Market Your Audiology Practice For Less
Want to grow your practice?
Want to attract more patients?
Would you like to sell more top dollar hearing aids to more people so they can hear better and live better?
You answered yes to all three questions, right?
So, before I tell you how to do all 3, I’d like to dispel a common misconception.
Most people equate saving money with making money. But is that right?
Let’s say you owned a pizza business and pizza delivery was the mainstay of your business in your rural town. Should you spend money on a reliable delivery van, or save money and rely on bicycles instead?
Duh! Of course, you’d need to buy or rent a vehicle. Using bikes would save you a lot of money, but by the time the pizzas were delivered they’d be cold in winter or soggy in summer, and no one would ever order another pizza from you again.
The same is true with your audiology or hearing aid practice. If you’re too cheap, if you focus on cutting costs, you could lose your practice.
Take your staff. It’d be much cheaper to outsource your front desk operation to India, the Philippines, or China and just replace your staff with a touch screen computer. (I’m just kidding here, so don’t get any ideas.)
Do this and you could save thousands of dollars each month, of course you’d lose not only any new patients you’d hope to attract but your existing ones, too.
OR – you could set a goal to bring in another $100,000 to $300,000 in additional revenue and then go for the cheapest (lowest cost) marketing solution. Now I’m sure you’d never do that, but we see practice owners shooting themselves in the foot by trying to grow their practice while avoiding investing in it.
They spend a lot on their training, their office, their equipment and then they go cheap on their marketing. It’s like buying a fine car, Cadillac or BMW, that one you’ve always wanted, and trying to save money by filling the gas tank with water instead of quality fuel.
So let’s get a couple things straight.
1. If you want your practice to always struggle – be a marketing cheapskate. On the other hand, if you truly want see your practice become one of the leaders in your town, you’re going to need to focus, not on saving money but on your ROI, the rate of return of your marketing.
2. It’s time to redefine what cheap means in your vocabulary. It’s not about the dollar amount, but the value you get in return. For example, while spending $4,000 on a pair of hearing aids might seem like a lot to some, one could also argue they are cheap given the technology and performance they provide.
Cheap Marketing Redefined
Most people define something as expensive or cheap on a gut reaction and rarely actually apply math. Which makes no sense!
So let’s do the math and define what cheap means in terms of marketing for your practice. Here are two scenarios:
A. You pay $100 every month or more for an ad, a direct mail piece, or lame website for your practice and it generates no new patients. Which is expensive.
B. You pay $1,000 a month to market your practice and you get 10 more phone calls for the month, schedule 7 appointments and sell 5 more pairs of hearing aids than you did the previous month. That’s CHEAP!
Next Steps?
Find out how to grow your practice by being cheap – I mean by getting a solid return on the time and money you spend on your marketing. I’ll even give you a few tips right here.
1. Use science!
In an email, instead of just randomly picking a subject line, I reviewed our open rates and noticed whenever we mention the word “cheap” in a subject line we get ridiculously high open rates, and more people read our messages. Hopefully it’s not that audiology and hearing aid practices owners are just plain cheap.
How does this work out, using science in our marketing?
Since I joined MedPB.com, we’ve seen leads increase by over 300%, and much of that has to do with picking the right words, something I’d be more than happy to share with you as a member.
2. Use math!
The secret to marketing is to target the emotional reasons your patients buy, but use math to review your results, and replace what’s not working with what does. Again, as a member, that’s what you’ll discover.
Ready to see your practice prosper? Our members typically see their hearing aid sales increase by 21% when they sign up.
Talk to Us to schedule a free practice development consultation with Kevin.
P.S. According to surveys, 4 out of 5 people here in the U.S. are willing to pay a premium for quality, whether it’s a hearing aid or prepared food. And if that’s your market – people who are looking for premium hearing testing and hearing aids – if you’re just trying to pick the cheapest marketing approach, you’ve got a big disconnect in your business strategy.
Ready to grow your practice? Talk to Us.
