As a practice owner, your top priorities are providing exceptional care and growing your business. BlueWing, a Darwill company, is here to help you choose the marketing strategies that will help you achieve your marketing goals so you can focus on patient care.
We’ve created this blog to outline five marketing strategies for hearing care practices. If you need help with your current marketing efforts or are just getting started, this is the blog for you.
Website
To help your patients find you online, you’ll want to build a website for your practice. As you plan the creation of your website, consider the content, layout, and usability.
First impressions are everything and your website is most likely the first interaction a potential patient has with your practice. Creating an informative website will help patients find the answer to what brought them there in the first place. Design, copy, and the overall website functionality will all impact how the patient feels about the practice and drive them to schedule an appointment.
Additionally, your website can act as a way to generate appointments. Either directing patients to schedule an appointment online or making a phone call to schedule at their preferred office location. Having the option to schedule online can really make you stand out, especially for those patients that have a difficult time hearing over the phone.
Once you have a website, you’ll want to make sure that it ranks high on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This means working on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of designing websites to improve their positioning on organic search results based on the web pages' relevance to the search query. This can be done by adding the right keywords to your web page. When a search is conducted, your website is scanned to see if it contains relevant content to the search. Having those keywords will help your website when it comes to being displayed in the results. Website SEO can help you increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.
Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is a quick, affordable option to increase your patient volume. Digital advertising refers to the ads that are located at the top of your search result list, in social media news feeds, displayed on web pages, and more. These ads can retarget patients with the content they were viewing on your website. This helps to keep your brand and messaging in their mind so that when they’re ready, they come to your practice for an appointment.
Digital advertising targets patients online with services or offers based on the campaign goals. The call to action (CTA) on your digital ads will direct the potential patient to your website to learn more about your practice or to schedule an appointment. Plus, the scalability and trackability of digital advertising allow for a better return on investment (ROI).
Social Media
Social media is a great platform to utilize to tell your story and nourish patient relationships online. You can craft posts about your skilled staff, promote your services or hearing aid offers, and interact with potential patients. This is a great place to establish and build trust with patients. Some people may be embarrassed by their hearing loss or nervous to start their hearing care journey. Through storytelling on social media, you can show there’s nothing to fear and empower them to take control of their hearing health.
Social media is great for posting quick updates or announcements that you may not have time to translate on your website. Additionally, if you don’t have a social media ad budget, organic social media posts are an alternative that can benefit you and can be further analyzed to understand what content is capturing the most response.
Direct Mail
In hearing care marketing, the target audience typically skews older. Many people in this group still prefer receiving physical mail and letters over email. In many cases, this group has not fully transitioned over to the digital world. Knowing this, we can craft direct mail campaigns specific to the patient or prospect that will produce a high response. For the aging population that needs hearing aids, mail, newsletters, and other print ads can be ideal for getting your message in front of them.
While your audience may primarily respond best to direct mail, you may want to consider pairing direct mail with digital marketing for a multichannel approach. BlueWing’s data shows that 48.2% of baby boomers, ages 54-72 years old, use social media daily. Implementing direct mail and digital in your marketing strategy will help ensure that you reach your target audience across channels when they go online. Using both in your omnichannel strategy helps to target your patients across multiple channels to build brand awareness and drive appointments.
Referrals and Reviews
Lastly, getting referrals and reviews will be a huge help as studies have shown that patients are very trusting of their peers. Asking your happy patients to leave a written review or even a video review can boost your patient volume. Plus, you can use patient quotes from the review in other marketing material which can provide a great ROI.
As long as you provide a positive experience, your patients will be more willing to recommend your practice to people they know. This means a higher quantity of quality patients for your practice.
Get Started with BlueWing
We help hearing practices like yours increase patient volume, improve brand awareness, and drive appointments. Our marketing recommendations will help you see a better ROI and generate quality leads. Let’s get started today!