Digital advertising is essential for growing your audiology practice.
A growing share of people looking for your services and products are doing so on their computers and phones. They are simply typing “hearing aids” or “audiologist near me” into their search engine and clicking on one of the links given to them (almost always on the first page). You want your audiology practice to show up on that first page. That is reason number one. We call it Digital Marketing for Audiologists 101. But the same idea works for any other professional service/business. Besides there are lots of other reasons for an audiologist to look into digital marketing. Let’s explore the top four marketing ideas for audiology.
1- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Optimizing your website means making the value of its content, organization and layout clear to the artificial intelligence (AI) crawlers (spiders) that search engines use to collect data. These search engines want to get reliable, helpful and quality information in front of their users.
- First, SEO identifies keywords that consumers use most often when they go searching for information.
- Second, SEO finds quality content where these keywords are used and offers those business websites back to the searcher.
Great websites weave these keywords into the content of their webpages, blogs, infographic content and links to optimize the quality of their content for SEO crawlers. Strategic keywords are woven into as many places within the web content as possible so that the site will get noticed by Google as well as other search engines. Search engine software scans the content of billions of pages and notes and indexes the use of these keywords. The desired end result comes when a consumer types “best audiologist near me” into the search engine and the result of their search gives them your business name, address, phone number, menu, weekly schedule, etc. on the first page of their search. Check out these fun facts:
- Less than 10 percent of searchers go to the second page of their search results.
- More than 30 percent of searchers click on the first website in their results.
Quality content will continue to be the determining Audiology SEO factor. That is why creating content on vital topics that are interesting to your audience is a first priority. Producing high quality relevant content requires a business owner to consider what kind of content will most benefit them? What are the most likely questions and objections of our potential customers? With the answers to those questions in mind you must then write, or get professionals to write, high quality and high impact content in your blog, in your newsletters and on your website. Quality content will soon get noticed and shared by others through social media and will inevitably lead more people to your website.
2- Email Marketing
The focus of Email marketing is on retaining your customers while also pulling in new clients. It can be tailored to build brand awareness, keep your services top-of-mind, and encourage repeat product purchases. Email continues to be an important marketing tool for creating new leads and cultivating leads from existing clients. In fact for many companies email remains their most effective channel based on ROI. According to a McKinsey & Company study, email is 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter, with conversions being 17% higher value than on social media.
Email Newsletters
Are an excellent way to provide current clients with interesting, relevant and helpful information, industry news, and personalized content that draws interest and may also get shared through social media. You can offer product coupons, summaries of your blog posts, links to third party articles, special offers, and event announcements to existing and new customers. Several sites have galleries of sample newsletters on their site which offer lots of inspiring ideas.
Setting a regular posting schedule for newsletters is most effective; monthly or quarterly postings are a good place to begin. E-mail blasts can also be created to announce new services, products or hearing aid promotion ideas. It is vital for you to make it really easy to sign up for your newsletter. This is best done with simple newsletter sign up forms throughout your website and blog. Your email newsletter provider can also track click ins and sign ups as well as who clicks into specific articles. These analytics can be used to refine the content and layout of your newsletters to best engage your audience.
Automate your Email!
Once you find value in Email marketing the next step is Email automation. These services will automatically send welcome emails to new subscribers, ecards on clients birthdays, or targeted newsletter/blog content based on a subscribers history of click-ins. The nice thing about this is it should be part of a suite of automation software that takes you to the next level.
3- Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
With PPC, your business bids on keywords that your business wants your ads to pop up for — whenever a user search includes your keyword(s) your ad will pop up. Your ad will appear at the top of the search results page, before any other listings. Whenever a user clicks on your advertisement, you will pay a fee for that click. You aren’t paying for ad space — you’re only paying for results.
Pay-per-click marketing is one of the most effective and cost effective modes of marketing today. It is basically a way to use search engine advertising to drive clicks to your website. And it works in two ways.
- First, you can buy a sponsored ad at the top of Google’s search results page and assure that your business is one of the first options that shows up when someone does a search with your business keywords.
- Second, your business can run PPC campaigns on Facebook or LinkedIn. A targeted ad is created that appears on the FB or LinkedIn accounts of those who would be most interested in your products or services. Any time your ad is clicked, the user is sent to your website, and you pay the search engine a fee. An excellent and well-designed PPC ad campaign will generate a high percentage of quality leads making the fee a very worthwhile investment.
One of the most beneficial ways that Google and other search engine ads campaigns work for small and medium sized businesses, is that they do not just sell their ad spots to the richest bidders. Their PPC marketing campaigns also reward the best ads, those of the best quality and those that users like the most. If you develop a high performing ad then you can play with the bigger fish! What that means for small and medium sized businesses is the better your ads, the higher your click-through rates then the lower your overall costs.
4- Social media marketing
One of the cutting edge areas of marketing ideas for audiology is harnessing the growth of social media; 60% of small and medium businesses report gaining new customers through the use of social media. The explosion of social media has created wide ranging opportunities for getting your business message spread far and wide. This growing medium provides lots of benefits including:
Brand Exposure
Growing your brand and familiarity with your potential customers is essential. People very often choose a product or service based on their familiarity with it. They have encountered your brand before. Growing this kind of familiarity with your brand through social media is effective, has the potential to reach a global audience and does not have to cost a lot of money.
Fish where they Bite
It seems crazy but the average person today spends 2.5 hours on social media daily. This is where people are interacting with others and increasingly are getting information and receiving advertisements. Staying relevant means going to where people are engaged and active. By building a presence on social media, answering questions and building relationships you will be fishing where people are biting.
Become the Go-To Expert
By providing excellent content, advice, answers to questions, relevant sources and friendly service you can create a following on social media in which you are the go-to expert in your field. If customers return to your page for quality content and pass that information on to their “friends” your list of clients will grow and their trust in your business will increase. More trusting contacts will lead to higher sales conversion rates.
Conclusion
As you can see there are a lot of benefits to using Digital Marketing for Audiologists. But as you can also see there is a lot of work to be done to get your Audiology SEO up and running and then maximizing its many benefits. Which is why an audiologist might want to hire a digital marketing agency. Whether you just need help with hearing aid promotional ideas or a fully outlined digital marketing for audiologists strategy, these marketing professionals know all of the in’s and out’s of the digital marketing business and can work with you to tailor their digital approach to meet your need for marketing ideas for audiology.
Here at zo agency we work to build long term relationships with our clients. We call it Tribe!
We will work diligently to discover your vision, your passion, your needs, your hopes and dreams for your business and then will create an overall marketing plan that meets your needs and fits your budget. Visit us today at www.zo.agency
