Culture & Marketing: Make Your Hearing Healthcare Brand Come to Life

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What makes a brand? Is it a tagline? A color scheme or logo? No, a brand is so much more than that! Just like you, your practice’s brand has a unique personality and voice. When you identify and develop these traits, your practice earns trust, builds a stellar reputation, and forms loyal patient relationships for years to come.

Branding can be an intimidating subject for some. If you’ve ever thought about your audiology practice’s  branding, you may have wondered if your tagline is catchy enough, your colors are bold enough, or your logo is flashy enough to attract new patients. Maybe you don’t consider yourself a creative. After all, how do you create a great brand from the ground up? The truth is, for better or for worse, every business already has a brand.

Your brand is your reputation—it is what people say about you. Things like your color scheme and your logo are still important because they help represent who you are, but at the end of the day, nobody shops at Amazon just for the logo!

How your patients feel when they interact with you is crucial. It impacts their chances of becoming a return customer, online reviews they leave, and what they tell their friends. So how do you ensure they have good things to say? There are two important factors:

• Culture: Providing an exceptional experience
• Marketing: Telling the right story in the right way

Examining how each of these things function in your practice is a great place to start. Have you ever heard the phrase “walking the talk?” Culture is the walk and marketing is the talk. Having one is a good start, but the real value comes from having both.

Culture: Providing an Exceptional Experience

Think back to a time when you had a good experience with a business (an airline, restaurant, hotel, etc.)

What happens when you don’t have a good experience? Let’s walk through an example. Say you try a new restaurant in your town for the first time, and this is what happens…

• You arrive at the wrong location. You realize the restaurant’s Google listing is not up to date and is showing an old address. A sign on the door directs you to the current address.
• The hostess doesn’t smile or greet you when you enter. You have a reservation, but you still wait 15 minutes to be seated.
• You are seated right next to the bathroom. Every time someone enters or leaves, the door bumps your chair.
• Your server explains that many of the items on the menu are unavailable, including the chicken parmesan that they posted on their Facebook page earlier in the day. You really wanted that chicken parmesan…
• Your food arrives, and it’s great! But you encountered a lot of obstacles on the way to get it.

How do you feel in this scenario? Frustrated? Annoyed? Disappointed? Do you think these feelings impact the restaurant’s reputation? An important thing to point out is that even though the food was great, the negatives may stand out even more.

As a hearing healthcare provider, you know you can help patients transform their lives through better hearing. You have the skills and the tools to do so. But creating an excellent experience means focusing on other aspects outside of your quality care—just like an excellent restaurant requires more than good food. Providing that five-star experience means tapping into your empathy and thinking about everything your patients want and need. What would make their experience easier? More convenient? Happier?

Here are some things to consider when creating an excellent patient experience:

• A website that accurately represents your practice and services
• Google listings that are up to date
• An easy way to make an appointment with you online
• A welcoming, comfortable, and accessible waiting room with a short wait time

Culture: It All Starts with Staff

Experience isn’t just important for patients, it’s important for staff too. How your team members feel about their jobs can directly impact your patient’s experience.

For example, your patient care coordinator has a huge impact on your patients. This person listens to patient needs, offers solutions, and has a crucial role in helping them get the care they need. If they feel that they come to work everyday in a positive environment, your patients will feel that too. Attitude is contagious! Even if your staff is always professional and polite to patients, negativity and positivity both can trickle down to the patient experience in subtle ways.

Think about your staff. Are they motivated? Do they take pride in their jobs? Do they have everything they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities? Asking these questions and having regular check-ins with your staff is key to ensuring everyone has a great experience.

Marketing: Tell the Right Story in the Right Way

One standout example of great marketing is the Stanley Quencher cup—you know the one! This water bottle became popular seemingly overnight and is now one of the internet’s most viral products. Would you believe that five short years ago, Quencher sales were so bad that Stanley almost discontinued them? How did they turn things around?

A blog called The Buy Guide came to the rescue. Stanley was originally marketing their tumblers to the same people who bought other adventure and camping gear. However, the Buy Guide argued that there was an entire audience Stanley was missing in their marketing. It was moms and other women in the workforce who needed a large, portable drink that would view the Quencher cups as more of an accessory than a piece of gear.

Stanley redesigned their website, marketing and expanded their color palette to appeal to this segment of their audience. Sure, there are other popular water bottles that are very similar, but it’s the story that sets it apart. The story is, when you buy a Stanley Quencher, you are buying wellness, exclusivity, belonging, and an accessory that makes a statement about who you are. Once Stanley told the right story to the right people, sales skyrocketed!

That was an example about water bottles, but the same principle applies to any business—even hearing healthcare practices!

When patients purchase a hearing aid from you, what are they really buying? It’s more than just a piece of technology. It is your expertise, a better lifestyle, better health, excellent customer service, customized programming, someone to listen to them and understand them. Everything from your marketing to your waiting room to your follow-up care helps you tell this story.

Your Marketing Checklist

So you know what your story is, but how do you tell it? A lot of different ways! There are so many opportunities along the patient journey to tell your story. You might be trying to reach a patient in the awareness category who hasn’t even considered how hearing health impacts their life. You might be reaching a current customer in need of an upgrade. There is no one way to reach these customers. The key is to have a variety of marketing strategies in place so that no matter where a patient is on their journey to hearing care, your practice is front and center.

Here is a basic checklist that covers the fundamentals of a great marketing strategy:

• An SEO optimized website backed by paid media
• Updated listings on Google and industry directories like Healthy Hearing
• Video marketing
• Patient nurture strategies
• Patient referrals and testimonials
• Physician marketing
• Direct mail
• Community outreach

Just like you, your brand is unique! When you focus on providing an excellent experience and tell the right story in the right way, you are walking the talk! Not sure where to get started? CQ Partners has an entire team of in-house marketing experience who can make your brand come to life!