As a hearing care professional, having a degree or good skills alone won’t be able to bring in patients. When people have many options for availing audiology services, actively promoting your audiology services is a must to remain booked with patients. People must see and hear your audiology services first so that you can make more of your patients to hear. Consider the following audiology marketing ideas to see dramatic changes in the revenues of your business
1) Equip Your Virtual Clinic
Your audiology business website is your virtual clinic that will have the responsibility of convincing the site visitors to take your audiology services. Most businessmen don’t know how to fully utilize their website’s potential. To enable your website to convince and send more patients for your audiology business, take note of these factors for your website:
a) People don’t like waiting times. Enable a quick appointment booking session directly from your website as it will increase the number of bookings.
b) Trust is a key element in the medical profession. So make sure to display all your best features like accreditation, experience, testimonials, awards, media coverage, etc.
c) On your site’s homepage, have a nice and professional video explaining your audiology services. This is because videos can convince your visitors way better than ordinary text content on your website.
d) Check your site loading time and improve the loading time (if it is slow loading) as it can cause up to 10 percent change in the number of visitors to your site.
e) Check your site from different devices and see if the site resolution changes with the device type. If your site resolution remains rigid, get it changed to dynamic.
2) Get Visual Presence of Your Audiology Business
Most searches for audiologists begin on Google. So it becomes quite obvious that your audiologist website must appear within the top few results of Google for such searches. Type “audiologist in [city]” and similar search terms and observe where your website ranks. If your site ranking is low, start implementing good SEO principles. It is very easy to understand the basic SEO principles, however, remaining updated with new changes requires some work. Contracting the SEO work to an SEO agency is also a feasible option to get professional support in ranking your website and thereby increasing your business visibility.
3) Optimize and Rank Your Business Profile on Google
Not only your website but your Google Business Profile page created for your audiology business too can rank on Google’s first page. All it will take is the right knowledge of optimization of your Google Business Profile. Keywords, category, reviews, citations, etc are a few of the many factors that influence the ranking of these pages. Once again, you can do this optimization yourself or can get it managed by an SEO agency.
4) Push Your Business higher by Post Stocking
The more posts you publish on your audiology website, the more will be the number of keywords (search queries) for which your website will start appearing on Google. More appearance in search engines directly correlates to more visitors and hence clients. So start writing on audiology-related topics for your website like “audiologist for ear waxing in [city name]”, “audiologists in [city name] that accept medicare”, etc. This method of marketing will keep on driving clients to your audiology business for a long period of time without incurring any cost from your side (if you write the articles yourself).
5) Show Your Business Worth with Press Releases
Mentions of a business in big news publications increase its worth and brand value. This is why you must use a quality press release distribution to get the name of your business covered on brands like Yahoo, Associated Press, Fox News partners, etc. Whenever people will type your business name, they will come across media coverage of your audiology clinic which will not only increase the faith in your business but will also serve you the privilege to mention “As seen on….” on your marketing materials.
6) Start Executing Ads to Get a Quick Inflow of Leads
By paying to advertise your ad on top-tier advertising channels like Google, Bing, Facebook, you can propel the rate at which you are getting leads currently. However, you must be watchful of your ad optimization as improper optimization can elevate your advertising costs and can decrease your overall returns. Learn the fundamentals of advertising on these networks through various free YouTube tutorials or if budget is not a concern, use a PPC advertising service for better handling of your paid ads.
7) Start Growing the Local Base with Social Media
Nowadays, you can easily find a huge chunk of your local population on social media. However, to get these people to know and follow you on social media will require consistent work from your side during the initial phase. Sharing new posts, engaging with local groups on social media, using local hashtags, linking with other local businesses, etc are the few most common ways to start getting traction amongst the local masses. With just a few months of effort, you can easily get a few thousand people from your area to follow your social media profile. Social media marketing of your audiology services can easily be handled either by yourself or by any third-party agency, if the need arises.
8) Increase Your Sites’ Efficiency by Collecting Emails
All those visitors who exit your website without contacting your audiology business are lost opportunities. If you put up an email opt-in form on your website and start collecting the emails of your site visitors, you will be able to increase the utilization of your site visitors with just this small strategy. As people won’t voluntarily provide their email addresses, do prepare a good incentive that can be provided in exchange for email addresses. These incentives can be in form of ebooks, discounts, etc. After having email addresses of potential clients, you will have multiple attempts to convert these leads into your patients.
9) Uncover New Client Funnels Through LinkedIn
The professional network, LinkedIn, can allow you to reach out to many potential partners for your audiology business. You can reach out to many doctors and healthcare professionals through LinkedIn and can associate with them to get new patient referrals. These partners will work as your client funnels and you can easily find such local partners through LinkedIn.
10) Direct More Traffic with Directories
Type audiology-related keywords in Google search and you will definitely notice a few high-ranking directories. These directories will be Yelp, Zocdoc, etc. Make accounts on all these directories so that your audiology business can successfully take advantage of the visitors of these directories. The more directories where you list your business, the more will be the number of patients that you will fetch from these directories.
