Strategic Planning for 2025: Gain Quality Hearing Healthcare Leads

Not all patient leads are created equal, and when planning for 2025, it’s important to focus on adding quality leads – patients searching for help for their hearing loss. Where do you start? How many leads to do you need to support your goals? Where will those leads come from? With the right strategies and expertise to help you, you can gain the quality patient leads you need. You don’t have to do it alone, either. CQ is here to help you implement and execute plans to get these leads on your schedule and help more people hear better.

Let’s discuss how you can define, track, and implement strategies to gain more quality patient leads in 2025!

How do you define a quality patient leads?

Defining a quality lead depends on the practice itself, your individual mission for your practice and your vision for how you want to service your community. Generally, a lead is considered anyone expressing interest in your practice. We all love those, right? This lead could be someone who just needs their hearing tested for their employer, or just needs a new dome for their hearing aid. We’re all more than happy to provide care for those patients. A quality lead, however, is someone who is looking for a solution to their hearing loss. Ideally, a quality lead is familiar with your practice in some way. They may have been referred to you by their physician, or not, but they are at the point where they have recognized their hearing loss and want to get help. Defining these leads will help you prioritize and create opportunity appointments.

If you look at your practice’s calendar, you’ll probably see a variety of different appointment types. They’re all great because we want to help patients throughout their journey to amplification, no matter where they are. You do, however, want to make sure you are prioritizing those opportunity appointments, because we know if we have a goal, we can work backward to know the number of opportunity appointments you need. You can make sure they don’t get overrun by clean and checks, or follow-ups and troubleshoots. Sometimes a practice can be busy with a completely full schedule, but they’re not bringing in the revenue they want because a lot of their schedule was filled with non-opportunity appointments. Therefore, you want to make sure you have the right number of opportunity appointments, which is where your quality leads are going to help. These are the opportunities to be able to provide a solution and make a treatment recommendation for a patient’s hearing loss.

How do you determine how many patient leads are needed?

Most practice owners would say that they just want to add more quality leads. While that’s not necessarily a bad goal, there are ways to get more specific about the amount of quality leads you want to add. Start with your goal. Whether it’s a financial goal, revenue units, or number of people helped, you can then work backwards to determine how many opportunities you need on your schedule to reach that goal. Then, you can figure out the right amount of quality leads you need coming in through your marketing plan or through internal operational strategies to fill those opportunities. Even though some patients may cancel, or not go through with a hearing aid purchase that day, filling those opportunities will ensure that you are meeting your goal.

What can you do to gain more quality patient leads?

Your first and most important step to gaining more quality leads is to put together a strategic marketing plan that pulls from an omni-channel approach. Back in the old days of marketing, you could run one or two events, whether it was a newspaper ad or a direct mail campaign, and expect a good amount of quality leads. Now, you need to utilize multiple channels with a cohesive message, unique branding, and a strong call to action to gain those quality leads. Your marketing now needs to build awareness, inspire trust, and motivate patients to get help.

When doing your marketing planning, it’s also important to know your budget. Your strategic marketing plan doesn’t rely on just a financial investment, it also relies on your investment of time and resources. Physician outreach, or referral marketing, is an example of a key strategy in your marketing plan that does not require a major financial investment, but taking the time to do it has a major pay-off. Often, a referral to you from the patient’s physician already establishes a certain level of trust and familiarity with your practice.

In addition to physician referral marketing, the threes “Ds” or direct mail, digital, and database, are important strategies to include in your marketing planning.

• Direct Mail Marketing: A critical part of a direct mail campaign is working with the right company to produce, deliver, and track your campaign. There are ebbs and flows with direct mail companies in terms of the results they produce and the way they strategically identify demographic opportunities in your database. If you’re sending a mail piece, it’s important target certain areas or qualities of patients that will yield you the best results.
• Digital Marketing: Your digital marketing should maximize the use of every available channel in accordance with today’s best practices. CQ Digital utilizes the right combination of essential strategies and exclusive tools to drive as many quality leads to your practice as possible. Additionally, your team continually reviews key reporting metrics with you so you can feel confident that you’re spending in the right areas and maximizing your return on investment.
• Database Marketing: Database marketing is often an overlooked source for quality leads. You have a pool of patients who already know and trust you that will need new hearing technology as their hearing loss journey evolves. 45% of hearing aid wearers buy their next set from a different provider, so why not do what you can to make sure those patients are returning to you? CQ works with practices to ensure that together, you don’t let those patients go somewhere else. You can capitalize on your database and put protocols in place to ensure that these leads continue to use you for their hearing healthcare.

To really succeed and take full advantage of these strategies, rely on your CQ Account Manager. Working closely with them will help you clearly understand what your overall goal is and how to get there. CQ helps you develop both a strategic business plan and a marketing plan, and while they do go hand in hand, there are ways to capitalize on your strategies outside of your marketing plan. There are things you can do internally to wrap around the patient experience from beginning to end. Are you providing a great experience from the time they look at our website, to picking up the phone and scheduling an appointment, then to walking in the door and meeting the front office staff? Is someone reaching out to follow up after the appointment? Are you doing the best you can to differentiate yourself from the competition? There are a lot of ways you can drive quality leads that don’t have to do with the marketing plan. These standards that really focus on the basics are included in CQ’s All the Right Things operating model. Practices that drive quality leads outside of their marketing spend and succeed at delivering these behaviors tend to do those better than other practices in their market.

How do you track patient leads?

The tool you use the most is the best tool to track your patient leads – your practice management software. Proper tracking in your management software starts with staff training and ensuring the front office is asking the right questions in the right way. You want to find out information like how the patient heard about your practice. Maybe it wasn’t just Google. Maybe they searched for your website after receiving a direct mail piece. In that case, you wouldn’t want to list the true referral source as “website” or “search engine.”

In addition to entering the necessary information correctly, make sure your practice management system is set up right. Primary and secondary referral sources need to be established correctly so that when you run a report, it isn’t just unusable data. When set up and entered appropriately, you can see where the bulk of your leads are coming from and follow them to determine who is a regular lead and who is a quality lead that may end up purchasing a hearing aid device – the primary driver of revenue for most hearing healthcare practices.

What are your goals for 2025? No matter what they are, CQ Partners is here to support you. Your Account Manager works openly with you to not only make the necessary plans to achieve growth, but to help you monitor your progress and make proactive adjustments on a weekly basis. Reach out to us today to start making moves to gain more quality patient leads in 2025!