to talk with us so we can strategize a way forward with you. It’s no accident that our most successful clients are almost to a tee the ones who have built out the best online photo galleries.