11) Start Building a Referral Chain
A very simple way to make use of existing patients to get new patients is by asking your present patients to refer your business. Apart from patients, you can also ask other related businesses to do the same. This marketing method is simple and can easily cause 10-20% rise in customers looking for audiology services.
12) Decrease the Decision Making Time with Videos
People look at different aspects before finalizing a product/service. You can drastically reduce the decision-making time of your potential customers by presenting your audiology business through professional videos. A video is way more convincing than text and is therefore proven to boost conversion rates. So start utilizing videos, be it on YouTube, your website, social media platforms, etc. Additionally, uploading your audiology business videos on YouTube can give you more traffic and consequently leads from the YouTube platform.
13) Make Use of Non-Online Marketing Methods
While online marketing is a fastly growing trend among businesses, the charm of offline marketing still exists. Select a few local newspapers with good circulation and start giving your audiology business ads on them. Reserve billboards and banner ads near crowded locations, popular hospitals, etc. While these are the most commonly used methods for offline promotion, you will find a few more extra offline promotion methods in the next few sub-topics below.
14) Promote as Well as Maintain Good Reviews
When it comes to crucial decisions like health, finance, etc, people are more likely to check reviews online. Therefore paying attention to the kind of reviews your business gets online is very crucial. In case your audiology business doesn’t have reviews, your potential customers might switch over to any of your competing audiology service providers. So start asking people to put reviews of your audiology business online.
15) Present Your Expertise Through Newspapers
Newspapers like featuring expert content. You must connect with local newspapers and must offer free writing on hearing and audiology-related topics. Once people start reading your content through newspapers, your recognition will start growing up to new levels and this will bring many new patients to your audiology clinic.
16) Host Free Consultation Camps for Audiology and Ear Problems
Free health camps attract a big crowd. Host free consultation camp for ear and audiology-related issues to bring hundreds of people in contact with your business. You can recommend medicines and devices through such camps and can earn from the sale of these devices and medicines by partnership with the dealers of these products (medicines and devices). You can also get many of them to come for a paid checkup if the severity of their problem is bigger.
17) Get More Patients by Building Relevant Partners
There are many places from where you have more chances of getting patients for audiology clinic/hospital. Some of these are ENT doctors, physicians, general clinics, etc. You can, therefore, associate with these entities and can start getting more patients through their references.
18) Be Active in all Community Events
Various kinds of local gatherings take place in every city/town. These gatherings can be in the form of trade fairs, events, community camps, fundraisers, marathons, etc. By making your presence or the presence of your business representative in such community events, you can get your audiology service introduced to more people locally.
19) Start Presenting Case Studies
People love reading case studies. Case studies also increase the conversion rate of a business as they provide a more real feel. So start sharing case studies of how your audiology clinic/business has treated people. Since most patients are not comfortable with sharing their personal details, you can either mask their real name and face or can take their prior consent to be included in your case study. These case studies can be published on all of your marketing materials like website, social media, etc.
20) Adopt the Latest Technology to Gain Upper Hand in Your Business
Always be attentive to the latest developments in your niche and be among the first in your region to adopt them. Uniqueness adds value to a business and it separates your business from the rest. For example, there are technologies using which you can show a real-time image of the interior of your patient’s ear. The better you present yourself as distinct from other audiologists, the more will be your chances to increase your patient base.
21) Involve Text Marketing
People read text messages much more often than emails and most other means of communication. So you must integrate text messaging feature so that automatic reminders can be sent for the next visit to patients along with sending reminders and follow-ups on their upcoming appointment. This will cause a sharp decline in the “no-show” problem that is common in the medical profession.
22) Ride the Wave of Being a Book Author
Having a book written and published by you is a great way to cause a big boost in your brand image. Nowadays it has become extremely easy to write and publish a book due to various digital technologies and platforms. Once you get a book published, you can proudly show yourself as the author of a book across all your marketing channels.
23) Start Offering Telehealth Services Too
Most people want the best convenient way to solve their issues. A good approach in this direction is to start giving telehealth services using which people can book online appointments and you can give online consultations to them. You can also join various doctor-related apps where doctors do online consultations for their patients.
24) Associate and Build a Multispeciality Center
You can team up with doctors in other disciplines and can build a big multispeciality center so that this center can become more popular and can attract more patients. Such a center will help all the doctors involved in it.
25) Open an Affiliate Program
In order to utilize the efforts of other people in advertising your audiology business, you can open an affiliate program. With an affiliate program, you will share a certain percentage of your booking amount with those affiliate partners who send new patients/calls to your clinic. To get new affiliates readily, joining any affiliate network like commission junction would be immensely helpful.
These audiology marketing ideas, on implementation, can impact your business positively and can increase the number of patients in your clinic/hospital. Have doubts or questions, ask them out below.
