Many of the practices that I speak to assume marketing is centered around bringing in new people. While that is a key component, that is not all that marketing is. The definition of marketing provided by the American Marketing Association states: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
Notice how “customers” are the first audience they call out? They are the easiest people to market to, yet practices tend to leave them by the waist-side.
Here are three reasons why you should be marketing to your patients:
- You have an established relationship with them. You already invested the time (and money) to get them in the door. Regardless if they purchased or not, you should want to maintain that relationship with them, so they continue to come back.
- Out of sight, out of mind. The hearing industry has evolved into a heavily competitive environment, so your patients are bombarded with advertisements from the larger, big box competitors that have the million-dollar marketing budgets. If you aren’t communicating with them on a consistent basis, they are more likely to go elsewhere.
- It is less costly. As opposed to marketing to the whole 65+ community, it won’t cost you nearly as much to mail something to your patients. It would be even cheaper if you sent them an email! The ROI is also much higher because you are marketing to more qualified leads.
Here are the facts*:
- Compared to ads, inserts, digital marketing and traditional direct mail results, database marketing had the highest ROI – 99%!
- 68% of completed appointments that came from a database initiative, converted to units sold.
- Practices who ran an CQ Partners Upgrade event where they targeted their TNS and OOW patients, on average made almost $31K in profit – just from one 3-day event!
Here is what you can do:
- Document where your patients came from and what the result was from their appointment. This will help you tailor your messages to those specific audiences. It will also provide insight into whether your marketing is working appropriately.
- Devote 10% of your marketing budget to database marketing and implement it. This can consist of letters, birthday cards, postcards, newsletters, etc. These messages can either be delivered through the mail or the internet.
- Execute fun events to get patients to come back into the office. You can do different things like a patient appreciation week, a wine & cheese night or even host Q&A sessions with both hearing aid and non-hearing aid users.
Here is how CQ Partners can help:
- We can organize your database by establishing the correct referral sources and working with your practice management software on developing segmentation lists.
- We can design any marketing piece that you want to send out to your database.
- We can host your next Upgrade event.
All you need to do is contact your CQ representative or the marketing team to get started. We will work with you to make your practice profitable by keeping it top of mind with your patients.
*These facts are based on the data that our Associates provide to us that is captured in CQ’s quarterly marketing ROI report.
